Two sides of increased traffic: What can Cyber Week mean for your website?
Black Friday, now extended into an entire Cyber Week, usually presents a golden opportunity for all businesses with an online presence. Actually, did you know the “black” in the name refers to retailers moving into “black” numbers (or profit)? It seems to ring true - let’s talk numbers for a second:
- According to Salesforce analyzing data from 1.5 billion shoppers, global Cyber Week sales clocked in at $281 billion.
- Adobe Analytics and its data in the U.S. paint a similar picture - tracking $35.3 billion during Cyber Week!
Just lean back in your chair, close your eyes, and imagine: your website, running like clockwork, welcoming (and efficiently handling) the scores of website visitors, turning a spike in website traffic into revenue.
And what a spike it can be: according to Queue-it and the 66 million website visits they tracked on Black Friday, the retail holiday brought three times as much traffic as an average October day.
But with great traffic comes great responsibility - so it’s best to make sure your website can handle it.
Don’t worry - we can help you with that!
Stay on the bright side of Black Friday with Umbraco Cloud - and Dedicated Resources
If you’re launching a campaign, have a big sale, or generally anticipate a spike in resource usage for your website during Black Friday, on Umbraco Cloud, you can always choose to purchase Dedicated Resources and give your website the resources it needs to elegantly handle the extra traffic.
Exactly like IMPACT, a digital agency and an Umbraco Gold Partner!
They are using Dedicated Resources when creating and managing commerce solutions for their clients - and they only have positive things to say about their experience:
We highly value the flexibility of moving our clients to dedicated resources on Umbraco Cloud when necessary, particularly during high-traffic periods like Black Friday. We recently utilized this feature for one of our clients, showcasing the ease with which we can adjust resource allocation with just a few clicks.
Let’s dive into it with more detail:
- Dedicated Resources allows you to instantly upgrade from shared to dedicated hosting - actually, at the click of a button! - and give your projects the power, memory, and network bandwidth you need.
- The beauty of it? Once the rush hour is over, you can scale down as easily as you scaled up - either to a smaller dedicated plan or back to a shared plan - staying in full control of your resources at all times.
- To find the plan that fits your project needs, you can choose from several dedicated options.
See more about Dedicated Resources here
Weighing the benefits of being on a dedicated server? Here’s how having additional resources available can help you:
- Few things turn customers away faster than a website that takes ages to load. Additional bandwidth from a dedicated server can help you deal with the Black Friday spike in traffic.
- High traffic can overwhelm a website’s server, potentially leading to crashes or downtime. Extra resources can help prevent that.
- You can be prepared for everything with your website - but what about a noisy neighbor from hell on your shared server? Going dedicated means you’ll have all the real estate for your own traffic, and no one will stomp over your Black Friday success.
Black Friday favors the prepared
If there is a day - or a week - during the year when you need your website to run as smoothly as possible, it’s the end of November when the holiday of retail happens.
And we can help you be as prepared as possible!
Already on the Umbraco Cloud? Great! You can switch from a shared server to one of the dedicated options on your Umbraco Cloud project under Settings > Dedicated Resources.
It's simple, quick, and could be a game-changer.
Not on Cloud yet? This could be a perfect opportunity to explore the optimal Cloud setup for your business. Let's talk about it - book a discovery call with our team today!