Why Magento support and maintenance plan is essential for Christmas holiday 2018

Every online Magento merchant is eagerly waiting for the onset of upcoming holiday sales at the end of 2018. However, the success of the holiday season depends on several things, but Magento support and maintenance plan by a reputed team like Perception System, USA is a highly impactful idea. Let’s see how.

Christmas holidays are already knocking the door, and it is high-time for e-commerce stores to be ready to combat the holiday spikes in every aspect. If your Magento website is aged and deteriorating gradually, thinking of the redesign is an excellent way.

If you have created it or redesigned it within the recent past, looking for a best support & maintenance plan for your Magento eCommerce is inevitable. If you ask me why it is mandatory to subscribe to holiday support and maintenance plan even earlier, I will give you answers with my following logic. 

To Combat with Magento Hosting Issues 

Hosting and network related issues such as server slow down/downtime, network clout, or a crash are never respecting your holiday season. They can strike at any moment and in any form.

When cloud hosting started to getting momentum, our assumptions were to have uninterrupted hosting services. Unfortunately, recent breakage in Amazon Web Services has wiped off all aspirations of Magento merchants to consider the cloud is hosting the safest and reliable option. What we need is to watch the clouds with unblinking eyes. If you have own hosting infrastructure or subscribed a dedicated hosting plan from private hosting services, still you need robust monitoring.

Are you able to set a technical team to monitor your Magento hosting server or cloud constantly? Do you have time to go DIY way? Perhaps, never because your core activity is to deal with strenuous holiday sales activities. So, what is the solution? I think it is a right support and maintenance service provider with all nuts & bolts to mend it or save your store right before anything unwanted happening with your e-commerce hosting. It is Perception System, San Jose in California, USA to aid you during your holiday season 2018.

The Magento expert team  at Perception System has automated & manual monitoring tools/techniques to watch your Amazon Cloud or any hosting service you have. The team will check system status, instant status, alarms, events, logs, and scripts using automated software/tools. 

• If your currently running hosting plan is not scalable enough, the support team instantly subscribes suitable plan and switch your site.
• If your Magento hosting is proving incapable of dealing with high traffic surges and going to crashes, the technical team will jump on the board and start backup hosting services within the shortest period.
• If your site needs cloud migration before starting the holiday season, the team will look the most appropriate cloud services and provide seamless cloud migration experiences.

Monitoring the Magento Site with Manual & Automated Tools

We used to wait until the system breaks. It is a dangerous approach, which costs us dearly. Therefore, predictive maintenance concept and practices are getting trendy today against reactive attitudes.

It is predictive analysis methods, and automated monitoring tools are the solution to assure constant health of your Magento store throughout the holiday season. As discussed earlier that the support team at Perception System uses the latest automated tools to check the health and performance of your Magento store. The checks include:

• Network connectivity
• Hosting system configuration for hardware and software according to the traffic surge to offer the best scalability
• Software and hardware issues of the hosting
• Memory status, corrupted file system check, system failure statistic, compatibility kernel

Similarly, manual monitoring includes various tests through dashboards of cloud services and Magento backend, such as – Service health, alarm status, instance metrics, volume metrics, and much more described in automated monitoring.

Optimize Your Magento Store for Mobiles 

A global consumer survey by Statista in 2018 revealed that nearly 60% online shoppers are using smartphones as a prime shopping device while 40% of respondents have admitted that they use tablets as their prime shopping devices.

While PayPal has cited that one-third of online payments come from mobile devices. These all indicate that your Magento store should be mobile-friendly and the latest Responsive Web Design (RWD) technology is the best-ever answer of it.

Despite the use of the best responsive design theme for your Magento store, mobile experiences break during the peak period of your holiday sales. Then, who will help you? It is Magento support services, which are responsible for it.

The team will check the various aspects of mobile user experiences on multiple mobile devices, such as viewing shopping cart, adding, deleting, or modifying shopping cart, checkout process, display of product pages and different product attributes, readable font styles, content scalability, layout responsiveness, easy form filling, and a lot parameters.

Test, test, and test is only the way to assure the best mobile experiences and support team is the answer to it.

Crash Problems, Which Demand Round-the-Clock (24/7) Magento Support

If you have a sharp memory, once Amazon e-commerce site went down and observed estimated loss of $66,240 per minute. Similarly, Google went down and resulting in a 40% drop in the web traffic.

It reveals one fact obviously that unexpected downtime or crash of your eCommerce site is the dreaded enemy of your holiday sales and instant mending is compulsory to prevent it. If you don’t have signed support and maintenance contract in advance for your Magento store, getting on-time help becomes daunting.

