2016 Holiday Website Optimization: The Gift That Keeps Giving

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2016 HOLIDAY WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION THE GIFT THAT
KEEPS GIVING
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• The holiday season is the ultimate stress test
  for some retailers, and for good reason. Key
  shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
  and Super Saturday can make or break a retailer's
  revenue results for an entire calendar year.?
  A recent study done by About.com revealed that
  nearly 20 of U.S. retail sales come during the
  Holiday shopping season.
• Its never too late to take preventive measures
  to ensure your website is ready for the rush.
  Here are some tips to stay up and running during
  peak traffic periods
• System readiness testing.Now is the ideal time
  to execute load testing to determine how your
  site will respond under peak traffic from a
  variety of device types and network conditions,
  such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones
  accessing the site from wired, Wi-Fi and cellular
  connections. Be sure to test performance and
  download times on diverse networks and devices.
• Implement application performance monitoring
  (APM) tools.Mobile and web experiences are
  personal. Consumers expect relevancy.
  Understanding the specific devices, touchpoints,
  and interactions is the only way to know if your
  digital strategy will directly improve customer
  experience. You have to anticipate their needs to
  win and retain their business. APM tools monitor
  real-time user experiences to ensure your website
  operates at maximum efficiency.
• Put the lock down on hackers.Maintaining site
  security is an ongoing and ever evolving
  challenge as hackers aim to find holes in website
  security. 2016 saw the largest distributed denial
  of service (DDoS) attack in history. These
  breaches can take down a website for days and
  cost millions. With cybercriminals stepping up
  their attacks amid increasing holiday traffic, it
  is imperative that retailers implement Web
  Application Firewalls, DDoS mitigation, and
  malicious bot detection solutions to offer
  end-to-end website security.

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• Optimize for omni-channel experiences.Consumers
  expect a seamless experience across the many
  different devices they use on a daily basis. If a
  customer is searching for the perfect gift or
  price-comparing on a mobile device and moves to a
  desktop computer to finish purchasing, they
  should have a consistent experience.
• Retailers should keep in mind that consumers
  have come to expect web pages to load in three
  seconds or less on any device, or else run the
  risk of losing the users attention. According to
  our recent web performance survey, 75 of
  customer left for a competitors site due to
  slow site speed at peak traffic times.
• Think beyond your legacy content delivery
  network.CDNs can provide a huge performance
  benefit, but legacy CDNs are not going to cut it
  moving forward. For most online retailers, one of
  the most common performance pains are third-party
  content processing. Traditional CDN technology
  cant help you with that. And most only provide
  marginal performance improvement on mobile
  devices.
• Make sure youre using a web and mobile
  application delivery platform that includes a new
  breed of CDN technology. A solution
  like AppSpeed accelerates the network, but also
  provides application-level, third-party content,
  image, and mobile optimizations, which
  continuously learns and improves application
  behavior. You want go beyond the CDN, all the way
  through to the application execution, versus one
  that stops short at the network edge.
• By taking these preventive measures to get your
  website holiday ready, you can make a big impact.
• It is highly secure and PCI-compliant application
  delivery, ensuring applications are not under
  threat or vulnerable to malware.
• With speed, security and a clean, organized app
  being the biggest concerns inhibiting customers
  from purchasing on their mobile devices,
  retailers must improve these factors in order to
  elevate the user experience and not miss out on
  potential revenue.

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Instart Logic is the worlds first endpoint-aware
application delivery solution that makes websites
and applications fast, secure, and easy to
operate.
Interested in learning more? Preview our image
optimization capabilities in the Playground
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