The Complete Guide to eCommerce Development 2024

How Can You Prepare for the Holiday Season from Server Side

How to improve online store performance before Black Friday

The period from November to the end of December is the busiest time for online stores and you need to prepare for them from all sides: purchase ads, arrange mailings to offer discounts and promotions, but not only. You should get the server-side ready for these sales so that your project could sustain the influx of customers.

Every year we monitor the server behavior for our customers to keep abreast and immediately respond to incidents as prescribed in SLA that we provide. But since it is always better to prevent critical situations than resolve issues, this year, we’ve proactively prepared all our clients’ servers for the festive season. Besides, with this post, we want to remind you what measures a store administrator should take.

To prepare a project on CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor for the holiday season:

  1. Enable image optimization to speed up the website performance by 4-9%.

    We recommend enabling image optimization on the server with no extra costs and risks, without installing new add-ons, which can add new problems to your project.

  2. Update the PHP version on your server and check your website performance.

    Updating PHP to the latest supported version increases the speed of the project by 3-7% according to our tests. Update the version of CS-Cart and add-ons if necessary.

  3. Use PHP-FPM instead of Apache (httpd) whenever possible.

    Switching from Apache (httpd) to PHP-FPM gives 2-3% gain.

  4. Install and enable caching via Varnish.

    Our Hosting Team collaborated with Add-Ons Development Dept. to make a unique offer for our hosting customers – free Full Page Cache by Varnish add-on.

    – For Ultimate plans and above, we will provide the Varnish plugin for free. For Premium users, we will provide the addon free of charge if there is an active annual payment.
    – For Basic plan users and those who pay monthly on Premium we offer the add-on on a recurring basis at 25 USD/m.

    EXPLORE HOSTING PLANS

    There is a similar add-on on the CS-Cart market. If you already have it, we can assist in installing it for you.

    HELP WITH INSTALLATION!

    We highly recommend not using additional add-ons and cache systems capable of putting the generated HTML code to the database. Such behavior creates an extra load for the database.

  5. “Freeze” the website state for the holiday season.

    This will allow you to avoid tricky moments with the generation of a new cache and thumbnails, especially when the website is up and running and there are visitors on it. According to our observations, is the most common reason for the unavailability of projects.

    Find more details at: 
    We Say No To Friday Releases.

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