4 Ways To Speed Up Your Site For The Holidays

August 18, 2014 By Digital Operative,

This guest post was written by our partners at Tenzing There are lots of opportunities to find hidden capacity in your environment – and that capacity can be very valuable during the busy holiday season. Our partner Tenzing is here today to share four ways to free up your environment before the holiday rush hits. It is incredibly important to regularly review your application performance and tune areas that are resource intensive, but as we come up to the holidays this type of tuning is imperative. As a specialist in infrastructure for ecommerce, Tenzing starts working with clients on holiday plans in August, well ahead of the holiday rush, to implement the following best practices.

Adjust caching timing

Caching can save system resources by holding information in memory, but when the cache has to be refreshed it draws system resources to complete this activity. During peak times increase the time between caches.

Adjust ‘type ahead’ search

Type ahead search uses additional sessions and threads within your application. Increasing the number of characters before the search is initiated or how long the system will wait before it starts searching will give you added capacity when you need it.

Remove/adjust view all options

Giving customers the option to view all items in a category is available on many sites, but if you have a large catalog the loading of these elements take time and resources. Review all the areas where the option to view all is available and restrict the number of items that can be viewed when it is selected.

Limit Publishing

Limit your publishing during peak times. Catalog updates en mass are resource intensive because in most applications the database and search engines need to re-index. In addition caching has to be refreshed.

For more information on how to prepare your site for the holidays download Tenzing’s free Ecommerce Holiday Guide – it’s full of advice and ideas on preparing for the holiday season including how to prepare your infrastructure optimize your application and coordinate your marketing.

About Tenzing

As an ecommerce infrastructure specialist Tenzing has been helping retailers prepare for the holiday season for almost a decade. Tenzing combines scalable infrastructure, deep platform expertise, advanced managed services and extensive industry partnerships to help merchants increase revenues and deliver remarkable customer experiences. Retailers and Solution Partners choose Tenzing because we help them increase SEM performance, reduce shopping cart abandonment and ensure performance during peak seasons. To find out more about us visit www.tenzing.com or email us at ecommerce@tenzing.com