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Preparing travel platforms for peak traffic

Tips for ensuring a profitable peak booking season

https://www.scivisum.co.uk




If you want to be in pole position for the January peak, it’s crucial to prepare your site for the onslaught. It’s a competitive sector with low levels of customer loyalty – all of which means that the smallest

performance issue could negatively impact conversions. Given the relatively high-value of the transaction, and the importance

of making the right choice, customers invest time and energy into research, returning to the same site many times before purchasing.

So it’s essential that you do all you can to ensure that poor web performance doesn’t lead to high abandonment rates. Load testing

is essential, as is the 24/7 provision of performance monitoring – including mobile journeys – but with complex provision and the

heavy use of external third-party systems, what else can you do to prepare for peak success?

Preparing for peak success




More than three-quarters of holidaymakers now book their holiday online, with this figure rising among the 45-54-year-old age group. Interestingly, most holidaymakers still prefer to book using a PC,

most likely because research shows that the majority find the mobile booking experience more difficult.

According to research by Thomas Cook, online shoppers are likely to make multiple visits – an average of 11 – before they commit to a booking. Which means that your website must deliver a smooth,

responsive experience on each occasion (and across multiple devices) to avoid spooking your prospect before they hit the buy button.

Introduction

In our experience with travel clients, the sector has a unique combination of online performance challenges making it particularly

difficult to test and manage performance at peak:

A unique set of performance challenges

1. Managing highly complex transactions and wide ranging content2. Being heavily dependent on multiple APIs and third party content3. Delivering smooth performance over multiple visits before customers

commit to buy4. Maintaining fast and error free pages despite inherent site richness




With holidaymakers investing more time and energy into researching before buying – naturally enough, given the

relatively high-value nature of the transaction, compared to other online purchases – there’s much greater potential for

cart abandonment. Which is why it’s more important for online travel providers to ensure that poor web performance doesn’t

exacerbate abandonment rates.

The number one performance problem for potential customers is slow and error prone page loading. If your site isn’t responsive

enough, your eager holidaymaker will simply abandon their journey and hotfoot it to a site that offers a better experience.

Load testing is essential, as is the 24/7 provision of performance monitoring – including mobile journeys – but with complex

provision and the heavy use of external third-party systems, how can you plan for success at peak?

Read our eight tips for a guide to peak preparation.

Getting your website up to speed




Don’t let your site's mobile experience damage conversions

1

The average time a user

will wait for a page to load is

between 0.5 and 2 seconds

People will not return to

a website that took more than

4 seconds to load

Whether you have made your site mobile-friendly via a responsive or PWA approach or you’re using a third-party to run a parallel mobile site for you, mobile

performance is key.

Whilst mobile is not yet the preferred device for booking it's still a popular choice for browsing and researching holidays and Google favours mobile friendly sites in its search results - so

it’s key to optimise your site for mobile browsing.

Without 24/7 metrics on those vital mobile journeys, you may be blind as to what

your visitors experience and why they may abandon their journey on your site.




Make time for testing

2

The single most effective thing you can do is to schedule ample time for realistic performance testing.

We recommend you plan to test at least two months ahead of time so you’ll have the opportunity to fix any outstanding

issues. When your code is locked down, test key journeys again a few weeks ahead of your anticipated peak to make

sure all is running smoothly in a live environment.

And, when your performance testing is complete, consider real browser monitoring to keep on top of performance

and bring you closer to the end user’s real experience in the run up to, and during, peak. Especially important for mobile

browsers where page-load times are so critical.




Keep performance testing real

3

Are your load testing tools measuring realistic site behaviour? To minimise risk you should only base decisions on performance testing

that’s intelligent enough to return accurate data and measure realistic user behaviour. Anything less and you could be making a big mistake

by relying on misleading data. Traditional load tests often rely on ‘snapshot’ metrics: calculating concurrent users, for instance. The

problem with this kind of data is that it doesn’t take account of users’ actual on-site activity – whether they’re browsing, buying or have

wandered off to put the kettle on.

Load testing should replicate intelligent journeys based on the real behaviour of visitors to your site and making decisions on the fly like

real users.

Our load test engineers create a traffic profile from your own analytics that reflects genuine user behaviour, incorporating multi-step journeys and drop-off ratios. It’s a uniquely realistic process that enables you to hone in on the genuine performance issues that impact your customers.

