Cyber Monday, the busiest day for online retailers, is around the corner and while it is too late to make major changes to your site, there are a few things that can be done within hours or even minutes to improve your systems’ performance this holiday season. Take a look at the list of quick and easy optimization techniques that you still have time to act on.

off button

DISABLE BACK-UPS & THE HIGH-IO JOBS

The chances are that your systems are running quite a few high-IO jobs at any given time. Take a look at those jobs and disable all non-vital ones for the time of the peak traffic. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are special days for online retailers. Make sure you treat them accordingly.

SEND EMAILS IN SMALL BATCHES

Email marketing is the second largest channel driving online sales during Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping season and was responsible for 20% of holiday sales in 2015. All this traffic can result in the revenue gain or loss depending on your systems ability to handle it. To reduce the risk of overloading your systems and keep your site traffic more consistent send email campaigns in batches distributed over time.

deploy button

MINIMIZE BULK DATA LOADS

Whenever you need to upload large amounts of data try to do it before or after anticipated peak traffic. For instance, if you have a promotion scheduled to come out on Tuesday, do deployments on Monday or Wednesday.

diagram

PAUSE PENETRATION TESTS

While running penetration tests is important to keep your systems secure, such tests can sometimes have a negative effect on your site performance. In order to optimize your end customer experience during peak traffic pausing any penetration tests is highly recommended. In fact you only need to run them quarterly or weekly.

ENABLE  SUPPORT FOR HTTP/2 PROTOCOL

Most modern CDNs can support HTTP/2 protocol nowadays which means better performance and lower bandwidth usage. If you haven’t done so yet, contact your CDN provider to find out how you can enable this service. It can be as simple as adding a short header to your web pages.

Read Oracle Commerce Holiday Readiness Checklist for more performance optimization tips.