Think your customers are happy to wait? Making the case for performance…
We’re pretty sure that most people in our industry understand that customers are turned off by poor site performance, but maybe the importance of site performance is not fully appreciated by everyone….Take a deep breath, take in the infographic below and prepare to re-assess.
Retailers!! Poor performance hits your bottom line….
One second delay in page load time = 7% loss in conversions and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. That is why it’s so important that your website is optimised for performance. But help is at hand, the good news for any Magento store owners out there is that Session can make your site fly!
Recent Live Examples - Coping with peak demand
Two of our larger customers recently ran their sales, each anticipating greatly increased traffic levels for the duration of the activity.
The first customer uses email marketing as a key traffic generator; they sent out over 5million outbound marketing emails to their consumer base and due to the nature of their sale (very short term, focussed sale period) these emails couldn’t be staggered to drop over time. So, our technical team were faced with the prospect of several hundred thousand customers jumping onto the website within a very compressed time window.
Scaling infrastructure - without breaking the bank
One of the considerations in situations such as this is how to provide the additional support for these very short bursts of activity, without employing lots of expensive hardware and cost.
We worked with our partners at Rackspace to create a replica environment (application and infrastructure) in order to fully understand the current site performance limits. Using that data we then implemented several performance enhancing techniques, measuring their respective effects. We were then able to accurately assess the optimum setup for that customer for their increased load requirements.
Our recommendations included implementing our custom Varnish proxy caching server solution, peak demand servers (a combination of physical and cloud based servers), as well as a series of on-site optimisations.
Serving over 50,000 customers an hour
Once the sale went live the anticipated traffic levels and profile pretty much reflected our projections, and at peak the site was comfortably serving over to 50,000 unique users per hour (with an average concurrency of 1,000 users).
Processing over 900 orders an hour
The other customer in question had similar requirements; their sale traditionally attracts a significant interest in traffic and customers and during their peak our Magento infrastructure was comfortably taking over 900 orders per hour, exceeding their expectations.
Conclusions
Our Magento solutions are scalable, and with the appropriate planning, infrastructure and implementation we help our clients maximise their peak demand trading periods without breaking the bank or compromising customer experience. If you are interested, why not read our Magento performance paper or give us a call…
