Overcome the coronavirus with crisis management eBook

The first step in crisis management is to have the product catalog adjusted for the demands during the crisis. The following are useful tips for managing the product catalog.

In the context of a global pandemic, it's of high importance to inform customers that you are taking all necessary measures to ensure the safety of the supply chain. All stakeholders have varying degrees of fear about the pandemic. So, you have to deliberately showcase your proactive measures and how you have modified your business operations for ensuring safety.

Safety information should be made available as a pop-up message as soon as customers visit your store. A dedicated page explaining the safety measures you have taken as part of the social responsibility is better.

Ecommerce stores can witness surges in the pandemic as customers would like to stock up as quickly as possible. It’s necessary to be prepared to avoid downtime during increased website traffic.

It's a good practice to have limitations on the number and complexity of heavy database requests your site might receive. This not only avoids downtime but also helps maintain a decent performance which is acceptable by the majority of the customers. It's better to use CDN (content delivery network) to load the static pages and handle dynamic pages. Images and other media like video plugins can affect the page loading time. It's advisable to compress images before uploading the page. High-resolution images take longer time to load, which can upset the customer.

Prioritization of UX processes consists of separating the mission-critical processes from those that aren't. When websites have surged in the number of visitors, it's recommended to remove large GIF files.

High-resolution images, and optimize the JS execution and CSS files for improving the loading time.

Here are the tips for tackling not just surges in website traffic but also for optimizing pages for best performance. Have a performance budget like a specific page size wherein, any addition of a new element has to be decided based on the budget criteria you have already. Any new element exceeding this budget has to be either optimized or replaced with a feature or dropped altogether. Images, if not handled properly, can cause havoc on responsive websites. Use PHP scripts that can automatically help resize, cache, and generate an optimized image for quick loading. When the number of images per page is more, it's better to go for the 'lazy load' technique.