How to Prepare Your Online Store for Overload?
In the context of online trade growth, the online store must operate stably, even during peak loads. Development errors, insufficient testing, and weak server infrastructure can lead to failures and loss of customers and profits. To avoid this, it is necessary to think through the architecture of the site in advance, optimize its performance, and conduct load tests. Many successful companies entrust this task to professionals — reliable IT companies in Bulgaria, Poland, and Ukraine help develop and test sites, ensuring their smooth operation even under high loads.
What Is a High Load on a Website?
What can be considered a high-load online store? Many people probably imagine an online platform with numerous customers who look at the catalog and place orders. But it can be different: there are few customers or their growth is insignificant, and the load on the online store is rapidly increasing. The reason may be, for example, an increase in the number of integration flows and their intensity, complex business logic that requires heavy calculations, etc.
Thus, a high load is a situation when resource capacities cannot cope with processing incoming requests. What kind of load this is, is not important at all. It can be 10 very heavy requests that slow down the system, or 10 million small ones that clog the network channel. Both are high-load projects. And by the way, both examples are a reason to think about optimization.
Today, online stores have advanced functionality, and the standard of customer service is considered to be the presence of such features in the online platform as:
- a full-fledged personal account with order history and documentation (receipts, invoices and acts);
- order statuses and purchase tracking (from the distribution center to the transfer to the courier);
- online payment;
- arrangement of delivery by courier or pickup from the warehouse, order pickup point;
- “Favorites” section;
- search history;
- list of similar\recommended products;
- instant purchases (in a few clicks).
From a business point of view, an online store must support sales of a growing assortment – only small companies sell tens or hundreds of items, while medium and large companies have thousands of SKUs, and marketplaces have millions. Moreover, the geography of online sales is rarely limited to one city and includes several regions or even continents. This means that such companies can have tens or hundreds of thousands of users per day.
All this imposes certain requirements and restrictions on the IT architecture of online stores and technically complicates the solution. Standard tools such as CMS (WordPress, CS-Cart, ModX) or online designers (Wix, Ecwid, Tilda) are no longer sufficient — they simply do not solve all the problems associated with storing and transmitting such a volume of information about users and the product range. The era of serious industrial systems capable of withstanding such high loads has arrived.
How to Predict Online Store Overloads?
At the stage of implementing or scaling an online store, it is worth focusing on the following recommendations that will help your online platform withstand growing loads:
- Regularly monitor the load.
If you have an expanded IT infrastructure of an online store, then load monitoring systems are not a whim, but a necessity. In order for this tool to be effective, it is important, firstly, to set up regular monitoring of indicators, and secondly, to determine the threshold values of all parameters in advance and set up an alert when they are reached. If the monitoring indicators approach these critical marks on regular, not promotional days, then, most likely, it is too late to fix anything. It is necessary to take measures in advance when the load is within acceptable values, but at the same time, its growth dynamics are noticeable.
It is also recommended to include a 10-fold load reserve when designing a site. This will help to avoid problems, for example, with a sharp jump in incoming requests. It is best to entrust this to reliable IT companies from Ukraine, Bulgaria, or another country with talents in this field.
- Collect insights from users.
Don’t neglect the feedback platform. To capture feedback from users, use auxiliary tools (preferably several at once, so that customers have more opportunities to tell you about errors). These can be:
- a widget button;
- surveys;
- a pop-up form;
- social networks and bots in messengers.
- Automate routine processes.
Try to automate repetitive operations as much as possible: checks, code assembly, releases, and much more. This can be done using a wide variety of tools: static analyzers, linters, autotests, and automatic pipelines (everyone chooses to their taste, depending on the complexity of the project and the experience of the team).
Automation of routine processes eliminates the human factor, speeds up processes, and frees up a lot of developers’ time for more complex tasks.
- Testing.
If a company develops its own solutions and pays little attention to testing, most likely, most releases will simply fall off. Despite the obvious benefits of code testing, this requires resources that the business is not always ready for. The task of the IT manager is to convince business owners that testing is a part of the product that affects revenue. Different types of load testing are applicable here, including stress testing, performance testing, etc.
- Ensure development security.
As you scale an online store and improve its architecture, programmers repeatedly rewrite the code and change the components of the solution and the relationships between them. If you do not design for fault tolerance, there is a risk of ending up in a situation where changing one element of the system crashes the entire platform. Therefore, it is better to design an online store at the start with the possibility that when one component accesses another, it will be unavailable or an unexpected error will be returned in response. This is what safe programming is (anticipating any abnormal behavior of subsystems).
Conclusion
High-quality development and testing of an online store is the key to stability, high speed, and user convenience. Without this, even the most attractive site may not withstand the influx of buyers, which will negatively affect sales and the reputation of the business. Cooperation with professional IT companies in Ukraine or Bulgaria allows you to create a reliable platform that is ready for any load. Such companies use advanced testing, optimization, and scaling methods, helping online stores operate without interruptions and use their resources as efficiently as possible. If you are interested in cooperating with such companies, we recommend that you pay attention to N-IX.