Top tips: Avoiding web traffic overload- It's all in the timing

Graham Moore, e-retail expert at Zeus Technology offers his thoughts on how to ease congestion when consumers arrive at a brand’s site all at once.

Many IT managers and digital marketers would have far less of a headache if lunch breaks took place at different times for the UK’s working population. However, as it stands consumers naturally tend to visit online outlets at very similar times each week. Being ingrained in the world of web traffic management means we naturally pick up on outages, either through our industry contacts or via the media. We have seen an emerging trend of big brand websites suffering performance problems consistently at lunchtimes, usually accompanied by negative media coverage reporting the problems.
As people unwind over lunch in front of their computers, it is of little surprise that sites fall victim to web performance issues. Where a customer has put up with online difficulties once, they are unlikely to return in case they face similar problems again. For example, the other week a colleague went to buy a ticket from a well known brand for a popular concert but found that the website performed badly. It was slow and in turn, did not result in a positive customer experience – in the end she chose not to buy the tickets, pointing to the frustration such online issues can cause.
A recent piece of research from Invisible Hand reflects the peaks in online shopping between 12pm and 2pm. The real-time online shopping business’s data recorded an 11% increase in the number of online shoppers at this time.
The issue is not solely down to natural consumer traffic, but is also exasperated by marketers who set up offers to coincide with and exploit the peak in people online looking to make purchases. It makes sense that digital marketers set up promotions to drive traffic to transactional sites at this time of the week and will help to optimise their return on campaign investment. What doesn’t make sense is where the relevant IT managers haven’t been informed about these so that they can scale the capability of a website up and down to the cope with the relevant number of visitors they expect at any given time. The answer is simple – regular communication between the two teams to stop any unnecessary instances of poor web performance.
The cure to the busy period headache isn’t encouraging the UK population to start changing the time it purchases products. Instead online businesses need to have a scalable solution in position to proactively prevent web performance issues. Managing resource behind a campaign will better position a site to be fast, offering a positive experience to the end user. This will encourage consumers to come back again, trusting that brand’s to consistently offer a high level of service online.
By Graham Moore
e-retail expert
Zeus Technology
www.zeus.com
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