# Can your online shop handle the summer sales? How to stop it going down with more visits

Can your online shop handle the summer sales? How to stop it going down with more visits The July sales are one of the most important dates of the year for many online shops. And also one of the moments when the most websites go down, precisely because traffic soars just when the server was not prepared to receive it. The problem nobody sees coming For the rest of the year your shop works fine. Pages load, orders come in, everything flows. But the sales arrive, you send the newsletter, post on social media, activate your discounts and suddenly… the website is slow, the cart gives an error or it simply goes down. It is not bad luck. It is that your hosting was sized for the normal traffic of any Tuesday in February, not for the peak of simultaneous visits that a well-executed sales campaign generates. What happens technically when an online shop goes down Every visit to your shop consumes server resources: memory, processor, database connections. Under normal conditions the server handles those requests without a problem. But when many visits arrive at once, those requests pile up, the server becomes saturated and starts responding slower and slower until it stops responding altogether. In an online shop this has a direct and immediate cost: lost sales, abandoned carts and customers who go and buy from the competition because your website would not load. Signs that your shop may not cope Your shop takes more than 3 seconds to load under normal low-traffic conditions. If it is already stretched with no visits, it will be much worse with the sales peak. You have had some outage or occasional slowness in recent months without knowing quite why. Your hosting plan is basic or shared and you do not remember reviewing it since you set up the shop. You do not have caching configured or you do not know whether you do. What can be done before the sales Review the hosting and scale up if needed A hosting plan that has become too small is the most common problem and the easiest to solve with time. Scaling up to a higher plan or to a server with more resources can be the difference between a successful campaign and an outage at the worst moment. Configure caching properly Well-configured caching drastically reduces the load on the server because it does not have to generate every page from scratch for every visit. It is one of the improvements with the best cost/benefit ratio in web performance. Optimise the campaign images The photos of products on offer, the sales banners, the newsletter images… If they are uploaded unoptimised they can add unnecessary megabytes that slow down every load. Compressing before uploading is a small step with a big impact. Run a load test before D-day Simulating a traffic peak before it happens for real makes it possible to detect where the bottleneck is with enough time to fix it. What we see every July at Bytechip Online shops come to us down in the middle of the sales, with the owner desperate because they have been unable to sell for hours and do not know what is happening. Most of those cases could have been avoided with a prior review of an hour or two. If you have a sales campaign planned and want to make sure your shop copes, we can carry out that review before it starts, not when it is already too late. ← Back to the blog