Once you signed the packages for maintenance and quick support before the onset of the holiday season from Perception System, California like reputed support and maintenance service provider, you might enjoy the following precautionary measures:

• Cloud testing
• Load balancing
• Auto-scaling
• Secure payment
• Fault tolerance
• Prevention of DDoS attack
• Functionality testing

To Solve the Payment Issues To Assure Consistent Lifeline of Magento Ecommerce

We know payment features assure the smooth flow of revenue and enable E-commerce to sustain as well as grow. The technical issue with payment system is payment gateway APIs. The more APIs integrated with Magento eCommerce, the more chances of API crashes or performance glitches.

Disaster Recovery Support & Maintenance to Ensure Quick Restoration during the Peaks of Holiday Sales

Storms, floods, earth quacks, tsunami, and heavy snowfalls are natural disasters. Different kinds of cyber-attacks are human to originate disasters. The intensity and types of disasters determine the impacts and require the appropriate measures to combat it.

To ensure right precautionary measures and quick restoration, support and maintenance team at Perception System takes following steps:

• Determine the types of technologies used in emergencies, natural and human-oriented.
• Assure the regular updates of precautionary technologies, tools, and strategies.
• Subscribe to the different types of backup services with quick restoration capabilities.
• Assure regular backup of Magento source code, resources, and databases.
• The team frequently and occasionally tests the disaster management and recovery plans to fix your holiday sales issues on the Magento platform ensuring smooth experiences.

Search Engine Optimization for Products and Entire Magento Storefront

After all, SEO is a long-term gain for any website, but short-term SEO practices are existing in e-commerce niche. If you have solid support and strategies to leverage holiday season the most, you can win SEO battle easily.

The SEO support team at Perception System helps your permanent SEO team or provides complete services for short-term SEO to turn seasonal favors towards your Magento eCommerce store.

SEO team for seasonal services checks analytics tools to determine various SEO related trends and aspects of your Magento storefront. Based on findings, the team plans different SEO strategies for different seasons such as November for Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday holiday peaks. December mainly for Christmas and other relevant holidays in the USA and Canada.

Other seasonal SEO activities are:

• Thorough research on season-specific keywords and trends to target in campaigns.
• Start campaign early and keep seasonal content ready.
• Promoting content selectively based on the day/occasion such as Black Monday content are only useful on that day, not on the eve of Christmas.
• Use the latest content with updated statistics and trends.
• Gifts, particularly gift cards are highly popular, and optimization of gift pages returns high.
• Prepare for all rounded strategies including Meta Data optimization, link building, social media optimization, and inbound traffic for seasonal SEO.
• Optimize product pages by standard SEO practices such as image optimization, product description optimization, and integration of relevant products on the product pages.
• Prepare combinations of similar category products or season related products.
• Optimize for excellent UX, performance, and high conversion rate using the latest techniques and tweaks.

To Deal with Security Threats Posed by Cyber Criminals on the eve of Holiday Sales

We, ordinary people, have Christmas vacation, but cybercriminals like hackers, data thieves, attackers, and different kinds of malicious elements thriving on the web don’t have. Instead, they are the busiest folk even more than online merchants during the holiday seasons.

According to Threat Matrix, more than 20 million cyber-attacks take place in the UK. Similarly, 6.09 million Australians are hit by cyber criminals each year. Cybercriminals are always trying innovative techniques using the latest hacking technologies and unique techniques that we hardly can imagine.

However, Magento has inherent capabilities of dealing with security threats and team of Magento security experts at Perception System, San Jose leverage it completely to secure your store during the holiday season.

Moreover, the team of Magento support and maintenance practicing following things explicitly during the delivery of their services.

• They scan the entire Magento site for SQL injections, cross-site scripts, and other tons of vulnerability.
• Based on the scanning results, they search the appropriate security patches and fill up security voids.
• The assure use of HTTPS on the domain, the latest security technologies including SSL, antivirus, firewall, and 3rd party services.
• They keep data backup on multiple places with quick restoration capability.
• They insist Magento merchants to avoid keeping transactional and personal data of shoppers on the local or server of the site and integrate payment gateways, which lead them directly to the API of financial institutions.
• Apply the latest security patches against SQLi, XSS, and malware
• Installation and updating of security plugins available on Magento platform.

Conclusion:

Here, we have seen a couple of reasons for that a Magento holiday maintenance and support package is inevitable for the Magento merchants who want to hit their holiday sales target in 2018.

However, holiday support demands several customized treatments according to your business requirements. Therefore, the best way is to take consulting services offered by the Magento marketing team at Perception System, San Jose. It will enable you to choose the right package as well as hints for custom Magento support and maintenance.

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