Blue Monday is here! Yes, we’ve all heard about and experienced the Monday blues, but what is Blue Monday?
According to a hypothesis by Cliff Arnall, Blue Monday is the most depressing day of the year, falling on the third Monday of January in 2020. Though not scientifically proven, the date is determined each year using a formula that takes several factors into consideration, including weather conditions, debt level, and feeling the need to take action. It applies only to the Northern Hemisphere, where the cold and gloomy winter, with its short days and long nights, makes people feel lonely and depressed. This coupled with the lack of a feel-good factor following winter festivities is cited as a major cause of the phenomenon.
With the internet being one of the most easily accessible and trusted companions in the modern world, digital avenues and e-commerce platforms are predicted to become the main channels of solace for those prone to depression. Studies by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute indicate that people spend more money on online shopping when they feel depressed; this provides online platforms with an opportunity to appeal to customers by ensuring a better digital experience. Here are a few tips to get your websites user-friendly and ready to deliver the best customer experience possible.
Additional incoming traffic may sound promising for your business, but it comes with its own share of risks. If you’re an online retailer, it’s time to review your incident response plans and strategies. When your page load time increases, the number of customers leaving your site also increases, which can lead to financial loss and damage your brand reputation.
What resonates with your business should be reflected on your website. It’s essential to ensure that your website is up and performing well 24/7. As the saying goes, a stitch in time saves nine; each preventive measure you take can bring the user experience closer to being fail proof and perfect. For this, a thorough performance check can identify possible bottlenecks before traffic spikes.
Start by testing and observing how well your site can withstand a traffic surge in real time by putting pressure on the servers and creating a vulnerable situation. This will help you understand what measures should be taken to rectify the failures, and how the website should be reinforced to face the heavy traffic.
For instance, the bandwidth and storage space your current hosting provider offers may not be sufficient when traffic is heavy. In that case, switching to a scalable hosting solution can help you deal with traffic spikes for a short time span. Often during times of high incoming traffic, sites go offline due to an increased load on the servers. Your server performance may be affected by the CPU, memory, disk usage, etc., so you should monitor these metrics to determine their effects on the performance of the entire configuration. The role of capacity planning in gauging the nature of the load and usage, along with understanding the impact of usage on machine architecture and the end-user experience is vital. If you’re serving customers globally, checking the performance of your website from various geographic locations should be a priority.
Another important measure is to track and understand the possible routes that a customer might take on your site, which can help you trace all the possible bottlenecks that may affect a transaction. Glitches may arise due to a high resolution image or a page that takes more time to load, hampering the performance of your website.
Being careful about the dimensions of images displayed on your website, monitoring the number of content delivery networks (CDNs) you use, checking for broken links on your page, and browser caching can all help you tackle issues that may arise. These bottlenecks might appear negligible, but when a traffic spike happens, things can get out of control.
All of these factors could lead to a poor load and response time, which can result in customers leaving your site for any of your competitors’ sites. According to the 2019 Page Speed Report, if customers face a slow loading page, 15 percent will leave yours and visit a competitor site.
A security breach is another major concern, as any threat to a customer’s personal information is a delicate issue. Monitoring your servers, the logs generated by your servers, applications, etc. will help you keep all your data secure. You can also monitor your pages for malware that might be inserted into your website through SQL injections.
However prepared you are, there can be pitfalls you miss that can trigger issues during peak traffic times. An application performance monitoring tool can help you easily discover and troubleshoot the root causes affecting your application. All trial and error methods you try during these tests will help you develop a strong strategy to diagnose and resolve issues easily.
A perfect digital experience may not cure all psychological issues related to Blue Monday, but what if it turns out to be the first step to cheering up your customers? Brace yourselves for Blue Monday, and deliver your share of happiness through a flawless user experience, with Site24x7; a cloud based user experience and digital experience monitoring solution loved by site reliability engineers (SREs) around the globe.
Beat Blue Monday with Site24x7 Monitoring
