Prestashop Day Italy 2018 – How to grow an e-commerce

This week we decided to show you the speech I gave during Prestashop Day 2018 which took place in Milan last September 27th.

https://youtu.be/-7Qg3mbk_YA

The 3 fundamental concepts addressed in the presentation are:

Speed How long does it take for your e-commerce to open? How long does it take for your website pages to respond?

In addition to following some of the best practices listed in our article "How to improve the performance of a website", in order to improve the response times of a website it is important to be able to measure them, precisely to know our starting point.

This is why at Host we have developed SPEED, which we have already talked about extensively in previous episodes of our Vlog:

How to Improve the Speed of a Website – SPEED

How to measure the speed of a website and share the results – SPEED

Security Security is expressed in various ways. The first of all concerns data persistence, that is: where are my data kept? For website owners it is essential to know where the data resides and above all whether it is safe.

This is why our infrastructure has been designed to be redundant on 3 different data centers located in Italy, in which our customers' data is replicated to also respond to any natural disasters!

Another fundamental aspect of security concerns data backup, i.e. a faithful copy of all your data in production. Being able to recover errors that lead to the deletion of data in production is absolutely vital for those who manage an e-commerce. The question is: when restoring a backup, how much data (in terms of time) are you willing to lose? Translated it becomes: how many orders from your e-commerce are you willing to lose?

This is why it is important to know how often data is backed up and how often restore tests are performed on backup data.

Finally, last but not least, the aspect of being "online, always". Your online shop must truly always be open and always visible, to avoid losing customers and orders. Being able to measure uptime, or the percentage of visibility of your website, is always very important for the concept of "if you can't measure it you can't improve it" (W.T. Kelvin).

Success In this part we talk about success management, that is, how to best deal with traffic peaks in order to transform them into an increase in orders and prevent your site from not best supporting the increase in visits. During traffic peaks, which can be brought about by marketing campaigns, promotions, particular periods of the year (Sales, Black Friday, Christmas...) it is important that the site operates at its best performance.

Usually when these traffic peaks occur, you are offered to change service and move to a Dedicated Server. Well, this is absolutely NOT the best solution for your e-commerce. Why? The Dedicated Server is a single physical machine and, if it fails, there is still only one physical machine left. The Dedicated Server is not managed, you will have to hire a systems engineer or someone to update and manage it. The cost of a Dedicated Server is therefore made up not only of the physical machine itself, but also of all the necessary maintenance that you will have to deal with.

This is why at HOST we have decided to offer a different solution for managing your success and traffic peaks: scalable, reliable, secure, fast and absolutely managed hosting profiles by us!

Furthermore, just for Blackfriday 2018, we decided to create a proactive monitoring program for all our e-commerce customers, SCALE. This is a process that analyzes traffic and visits to websites and, as soon as it detects traffic peaks, sends a notification to one of our operators who, in real time, checks the vital parameters of the site and increases the resources necessary to guarantee the success of your project.