How to Beat the Holiday Rush Online? Ensure Your Website is Up and Running

For the longest time, the holiday rush has been a challenge among traditional brick-and-mortar shops. The unusual influx of customers visiting physical stores packed in just several days is an effect of many factors affecting them, including crowded mass transportation systems, availability of income, and time constraints. These are the same factors why there has been a continuous rise in using websites to do the shopping and other transactions. With the increase in website usage, the holiday rush should not be a problem by now. Wrong.

The rise in website usage also gave rise to a problem rechanneled from physical shops' holiday rush: online holiday rush. This is an event where online traffic is significantly heavier than the average. However, there is nothing to worry about if problems are identified head-on, steps in fixing website problems are in place, and efficient maintenance tools are utilized.

Common Problems: Websites During Holidays

Common website problems when immediately identified and addressed will decrease turnaround time, increase customer satisfaction, and generate higher revenue. Here are the 10 most common website problems during the holidays.

• The influx of users using websites at certain times (peak hours) of the day or certain days (rest days usually happening on weekends or nationwide official holidays) of the week

• Phishing links are hidden as advertisements

• Malware and/or hacker attacks

• Dummy or copycat websites packaged to look like authentic websites

• Limitations on cloud service providers

• Media files like images and videos not loading fast or not loading at all

• Slow-loading checkout platforms and payment gateways for e-commerce websites

• Failure of third-party services and applications

• Plugin, web hosting service provider, and/or a domain error

• Overall website crash

How to Fix Website Problems?

Now that the common problems have been identified, here are the ways to fix them.

Identify problems way before the holidays.

As there are specific times of the day or days of the week where a number of users are visiting websites, problems should be identified ahead of these anticipated periods. Fix the possible errors that can occur, expand bandwidth capacity, boost website speed, and reduce files that need to be loaded.

Prioritize user experience

The influx of users and complex website design templates are not a good combination for the holidays. All user interface elements should have a reduction in file size to load faster. Unnecessary elements should be eliminated. During the holidays, it is also an excellent option to partner with a website design company to effectively address website design issues like lagging and crashing.

Review security measures and policies

The security of users and of their privacy, data, and information should be the topmost priority. During holidays, scammers usually set off different forms of attacks like spam, malware attacks, and copycat websites to phish information or redirect transactions. Only legitimate payment gateways and trusted security platforms should be utilized.

Provide multiple but streamlined options

Giving options can be tricky as multiple payment gateways and variations in media files put a heavy toll on websites. Streamline these options for the users by placing them in a particular area on the website. For media files, they can be automatically adjusted to be reduced in lower byte size so that they can be loaded accordingly to the user's Internet speed. Lastly, a queuing loading page can be set up so that users can expect how long would it take for them to wait to navigate or use the main website.

Fix website elements to avoid or minimize errors

Errors related to plugins, web hosting service providers, and domains can be avoided if addressed before holidays. As for third-party services and applications, it should be optimized and checked to see their compatibility with existing codes. Lastly, it would be best to identify website checker and maintenance tools to help with fixing errors.

Holiday Saviors: Maintenance Tools for Businesses

With multiple problems possibly happening simultaneously along with other underlying challenges like lack of workforce dedicated for website maintenance, it can be difficult to address website problems especially when everybody still demands efficient services during holidays. Surely, it will be impractical to rely on manual labor or processes. Here are 10 website checker tools to act as auxiliary support for website maintenance.

• Domain Hunter Plus

• DreamPress

• Google Analytics

• Google Webmaster

• LinkStant

• MailTester

• PhpStorm

• Rank Checker for Firefox

• Remove'em

• Watchful

Solve the Holiday Bug

Holidays can be stressful for businesses, but if the sources of stress will not be managed, those will be rechanneled to website users. Escape from the holiday bug by proactively taking action on common problems. Set up tools that can help you maintain websites so that your holidays will truly be a blissful experience.