The Christmas season is coming, the people around the world will start with the preparations, all the online stores will start offering discounts on their products online, registering the highest number of annual sales.

During this period, all owners of an online store, call for the audits required to prepare for Christmas period. This article will give some tips to be prepared to handle a larger number of orders, requests and demands within your own online business, it is obviously too late to hand updates to the code of your e-commerce, as well as to prohibit the possibility of changing critical components, which are not tested in this period.

Upgrading The Server And Your Web Hosting Plan

Depending on your e-commerce store which would be hosted on shared hosting or within a dedicated solution, it is useful to take some precautions:

Check your plan and upgrades: If we launch a promotion that can bring a greater number of visits, then it’s time to even think of expanding its shared hosting plan. In this case, we contact the provider to request a change to a higher priced plan, specifying the fact that it takes more resources for the website, and then the plan itself should be moved into a more powerful machine.

Troubleshooting the ISP: To find your main domain, website or e-commerce locked in the month of December is not a good news, we see that any faults with your ISP, from the perspective of technical and commercial, are resolved. Needless to require version upgrades or changes to the plan webhosting at this time, the only requirement may be a change and a server upgrade.

Upgrading your Dedicated Server:  If your e-commerce is hosted on a dedicated server, it would be useful to contact your service provider for the adjournment of the same. If they are not already the best performance, it is unthinkable to go to support an increase in visits. Increasing the RAM could be the necessary first step, followed by a reconfiguration and tuning your server, something we see in a few lines.

Cloud Computing Or Cloud Hosting: If we do not have the possibility to increase the resources of our area of shared hosting or on our dedicated server, then the best solution is to include the use of an instance of Cloud Computing effective only for the month of December, or at least only for the period in which we expect to be able to have a greater number of visits. In this case ESDS offers cloud computing solutions with pricing that it can be used for the required time.

You ignore the discourse of performance on the ISP side, it is important to understand if you (are) really ready to face an increase in visits with the configuration of server or instance of cloud computing. The first thing to do if we are not experts, is to contact your ISP or service ‘system to ask a tuning of the server.

What we need to verify exactly:

Apache : We are going to verify the configuration and memory consumption
Nginx : If we use this webserver, we just go to prepare a configuration tailored for our system, basic already get superior performance with Apache
MySQL : The use of tools to identify the problems of MySQL will save you a lot of time.

Finally, after working on our webserver, it is essential that an e-commerce website takes very little time for opening pages, first check which ones are current through one of the many online tools, we recommend PageSpeed Tool By Google.

Here we can get some information about our web site, an acceptable speed should never go more than 1.5 seconds to open, but we talk already about a very high result. To get further information, it is necessary to use Google Webmaster Tool, which gives an indication of how fast our site is, compared to all those tracked by Google.

Once you understand that the speed of the pages is not acceptable, there are several solutions that can be used. First we have to see if our e-commerce platform allows you to do caching, images in all statistical components. Solutions such as Magento or OsCommerce and have these options and you need to identify the best plugin and put it in production, but this is a change that could present problems so it should be applied at night, checking operation.

Optimizing your site must begin with the classic rules:

• Using verified HTML code, corrected at a syntactic level and setting
• Union and compression of JavaScript code for easier loading
• Loading the JS code at the bottom of each page
• CSS compression and compression of images with CSS Sprites

There are dozens of guides on the net. We will definitely prepare further test to check the speed of loading. We can think of to use the handy YSlow, which is a plugin for Firefox, or Chrome’s console directly. It will show the loading times of the individual components of the page.

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