For e -commerce websites, the holidays will come soon. It may feel like there is a way to go, but it may take a while to implement major changes to your website to implement and sign.
If you want to make full use of the holidays, it is time to change to ensure the stability of your Woocommerce website.
More importantly -you want to sell! Now is the last chance to increase the conversion rate before the holiday comes. Finally, your many years of income may depend on the year of the year. If everything goes wrong, you need to know what to do.
The following is our suggestions on how to make full preparations for the festival.
The first step: evaluate where your store is already
The best way to prepare for this busy season is to know you Stores at this exact time.
Before further optimization, you need to ask the following questions:
My topic or any plug -in or extension Is it outdated ?
Is my website run The latest version of WordPress and Woocommerce ? If you are behind a few versions, you need to pay attention to the update process -and you may need to hire developers to help you return to the right track.
If you have enough time to prepare in advance, please give yourself a holiday gift in advance- A temporary site . Temporary sites will allow you to run updates, adjust your content and tools, and adjust your site in other ways without making your traffic face risk.
Although it is a good thing to have a temporary site, it is a good thing for the whole year, but it is updated for testing for testing. Make sure they run well in the expected traffic peak
especially valuable. Remember: If your website fails, you will lose sales. This is how you create a virtual security network for your online image.
We also introduced the benefits of installments in detail here.
Prepare your website for conversion
You can expect the traffic in the holiday season to increase sharply, but to make your website succeed, you need to convert these clicks into sales volume. Maximize your websiteThe transformation potential is not a fast solution. You should consider what steps you can take for a long time before your products appear on your product.
The user rebounded from a slow website
According to Google, 53% of mobile website visitors will leave the page with a loading time of more than 3 seconds. The white page of 3 seconds is enough to allow most users to click on the back button and access the competitors’ website, and the 3 seconds of time are not enough to load your exquisite animation and rich image e -commerce pages. Especially if your user uses slow WiFi to buy gifts in a coffee shop, or to panic when connecting incomplete networks on the train!
Speed \u200b\u200bcheck
Want to understand the performance of your website on the page speed? Run it through Google PageSpeed \u200b\u200bInsights (PSI) tool, which provides speed indicators on mobile and desktop devices. Usually these may not be a thing you can take immediately, but if you get a low score, you may need to contact your developer or hosting service provider to understand what aspects can be improved. It will also highlight any excessive images you can delete or optimize to quickly improve performance. Pingdom is another popular tool that can be used to evaluate your current website speed.
Accelerate your website
There are many reasons for your website to run slowly. Here are some steps you can take by you or developers to improve it:
Check if your website has a large image
When the image is properly used in your topic, the image is correctly used in your theme At that time, they should be automatically compressed and narrowed the size to adapt to the page. The picture rarely needs to be greater than 150KB (for large full -angle pictures), and the average picture on the page should be much smaller. PSI will highlight any images that are not compressed or too much. If needed, you can minimize them before uploading.
Reduce server response time
If PSI emphasizes that the server response time is too long, your host or WordPress code may have problems. The server response time is the time spent on the server responding to the user’s request before the user starts the page. This includes the time required for server receiving, processing and response requests. Check the cache efficiency part below, find out the effective method of reducing this time
View the finger of the woocommerce website of WooCommerce websiteSouth, learn more skills to optimize website performance.
Make sure your website is running PHP 7 WordPress to run on PHP. In 2015, a updated, performance significantly improved version 7. Compared with PHP 5.6, the performance of some PHP applications has doubled, and memory consumption is reduced by 50%.
This major change takes a period of time to be filtered. You cannot assume that your host has been upgraded. In fact, because PHP 7 introduces major changes, not all applications are compatible with it. First, you need to determine whether your site is compatible with PHP 7. Fortunately, WPENGINE posted a free PHP Composition Checker plug -in, which can be installed on your site to run a compatibility check.
If you have a hosting host, you can contact them to understand the PHP version you use, and you can ask for updating it to PHP 7. If you are a self -custody, you may need to execute this process yourself. Remember to make a backup first, just in case!
Stable preparation for your website will lead to a large amount of traffic during the holidays. Some times in the day may soar or even higher. Let your products appear in influential blogs, emails, or promote your own sales (think of black Friday!) It may cause a large number of users to visit your website at the same time. This is not only the worst time for your website to fail, but also the most likely time for your server to handle all traffic. How many concurrent users do I have?
Smaller custody packs may be difficult to handle more than 4 or 5 concurrent users at the same time, otherwise the processing required by the server will cause the site to slow down or the request fails. The key figure you see here is how much bandwidth is provided by the hosting package -the amount of data that can be transmitted within a given time range.
If your website is installed with an analysis tool (it should be installed! If you do not get Google Analytics for Woocommerce -it is free), you can use the history of your busy time to try to understand the peak value you may expect to expect flow. Please contact your hosting service provider to ensure that your hosting service package can handle such a large peak -if not, please consider upgrading or movement.
cache efficiency Although increasing bandwidth will help deal with heavy traffic, you need to effectively use the bandwidth, you need the correct cache strategy. The cache is a temporary storage of dynamic content in order to quickly respond to similar requests. The cache can refer to the cache page, static assets (such as images and style tables), database requests (object cache), and cache in the user browser to avoid re -ing assets.
