The best thing to do to ensure your e-commerce site is ready for the holiday shopping season is to test website performance automatically and frequently.
Pay Attention to the Big Event
If your e-commerce site is having a flash sale or is launching a new product, expect that there will be isolated, increased traffic events. Test specific web pages and the overall lifecycle, to make sure each web page a shopper goes to – from the item page to the checkout – is able to field increased traffic. Lifestyle apparel brand Stance recently had a huge event – the launch of a sock line custom-designed by Rihanna – and used event testing to help 10,000 simultaneous shoppers per second have a positive, non-disruptive shopping experience. Knowing the problem areas before shoppers arrived let the sale go smoothly, with not one customer experiencing website downtime.