How to Prevent Website Outage During Black Friday

Retailers are getting ready for Black Friday. More than $23 billion worth of sales were made in 2018. This was a whopping 8% increase from 2017. More than 165 million Americans preferred shopping online for holidays. Thus, there are a lot of potential sales for your business.

Last year tons of e-commerce sites were down due to traffic surges. Even big sites like Best Buy were facing outage. You need to get ready for the traffic surge. If you are not ready for a traffic surge, then your website will go down. Your potential customers will move to some other website. In this article, we are going to talk about six things that you can cause website outage.

1. Malware

Hackers love Black Friday. They will try to infect e-commerce websites for stealing payment details. If your website is infected by malware, then all your customer details will get stolen. Hackers infected Macy e-commerce website before black Friday. They are currently providing free credit monitoring services to their users.

Malware can’t bring your whole site down. But, it can damage the reputation of your business. Your customers will think twice before shopping on your website. Procter and Gamble also recently discovered malware on their website. They removed their whole website just for fixing this issue.

It is important to make sure that your website is protected from malware. Make sure that the e-commerce software you are using is updated. If there is any issue in e-commerce software, then the vendor will issue a security update. Thus, make sure that your software is always updated. There are various malware scanners available in the market that can scan your website. You can also vulnerability scanners for scanning your website for vulnerabilities.

2. Broken Third-party Plugins

Plugins are one of the best ways to increase your website functionality. You don’t need to worry about coding these functions from scratch. These plugins are mostly used by small enterprises. If you don’t have a large tech team, then you can use these plugins for implementing various functions. But, these plugins are coded by third-party providers. Most of them won’t update these plugins regularly. Thus, you might be using a plugin that has various security vulnerabilities. A Broken plugin can disrupt various parts of your website. Some plugins can even make your whole website inaccessible.

You can prevent this by making sure that all your plugins are up-to-date. If some plugin is not getting regular updates, then you should remove it from your website. Also, you should watch your website behavior after installing any new plugin.

3. DDoS Attacks

A DDoS or distributed denial of service attack is one of the most common attacks used by attackers. Attackers will use various compromised systems for flooding your website with traffic. They will try to flood your server with fake traffic. According to a study by Link11, there was a 70% increase in DDoS attacks during Black Friday. Hackers will try to take down e-commerce websites.

You can prevent DDoS attacks by improving your IT infrastructure. Thus, your website can handle more traffic. But, this is only a temporary fix. Attackers can still flood your server. There are various DDoS monitoring tools that can help you in preventing these issues. Your IT department must have a plan to deal with DDoS attacks. You can also use various third-party services like Cloudflare. These third-party services will help you in protecting your website from DDoS attacks. There are various protection tools that you should install in your network. You should install key applications like network monitoring software, an anti-malware program, antivirus, and firewall. These tools will help you in monitoring your network for the traffic spike.

4. Inadequate Hosting package

If you are using the cheapest hosting packages, then your website won’t have enough bandwidth to support the traffic spike. You have to make sure that your server can support the traffic spike during the Black Friday.

Many e-commerce websites are using shared hosting. They are sharing a single server with many different websites. If any of these websites experience a traffic spike, then the whole server will slow down. Thus, your website can also go down.

The best way to avoid this is by upgrading your hosting plan for Black Friday. You should go for a dedicated hosting plan. This will make sure that you have your own server. Thus, the possibility of downtime will be very less.

5. Lack of Testing

E-commerce website owners use various different techniques for attracting new users. They will start by showing some offers to their customers. Thus, their customers can start planning about what they should buy. Big brands like Amazon also do various partnerships before Black Friday. You can use your American express reward points for doing purchase on Amazon.

You will see a traffic spike during the Black Friday. Hence, it is important to do proper testing before Black Friday. You can use cloud testing for simulating extra load on your server. Thus, you can check how your website will perform under extra stress. This will make sure that your website can handle huge traffic. You should also do proper testing of all your website features.

Conclusion

Black Friday is the perfect time for making some money. But, you have to make sure that your website is ready for the traffic spike. You should choose a provider that will provide you high uptime. If you are using shared hosting, then you should shift to dedicated hosting. This will ensure that your website won’t go down due to other websites in your server. Also, you should scan your whole network for security vulnerabilities. This will help you in protecting your website from hackers. If you want more tips about website security, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.