Averting an Online Meltdown

Avoiding a website meltdown during the holiday season requires plenty of blocking and tackling in the months leading up to the critical selling period.

Darl Crick, CTO of CrossView, has seen even some of the most sophisticated retailers allow matters to get to the point where they face critical failures at the most inopportune moments.

A retail technology specialist who has worked with Advance Auto Parts and Moosejaw, Crick recently shared with STORES five steps that online retailers should take right now if they intend to improve site reliability and end-user response time during the make-or-break fourth quarter:

• Optimize pages for faster loading. A cached page should load in less than two seconds, and order flow pages should execute in three to five seconds.

• Document your requirements, then test against them. Quality performance testing allows retailers to create the anticipated holiday load to be sure the site will perform.

• Clean out old data. This includes items like abandoned carts and past guest users, which take up valuable space in the system.

• Follow monitoring tools closely. Watching alerts throughout the year allows you to proactively recognize small indicators, like CPU utilization, that can quickly escalate into serious site malfunctions.

• Establish a process for failures. Run your own fire drills based on anticipated issues so that the IT team isn’t scrambling to figure out how to react while holiday revenue slips away.