For online retailers, Christmas is a worrying time for customers, who will want to know when you’re able to ship to them and whether they can speak to a customer service rep if something goes awry.
Nothing will drive them away sooner than hard-to-find contact information. Bring it to the front of your site for the holiday period, and include the hours your customer service team will be available each day.
Be sure you’re clear with your customers about cut off dates for orders to be purchased, shipped, and delivered well in time for the holidays. Make it easier to find by using direct language like “Shipping Deadlines” or “Shipping Cutoff” rather than polite euphemisms like “Shipping Info” and “Shipping Details”.
Freeze your code
The holiday season is not the time to be making big changes to your code base. Consider freezing your code in the next few days while the full development team are still available and monitor the environment closely to ensure likely problems are identified and resolved before the team takes off for a well-earned break.
Triage and simplify
If you’re a retailer, social sites or sports media publisher and you’re expecting a higher than usual workload over the holidays, consider simplifying to reduce load, by temporarily switching off non-essential resource-intensive code, data or content.
For example, adjusting a retailer catalog for a few peak days could mean a smaller product catalogue, which would be served more quickly and might reduce server load. Removing or disabling resource intensive features/functions, can ensure system resources are dedicated to core functionality.
Check and double-check your monitoring
If a server fails in the forest and nobody hears about it, did it ever really fail? Most definitely yes, but if you don’t hear about it, you can’t take action and while it’s down it’s doing harm to your business. Its safe to assume your team will be making fewer manual checks of the system over the holidays, so now is the time to test and re-test your automated monitoring to make sure that it trips for the right events, and that notifications will be delivered to team members who understand they’ll be responsible for responding over the holidays.
It may also be worth asking us to investigate whether the monitoring tools you are using are negatively impacting site performance.
Backup or be sleighed
We wouldn’t let you get by without any backup strategy at all, but now is a good time to ensure that your backup routine will be appropriate for the holidays, that key staff know where and how to begin rollback and recovery, and that you’re confident you can get it done quickly with your available holiday team members. If in doubt, give the Anchor team a call.
Test or hit Santa’s naughty list
Test early and often to make sure there’s enough capacity available while you’re holidaying, and that loads are balanced correctly.
Make sure predicted traffic levels are reviewed by all your internal stakeholders and confirmed as realistic.
Check everything twice, and check from front to back — connectivity, to firewall, to application and web servers. Check more than twice to catch that Murphy’s Law instance if you can.
Wishing you a safe, happy and 100% uptime this holidays!
