During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other winter holidays, many Shopify stores are getting ready to handle the increase in traffic and sales. Shopify themselves are probably tuning up their code and servers to make sure all of their stores perform well.
Even with all of that tuning, many Shopify stores are going to crash and be crushed underneath the holiday's traffic. Why?
Shopify Apps. Specifically, slow Shopify apps.
You'd like your store to stay online and functional throughout the holiday season. But one poorly managed Shopify app that you have installed could bring everything down.
If you're running any of my Shopify apps, I want you to feel confident that they won't be slowing your store down this season.
This article outlines how I've engineered my Shopify apps to handle the holiday season (and any other busy time throughout the year).
High-performance servers
To start with, all of my apps are hosted on a scalable, cloud-based platform called Heroku. Owned by Salesforce and built on top of Amazon's Cloud, Heroku has serious performance capability that lets me fine tune all of my apps performance to handle any expected and unexpected demand.
That means within a few minutes of a problem, my apps can be scaled up to handle an increased level of traffic.
There is a risk of an Amazon outage affecting Heroku but an Amazon outage tends to break the entire Internet, Shopify-included, so that's a small risk that affects everyone.
Repeat Customer Insights performance impact
Repeat Customer Insights doesn't touch or affect your storefront. The app runs in the background and talks to Shopify's API to get the order data. As long as Shopify is up and running, everything should be good.
There might be delay in getting new data into the reports if Shopify is having problems or during sales high volume. There might also be delays in report updates as the app's analyses engines are processing all of the new data. Whatever the cause, given time those should work themselves out as the data analysis catches up.
Since the reports are for you only, your customers won't notice any difference or slowdowns.
The database also had a large upgrade earlier in the year so there's a lot of extra capacity still available.
Designed for performance
All of the apps were designed specifically to minimize the impact on your storefront.
There still might be unexpected issues that crop up with my apps during busy seasons, but none of them should crash your store.
If you do have any issues, questions, or even if you suspect something isn't quite right, feel free to contact me.