The cache is a temporary storage of dynamic content in order to quickly respond to similar requests.
Imagine that someone asks you to do a tricky multiplication operation -37 X 4. You may take a few seconds to calculate, but if others immediately ask the answer, you can respond immediately. When the cache is in place, the dynamic web content is the same -the response of the user request is stored in temporary memory, and if the same request is issued, it will return immediately. This greatly reduces the processing that web servers must execute.
After loading once once, quickly provide the visitors, so you you Shoppers can restore shopping as soon as possible. How to enable the cache
WordPress cache is also easy to set. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are recommended in WordPress Codex, and there are a lot of documents about how to configure these plugins to work with your store.Another prompt: Install Jetpack and enable Photon.
The image in the post and page will be cached, and when someone accesss your website, you don’t have to load it again and again
. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you have very large images. Some web hosts provide cache strategies by default, or provide as a part of some packages. For example, WPENGINE provides a strong cache tool, and can even activate in a personal level plan to significantly improve performance -this means more concurrent users.
If you are carrying out holiday promotion activities and attract traffic back to your website, then make sure you your website The content of the content is cached and delivered quickly is a simple way, which can leave these return visitors at the location you want -browse your store.
Load test Test whether your website has prepared for the surge in holidays is a obvious way to fake the surge in your own. The load test means that people blast your website with a large amount of traffic to check how it cope. By testing with different loads, you can accurately calculate where the breakpoint is and when your user starts to encounter problems. Testing stations in the production environment are the key to load test -not local machines of you or your developers. In this way, you not only know whether the code on the website is efficient, but also whether the server and host you use are sufficient. Since you may not want to kill your activity site during the load test, the temporary storage site in the same environment should be able to solve the problem.
How do you perform load testing? It is best to leave the pressure test to those who have some development experience, but if you have confidence, there are many open source load test tools available. If not, you’d better find a developer for you.
Prepare for trouble The planned plan carefully designed by marketers often make mistakes -prepare for the worst case. If your website fails, what do you need to do? Which employees do you need to notify? Does your hosting and network agent provide 24/7 all -weather support? Do you need to upgrade to a bag? The following is our idea of \u200b\u200bprotecting your website. Backup and recovery strategy If your site fails, you need to understand your recovery plan in advance. Although the peak of traffic may only cause your website to be unavailable for users for a period of time, it is best to know what to do if more serious things happen.
You should prepare a backup plan, and many custody host packages have provided this service. However, if you set your own custody station, you need to implement your own backup. Fortunately, many plug -ins can make this process easier. WPBeginner has a wonderful tutorial on setting on the stage for the website driven by WordPress.
Although it is usually enough to back up daily, during the busy order period, you may hope to increase the frequency frequency Once an hour to avoid losing a whole day of order during the busiest time.
If your host is backup for you, determine whether the backup plan is applicable to e -commerce -including all store orders and payment information. Check the support page of the hosting service, understand the frequency of backup and restore the site from the backup. If you recover, you need to contact your hosting service branchHolding a team, make sure they can use it during a risk period. If you test new ideas before the holiday peak, please change it in the temporary storage site so that you can recover quickly! What is broken? Don’t worry. Temporary sites allow you to test things freely without affecting your real -time store (or slow down the most important traffic).
Disaster recovery plan
If your website’s normal operation time during holidays is critical to your business success, then it may be time to consider formulating disaster recovery plans. These plans can cover anything from the usability of the usability to natural disasters and ensure that you prepare for the worst situation in advance. Check the Guogle’s disaster recovery plan guidelines to understand how to prepare.
The timetable for preparing holiday flow for your store
Holiday is coming, and the holiday is coming. It is easy to make preparations slip-so this is the schedule we suggest:
At the end of October: Evaluation page speed requirements-Use PageSpeed \u200b\u200bInsightss -Cy discussions with your web developer or agency to implement the cost of improving evaluate possible peaks-use Google analysis to calculate what your concurrent user peak may be
Evaluate the cache strategy-View your custody package , Talk to your host support team
Recovery plan-understand the steps required to recover from the shutdown site and record them internally
to the end of November/Black Friday:
Implementing the cache repair -if you have not cached yet, you will want it when the traffic arrives
Implementation page speed optimization -at the beginning of the holiday, you will want to do it to do Out of your determined improvement
Execute the load test -before and after your cache and page speed change, use the load test to evaluate the performance improvement. Relevant staff related site availability problems and key contact methods
After section:
View the impact of the change
] Evaluate profits!
By following our timetable, you can help ensure that your website maintains stability and achieve sales, and at the same time, the risk of a shutdown that affects your profits is minimized.
If you are still worried or neededTo help, there are many Woocommerce developers, agents and experts willing to handle all your updates, security, backup, etc.If the recent update of plugins or themes has destroyed your website, they can also help you return to the right track.
or: contact me or Pragmatic’s friendly team!Or leave a message in the comments.
WordPress cache is also easy to set. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are recommended in WordPress Codex, and there are a lot of documents about how to configure these plugins to work with your store.
