I feel the need, the need for speed!

“I feel the need, the need for speed” said Pete Mitchell to Nick Bradshaw in the classic 1986 film Top Gun.   Little did “Maverick” and “Goose” know that 26 years later nearly every Retail Ecommerce Manager would be saying that very same thing to their IT Manager in the lead up to the most important trading time of the year for every retailer on the planet!

Speaking plainly, site speed equals high conversion rates which in turn equals dollars in the bank.  Outside of planning a suite of Christmas campaigns, that are seamlessly executed across the range of digital marketing channels, the next topic on the Christmas planning agenda has to be: how is the website going to maintain high-speed performance during a period of intense load both from browsing and purchasing customers?

This Christmas Cracker usually finds itself on the desk of an already busy IT Manager who is busy trying to get agreement with “the business” on a lock-down of system changes during peak trading times to ensure stability, squeeze some additional capacity from an already overloaded IT infrastructure to bolster retail store performance and populate a Xmas rota to ensure that the department had adequate cover during the holiday season.  

Needless to say, without an accurate prediction of site traffic and predicted transactions and in fact, even with an accurate prediction of site traffic and transactions, finding the budget and resources to implement the IT infrastructure (servers and network bandwidth) required to cope with peak load is very difficult.  

The upshot being that during the Christmas season some online shoppers will be presented with slow and very slow websites that are struggling to keep up with the pace of the voracious demand from the Australian multi-channel retail consumer!

So, what to do?

To ensure that your online customers don’t lose  “that lovin’ feelin” during the Festive Season the answer can be found in a new and highly effective solution: FEO – Front End Optimisation.  FEO is a combination of Content Distribution Networking and Website Acceleration (through software optimisation) that can significantly improve the performance of page rendering on your website, reduce load from your servers to ensure that transactions are handled faster and create a buffer so that spikes in high traffic volumes go un-noticed by your customers!

This combination of content distribution and site acceleration can be implemented within 36 hrs, require 5 minutes involvement from your IT Department, is contract free, pay-as-you-go and has a money back guarantee! 

For more information, contact iceman@hitworks.com.au who will help keep you out of the Danger Zone!