The last quarter of the year is a time of heavy consumer spending. As summer yields to fall, temperatures will inevitably drop and consumers will prepare for this in many ways. People will buy warmer clothing. Warm clothing means heavy coats and multiple layers of clothing. This translates into high volume consumption of high ticket clothing items. People will winterize their cars and insulate their homes which means yet more consumption.
This spending activity tends to spike on holidays such as Columbus Day and Veterans Day when people have more time off from work to do their shopping. Then of course comes Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.
This consumer activity combined with the fact that a significant percentage of them will do their shopping online means that ecommerce sites and other online businesses must be prepared. This means more than getting your website content ready. It means having an online presence that can weather the huge traffic surges this time of year brings. Will your website stay online during this critical time? How fast will your web pages load when they are hit with the increased traffic? Slow page loading means a poor customer experience which translates to lost sales.
If your website is down for even ten minutes during a peak traffic surge, most of the traffic won’t be coming back later since they will have already found what they wanted on a competitor’s site. Slow page loading time is often caused by servers being unable to handle the increased bandwidth demand of high levels of traffic. This type of problem guarantees lost sales during the those critical days when everyone goes online to shop.
Website performance during this time of year has everything to do with having a reliable web host. If your current web hosting has been having performance issues, don’t expect them to go away on their own during the fall and winter shopping seasons. Your business is too important to leave this to chance.
Applied Innovations offers many hosting options and guarantee an uptime of 100%. If you are concerned about the reliability of your current hosting service and would like to know more about our capabilities,contact us.