New Uptime.com study helps e-commerce websites plan for traffic and transactional surges with consumer data and performance monitoring strategies
Uptime, a leading website performance monitoring tool, will be releasing its 2021 industry study to help websites and online stories protect against peak shopping surges this holiday season.
The company’s whitepaper comes at a critical time for online sellers grappling with significantly accelerated digital growth in 2020. Consumers spent $791.70 billion with U.S. merchants in 2020 ― an incredible 32.4% year-over-year increase, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Expectations for 2021 are at an all-time high. Website conversion rates can drop by nearly 5% for each additional second of load time between zero to five seconds.
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Simultaneously, COVID-19 has helped drive massive surges in global digital traffic and engagement forecast to represent 35% of 2021’s total sales.
At no time of the year is this surge felt more than Cyber Monday and Black Friday. According to Adobe Analytics, shoppers spent $10.8 billion online during Cyber Monday 2020 — a 15.1% year-over-year increase. This not only represented the largest internet shopping day in U.S. history but also the first where 25% of Cyber Monday’s total revenue — $2.7 billion — happened over the day’s final hours, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. PST.
“The sheer volume of online shopping traffic and transactions seen in 2020 should be a clear wake-up call for online sellers that website performance equals revenue success,” said Uptime.com CMO, Yoni Solomon. “Some industries and regions forecast traffic surges greater than 50% — which means website downtime monitoring will make or break successful holiday sales seasons.”
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Uptime.com’s e-commerce website monitoring whitepaper will be free to download and contains best practices for online businesses to:
- Configure HTTP(S) checks to confirm sites are serving code 200 OK, monitor API endpoints and combine with custom checks for deeper insight into critical website jobs and processes.
- Use a free website page speed test on asset-heavy ads for optimization opportunities.
- Leverage transaction checks for synthetic monitoring of key pathways like login pages and shopping carts.
- Set up multi-channel alerting across email, SMS, phone, and DevOps tools like Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams and more.
- Use anonymized real user monitoring data to break down website performance by location, device, browser, and URL.
- Create branded status pages that are customer-facing, and consistent with marketing sites for users to reference in the event of downtime.
