Black Friday is coming up again to mark the official start of another holiday shopping season, and companies across a variety of industries are competing for the same deal-savvy consumers in a year where U.S. shoppers are planning to spend 5% less on holiday shopping. There will still be an inevitable surge in online traffic, as cash-strapped consumers plan to shop Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in a concerted effort to get more for their money this year.
Just because consumers plan to spend less this season overall, however, does not mean that demand will go down for e-commerce. In fact, the opposite may be true according to predictions from Deloitte which forecast a 7% to 9% jump in online sales compared to last year. This means companies need to be proactive to ensure that there are no service interruptions so they can remain competitive in such a tight market.
The Cost of Latency
Now is the time for corporations to ensure that their e-commerce experience goes as smoothly as possible for customers who increasingly have more options to choose from and less patience than ever for websites that lag or crash, especially in this age of convenience. Just a three-second delay is all it takes to decrease sales conversion rates by up to 50%.
When websites go down, there is the obvious lost revenue of sales that could not go through, but the cost to the company’s reputation as an unreliable online retailer can be even higher. With online fraud on the rise, a website that does not operate the way it should can permanently damage a customer’s trust in the company brand long after the issue has been remedied. A staggering 88% of online shoppers say they are unlikely to return to a website after just one bad experience.
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions
The new age of integrated e-commerce subscription-based products and payment processing procedures have created unprecedented demand that traditional hosting stacks were never built to handle. As a result, innovations like Cloudways’ Lightning Stack are more essential than ever to delivering a reliable consumer experience without sacrificing the scale of operations. In a targeted effort to prioritize both performance and reliability, Cloudways has found success with their latest tech stack upgrade, which was completely redesigned to be able to handle peak holiday traffic.
Cloudways was able to achieve this balance by replacing its Apache-based stack with a more efficient NginX + PHP-FPM setup. In other words, they found a way to get backend processes to perform with the same efficiency as cached content since cached responses cannot handle every request at this volume. As a result, Cloudways has been able to operate seamlessly, even under constant demand.
This innovation was a direct result of consumer feedback, and it has led to a 54% increase in requests served with 25% faster response times at zero additional cost to the company. These stats alone should illustrate the importance of acting on consumer feedback, but to further drive home this point, Cloudways even included customers in the live testing throughout the phases of upgrading their stack just to ensure it would address the concerns of contemporary users.
Commitment to Reinvention
Cloudways also confirmed in their self-audit that minor incremental updates to the stack were no longer effectively addressing the limitations they were trying to address. This feedback helped inform the decision to commit to reinventing the stack at Cloudways, which ultimately helped them achieve up to 65% faster performance for dynamic websites. They have figured out how to lower CPU usage so that there are fewer spikes when multiple requests are made at the same time, making Lightning an ideal stack for handling even peak Black Friday traffic.
The new composition of Cloudways’ Lightning Stack is going to help companies meet the demands of a rapidly evolving e-commerce environment as it inevitably grows more complex. The online shopping experience has changed so much that it should come as no surprise that simply modifying an existing stack is no longer going to cut it. Committing to a complete rebuild like Cloudways has done with their Lightning Stack is becoming increasingly necessary in order to meet modern consumer expectations.
Hosting for the Holidays
Companies that might be holding off upgrading their stack to handle the boost to e-commerce traffic because they are still waiting for online shopping habits to return to pre-pandemic levels should reconsider their strategy, according to PEW research indicating that the Covid-19 shutdown gave online shopping a more lasting boost even after stores reopened.
Being a good host for the holidays is not just for family dinners, online shoppers rely on companies being reliable hosts too. Like any good host, companies will need to be prepared to be busy which may need to include upgrading their tech stack capabilities. Consumers are not going to have as much patience for latency times due to high traffic when companies have had time to prepare for Black Friday all year and should by now accept that online traffic will not return to pre-pandemic levels. The good news is that it is not too late to start preparing ahead of this year’s holiday rush.
By Suhaib Zaheer, SVP Managed Hosting at DigtialOcean and GM Cloudways
