Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become huge shopping holidays in Canada as well as in the US. Recent stats show that nearly half of all Canadians planned to do some shopping on Black Friday last year. The most popular categories tend to be electronics and clothing, but all kinds of businesses are doing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to capitalize on consumers’ desire for savings.
This year, these holidays will be more important than ever, since many businesses have been hit hard by reduced revenues from the COVID-19 pandemic. Being well prepared will ensure that your business can make the most out of these opportunities.
First and foremost, you’ll have to develop an idea for a sale, and advertise that adequately so that customers know about it and will come to your site. From there, there are some things you can do to ensure that your website will perform as expected:
Invest in reliable hosting.
It’s very hard to expect your site to function well when you can’t count on reliable hosting. At this point in time, any host that offers less than 99.9% uptime should be reevaluated.
Ensure you have adequate site speed.
How fast does your website run on an average day? If you’re already not completely happy with the speed of your site, you should take care of some basics that can speed it up. Follow our instructions here for some of the basics of speeding up your site. You’ll want to keep assets lightweight, adopt asynchronous loading, and enable website caching.
Invest in more bandwidth.
You can also invest in more bandwidth such as our Virtual Private Server hosting option.
Enable a Content Delivery Network.
You’ll want to ensure that you have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) enabled in order to handle surges traffic. At CanSpace Solutions, we’re a proud Premium Partner of CloudFlare, one of the industry’s most renowned content delivery networks. Use of the CDN for your site is included free of charge with all CanSpace hosting plans.
Have your staff available.
Finally, with everything on the line on the big day, you’ll want to have all your staff available (and perhaps additional staff, if possible) to troubleshoot problems on the fly should these arise. Of course, at CanSpace Hosting Solutions, we are also available 24/7 to answer your questions and address any issues.
We hope your Black Friday and Cyber Monday efforts lead to some great results this year!