Preparing Your Infrastructure for High Traffic
1. Predict Your Traffic and Order Volume
Wild guesses based on gut instinct are fine at your favorite casino or racetrack, but when it comes to your organization’s most important opportunity of the year, a data-based approach should rule your planning. Four key benchmarks (easily reviewed via Adobe Commerce Business Intelligence, or MBI) serve as a guide to make useful predictions about the peak season traffic you need to support:
- Your site’s traffic load over the past six months on a daily and weekly average
- Your site’s traffic load during last year’s peak season dates
- The calculated percentage increase for last year’s peak season traffic over the last year’s six-month average prior to peak season
- The year-over-year percentage growth rate in traffic between last year’s and this year’s site traffic
2. Put Resources to the Test (Preparing Your Infrastructure for High Traffic)
With your predicted resource model for this year’s peak season, load test your infrastructure to validate how your site might hold up against the expected traffic. A good first step in this process is to review Adobe’s recommendations on load testing for Adobe Commerce sites.
3. Prepare Your Site Accordingly (Preparing Your Infrastructure for High Traffic)
Increase server capacity and/or database capacity
Now that you have completed site load testing and determined areas requiring additional capacity, the next step is to plan how to meet those needs. You might need flexible capacity to cover the periods where you expect higher traffic. If your site has routinely been running at a high percentage of load. However, you might take the opportunity to increase capacity to both meet your peak season needs and give your organization more breathing room as you grow. Since many consumer behaviors have permanently changed during the pandemic. You might want to assume that the web traffic and transaction increases over the past year will continue.
Use a content delivery network
Another way to meet the peak season performance needs identified during load testing is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN super-powers your cache, creating a global cache network of your static media files, HTML, JS, Style Sheets, and much more to decrease load and improve response times. You have many CDN options, but if you’re using Adobe Commerce, you have access to the Fastly CDN.
Update your caching configuration
You can also approach resolving infrastructure needs by reducing the number of hits on your server through better caching configurations. Along with our Best Practices on Cache Management, we also recommend taking advantage of Full-Page Caching, which is a great way to speed up your Adobe Commerce site.
4. Practice Good Habits (Preparing Your Infrastructure for High Traffic)
Optimize images for a fast eCommerce site
Images are a critical piece of the sales process. But these can be a net negative when improperly managed due to slow load times that impact site performance.
Update to the latest ece-tools package
Ensure that your cloud environment uses the latest version of ece-tools to take advantage of the enhancements delivered in our deployment tooling. Recent releases include improvements related to the local development experience. Speeding up the deployment of static content by up to 400%, and adding self-service capabilities to enable our merchants to be more productive. See the ece-tools release notes for details on the recent improvements.
Don’t let deployment get you down
It’s important that visitors can shop uninterrupted during the holiday season. But you might need to push changes to your production environment during this time. Did you know you can configure your project so that the customer experiences zero downtime during these deployments? One of the best ways you can practice good cloud infrastructure management is to complete the steps to configure Adobe Commerce for Zero Downtime Deployments. Applying these configuration best practices ensures that your customers engage with a live site, regardless of your deployment routine.
Back up your eCommerce site
Employ proper back-up management to prevent a time-consuming environment rollback. A Snapshot allows you to back up and then restore specific environments at any time. Which can save time and cost if something goes wrong with a deployment. Because Adobe Commerce environments deploy as read-only files, a Snapshot restoration brings your environment back quickly.
Monitor your performance
It’s always a good idea to use well-designed monitoring tools to keep an eye on performance. You have many options when it comes to tools and processes for monitoring site performance. So be sure to pick a method that pairs well with your organization. We do recommend that Adobe Commerce customers who use our cloud infrastructure management system take advantage of services like New Relic to monitor site performance.
Additionally, customers can now take advantage of Observation for Adobe Commerce, a New Relic nerdlet. This application provides a quick snapshot of your overall site performance as well as options to drill down and get more information on potential performance issues.
Keep in touch with your Adobe teams
We always recommend that you log in to your Adobe Commerce account and verify the contact information listed under Account Settings. Also, make sure that your Adobe CSM has information about your organization’s key technical contacts . If you’re working with a solution partner. Discuss their support plans for your holiday period so that everyone can execute on the plan should anything unexpected arise. These steps help us to alert the right people in your organization about any security or technical issues when they occur.
5. Protect Your Site (and Your Customer Data)
Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Commerce
As hackers become more sophisticated, it’s critical that Adobe Commerce merchants are running the latest software. Bad actors know that businesses are distracted during busy periods. Often use the noise of the holidays to pull off their biggest frauds of the year.
Even when you’re not up to date, stay safe
Security patches allow businesses to keep up with the latest security trends, even if they are not using the most current version of Adobe Commerce. We recommend installing security patches as they become available. Don’t let them stack up. The Magento Quality Package can help you access and apply patches, so your site stays up to date.