{"id":9517,"date":"2017-10-25T06:49:15","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T06:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/?p=9517"},"modified":"2025-05-05T21:20:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T21:20:43","slug":"optimize-website-speed-black-friday-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/software-testing\/optimize-website-speed-black-friday-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Optimize Website Speed for Black Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- Go to www.addthis.com\/dashboard to customize your tools --><script src=\"\/\/s7.addthis.com\/js\/300\/addthis_widget.js#pubid=ra-58d80a50fc4f926d\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is your website prepared for record breaking traffic and sales?<\/span><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before you know it, it will be Black Friday and then, Cyber Monday. These consumer \u201cholidays\u201d bring about the race for shoppers to buy all of the coveted items on their shopping lists before they\u2019re all gone. Some deals are so good that items sell out in mere minutes! In these cases, shoppers lose to other shoppers. But, other times, it\u2019s <strong>major retailers who are the ones that lose out when their site goes down due to a high volume of traffic<\/strong>, forcing their would-be customers to take their business to the next online retailer. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this post, we&#8217;ll share our best tips to optimize website speed for Black Friday so that you&#8217;re well-prepared from a technical standpoint for success! <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Run_Performance_Tests_Before_the_Big_Day\"><\/span>Run Performance Tests Before the Big Day<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Your site may have 5,000 visitors per day without any problems, but what happens when 15,000 try to visit it in one day? In an hour? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Performance tests are the best way to know whether your underlying system will or will not be able to support your expected load. Even if you do not know what the expected load is, running performance tests will at least let you know how many users your site can support with the components you have available at the time of testing. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here&#8217;s our advice on <strong>how to properly run performance tests in preparation for Black Friday<\/strong>:<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Allow_Time_for_Testing_Correcting\"><\/span><strong><span style=\"color: #3056a2;\">Allow Time for Testing &amp; Correcting<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Don\u2019t leave performance tests for one week before Black Friday or after you have noticed your site has suffered problems. Solving these issues takes time, a lot of time! Rather than planning these tests as merely a final check, plan them out with enough time, taking into consideration that you will have to spend time fixing any problems you may uncover.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Assess_Your_Infrastructure\"><\/span>Assess Your Infrastructure<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Decide whether you should increase your infrastructure temporarily to prepare for times like these when the expected user load is much larger than it typically is throughout the year. The cloud can make this easier to do, especially for smaller businesses. It\u2019s crucial to be ready and be sure that your auto-scaling policies are optimal, considering performance and costs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> It\u2019s advisable to test performance on an infrastructure similar to production or the one you have in production, whichever is the best for the moment in which you run them. Just remember that these tests often try to find the breaking point of the system, and we do not want to find it at the moment when a real customer is in the middle of a transaction. At Abstracta, we typically run these tests during very early or late hours, taking advantage of having a team of performance engineers in a different time zone. A four or five hour difference (like that of our testers in Uruguay and our clients in California) is usually more than enough.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Risk-Based_Testing\"><\/span>Risk-Based Testing<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since Black Friday is just around the corner, you probably won\u2019t have time to test <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">all<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the functionalities of your site. This means you\u2019ll have to choose the functionality or functionalities that you think will be most used, hence the riskiest if left untested, like for example, the shopping cart and checkout pages. If you do not know which other functionalities are most important, you can use google analytics statistics or access history from logs.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Monitoring\"><\/span>Monitoring<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Set up monitors and alerts using a sophisticated tool like New Relic or a simpler, opensource one like Nagios to stay updated on the health of your infrastructure. It\u2019s important to monitor all components of your infrastructure, as any of which may become a bottleneck as well as the database. Top SQL transactions should also be under control.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Stay_Realistic\"><\/span>Stay Realistic<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Try to run loads that are realistic for your the amount of traffic you expect (or hope) to experience. Testing too small of a load will not leave you well prepared for the actual Black Friday load, while executing an extremely ambitious scenario might leave you needlessly preoccupied over sizing your infrastructure and avoiding a crash when in fact, you didn\u2019t have to go through that much trouble.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Optimizing_Your_Page_Speed\"><\/span>Optimizing Your Page Speed<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Now that we have covered server-side performance, these next <strong>tips are for optimizing the client side, the website itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Why would you want to do that? Well, according to an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.top10-websitehosting.co.uk\/conversion-rates\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article<\/a> by Top 10 Web Hosting, Google have confirmed that site performance (including page speed) is one of\u00a0their many signals used in its algorithm\u00a0for search rankings.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A survey conducted by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.soasta.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/State-of-Online-Retail-Performance-Spring-2017.