While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has removed much of the traffic from the roads, it has led to an unusual increase in traffic on the internet. Online services are reporting a huge increase in the number of visitors and requests, making it tough to maintain seamless service delivery.
For example, grocery chains RedMart and FairPrice have both reported a significant rise in orders, disrupting their delivery schedules. If you run an online store, streaming or gaming site, or any other small to medium-sized online business, you have probably already seen a surge in users and perhaps some glitches in performance, too.
Yet, delivering the right user experience while handling heavy traffic is crucial to your business.
Service providers and experts say the internet can hold up for now. However, organisations need to implement measures to prevent network congestion and interruptions in service during this period.
The Singapore government has launched an e-commerce booster package to help small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) retailers that are new to, or have little experience, in e-commerce to diversify revenue streams.
Fast user experience is key
Near real-time insights tell you how fast your application is responding to a click or a swipe. Given the number of user interactions with your site, those insights are essential, especially if you run an online store.
Understanding the end-user experience of your business application can help diagnose critical problems before they impact application performance. Beyond identifying transactions with slow responses, it is important to identify the exact causes of these poor response times.
When the response time of a webpage is poor, the result is high user abandonment rate typically before it loads.
The underlying cause for this could be anything from network latency to the size of elements in the webpage (CSS, images, scripts, etc.) to chat, pop-ups, and other third-party code.
Prioritising critical user interactions
Some interactions are more important than others, for example, a form used to collect user details or the checkout page processing payment operations. Consequently, user path flows through the web application involved in such interactions should always be closely monitored for performance problems.
Synthetic monitoring tools available in the market can accurately pinpoint problematic transactions and help extrapolate the root cause of issues.
Historical analysis for capacity planning
While generating revenue is usually the primary objective of any business, in times like these, keeping the business alive and functioning for users is more important. To that end, historical performance analysis is essential.
Insights such as average availability and response time of your application from different geographies, average downtime, average load times, and outage reports can help you understand how your application is coping with requests and whether it requires any upgrades.
For example, it is possible that your web application requires additional capacity in the database. It is also possible that your application server needs an upgrade in order to process and deliver requests. These informed decisions can only be made with insights that help plan for the future based on understanding of growth and utilisation trends.
Monitoring is crucial
Website content monitoring or website defacement monitoring is definitely essential to delivering the right user experience. This goes back to the diagnosis and correction of any unauthorised changes made to the appearance of webpages on your website.
Using techniques such as phishing, code injection, and cross-site scripting, websites are usually defaced by hackers who break into a web server and replace the content or script in the hosted website with their own.
Insertion of potentially hazardous content, images, malicious code, or even deletion of content can inflict severe damage to your business reputation and user experience. Detecting such changes in time and rectifying them before end users notice theme is an important aspect of delivering an ideal digital experience.
The pandemic has forced people to stay indoors and affected businesses globally in many ways. While most businesses are impacted severely and are implementing measures to contain the loss of revenue, other online businesses are seeing a surge in users because of increased traffic on the internet.
In any case, ensuring that your business service not only has maximum uptime but also delivers a good user experience can help a great deal in mitigating the impact of these tough times.