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Akamai<\/a><\/span>\u00a0in 2019 shows that just a 100 millisecond delay can hurt conversion rates by up to 7%.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are several well known cases of companies that have boosted their bottom line by increasing page speed. <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.webperformancetoday.com\/2012\/02\/28\/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Walmart compared performance to conversion<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> rates and found that the overall average site load time for converted visitors was lower (~ 3.22 seconds) than that of the visitors who had didn\u2019t convert (~6.03 seconds). <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Around the same time, Intuit cut its load time in half for several of its marketing web pages and saw a 14% increase in conversions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fortunately, there are several <strong>free tools that you can use to quickly speed up load time<\/strong> (leading to higher conversions):<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Compressorio\"><\/span><strong><span style=\"color: #3056a2;\">Compressor.io<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">According to its website: \u201c<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/compressor.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Compressor.io<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is a powerful online tool for reducing drastically the size of your images and photos whilst maintaining a high quality with almost no difference before and after compression.\u201d We recommend this tool to clients when we send them reports that indicate that they should reduce the size of their images, which have a negative impact on page speed. By reducing the file size of an image, the page is able to load much quicker.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"WebPageTest\"><\/span>WebPageTest<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.webpagetest.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">tool<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> allows you to run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe. You can use real browsers (IE and Chrome) at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or more complicated ones including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. The results are very helpful in that they provide diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Sitespeedio\"><\/span>Sitespeed.io<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sitespeed.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">tool<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> allows you to run tests locally or as a service on the web. It comes up with a similar report as Webpagetest, but it isn\u2019t solely based on the URL you provide, since it has a crawler that analyzes<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> all<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the pages that one might reach.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"PageSpeed_YSlow\"><\/span>PageSpeed &amp; YSlow<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/speed\/pagespeed\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">PageSpeed<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/yslow.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">YSlow<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> are essential for figuring out what exactly is slowing down your website and what to do about it. We enjoy using them because the information presented is very clear and easy to understand for testers and non-testers alike. Detailed explanations are given for why you should make each improvement and how they will be beneficial. These tools can also shed light on optimizations that you weren\u2019t aware of before.<\/span><span style=\"color: #00b674;\"><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Remember_Mobile\"><\/span>Remember Mobile<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black Friday is the #1 day for mobile shoppers, with the weekend before Christmas a close second. A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.top10-websitehosting.co.uk\/conversion-rates\">2019 study<\/a>\u00a0found that 74% of visitors will leave a site if it doesn\u2019t load within 5 seconds on their smartphone.<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12636 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/abstracta.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/0-min-1.png\" alt=\"apptim logo\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>For e-commerce companies, mobile apps are also a huge sales channel. To optimize the performance of your mobile app, we recommend using <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/3bkW5GV\">Apptim<\/a>, a free tool to test your iOS and Android apps.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One last thought\u2026 Although we are headed for an intense season for e-commerce, it\u2019s always \u201cBlack Friday\u201d somewhere! Meaning, it\u2019s important to continuously test the performance of your site year round. You never know if a marketing campaign or promotion will result in a flood of customers crashing your site (which may be both a blessing and a curse)!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We hope this post helps you optimize website speed for Black Friday! <\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Recommended_for_You\"><\/span>Recommended for You<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"color: #00b674;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/performance-testing\/best-time-start-performance-testing\/\">When is the Best Time to Start PerformanceTesting?<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/performance-testing\/how-to-make-a-performance-test-plan\/\">How to Make a Performance Test Plan<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is your website prepared for record breaking traffic and sales? Before you know it, it will be Black Friday and then, Cyber Monday. These consumer \u201cholidays\u201d bring about the race for shoppers to buy all of the coveted items on their shopping lists before they\u2019re&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[113,50],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v14.0.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How to Optimize Website Speed for Black Friday | Abstracta<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In this post, we give our best tips to optimize website speed for Black Friday so that you are technologically prepared for it to be a success!\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow\" \/>\n<meta name=\"googlebot\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta name=\"bingbot\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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