Not only will you be able to see the problems – such as potential bottlenecks – but you’ll also have the data you need to put them right.




Keep it simple

4

With vast inventories and multiple content providers, travel operators face additional pressures during peak buying times. Consider simplifying your site as much as possible by stripping

out any non-essential features during your busiest sales period.

If you focus on delivering core functionality, you’ll be more likely to deliver better speeds, stock control and customer experience at busy times. This could mean removing a less

popular holiday category for ecample just for the duration of the peak period.

You probably offer customers the ability to use detailed searches – and to return close matches in the event of non-availability – but these complex search parameters may clog up the system when it’s under pressure. It may be sensible to limit searches to specific deals so you can accommodate more

customers with less load. Make sure you test your site after any changes.




Size and speed matters

5

Website visitors are impatient and will not wait for slow searches, pages that stall or large images that delay a page load.

In our experience common culprits that are often overlooked include badly compressed video and un-optimised images.

It’s not uncommon for extra images to be added over a crucial peak period – often bloated pictures that contribute to traffic problems. It’s worth checking that you are not double-serving images, which sometimes happens where two files are served

with each picture: a thumbnail and a hi-res version that may have been displayed on a previous version of the site and still remains,

thanks to some residual HTML.

It's not all about images check javascript and CSS is minified and on the server side it's important to check that infrastructure is

configured correctly.




Reduce third-party complications

6

The sheer number third-party providers can make it tough to carry out effective load testing and manage peak traffic.

Consider disabling any unnecessary third party scripts or tags – if third parties go down, they might take your site with them. Third-

party bulk in web pages is a prime cause of slow-to-load pages. Often marketing teams request extra tags and third-party features

be added, completely unaware of the impact they are having on page speed.




Don’t let marketing success cause your users to wait

7

Are you confident that the very success of your email campaigns is not causing an annoyingly slow buying process

for your customers? Make sure marketing and business teams are involved in the peak preparation process and understand the implications of staggering email campaigns and ensuring deals and promotions are integrated into the website in time

for code freeze.

Employing a service to monitor user journeys can provide essential insight in how to improve customer retention.




Check that website partners are not hurting your sales

8

The experience your site visitors have is not dependent only on how well your own team have built your site but also on the

performance of multiple APIs and external third parties.

The use of partner plug-ins and third-party integrations to offer additional services such as car hire, resort/hotel reviews, weather forecasts, video feeds and content marketing feeds is increasingly vital to give a rich experience to your customers.

However, all this functionality can hurt performance, so thorough load testing including API testing is recommended to make sure

it is fit for purpose and not a barrier to booking at the crunch point, when your traffic peaks are high. You may also find it

beneficial to run monitoring journeys on critical APIs so you're aware of problems before they impact customers.




How Neilson ensures optimum webste performance at peak

following replatform

Read case study

Thanks to realistic load testing and some collaborative planning with

the testing and monitoring experts at SciVisum, tour operator Neilson

was able to deliver a hassle-free online experience throughout a

recent replatform.

“We particularly like the

project management and

proactive support provided

by SciVisum. Having a fully

managed service enabled

us to focus on completing

site development while

SciVisum took care of the

load testing.”

Richard Scales, Neilson’s Delivery Manager


https://www.scivisum.co.uk/case-studies/neilson-ensures-optimum-website-performance-at-peak-following-re-platform-scivisum-load-testing/



Peace of mind with realistic load testing

Find out high touch, intelligent web, mobile and app monitoring services provide

accurate visibity of performance and swift resolution of performance issues.

Read more

Maximise performance with intelligent monitoring

Find out how a fully managed, realistic load testing service precisely tailored to your business will help you build better

websites, faster.

Read more

If you would like to schedule a free consultation regarding your website performance, learn more about our performance testing services or arrange a free

trial then please contact us.

scivisum.co.uk | +44 (0)1227 768276

About SciVisumMeasuring realistic user experience for peak digital performance

SciVisum’s cloud-based website performance monitoring and load testing services provide unparalleled insight into your customers’ digital experience by behaving exactly as end users would. A unique combination of realism – delivered by an intelligent test engine, and expert human insight provides the most accurate,

actionable data enabling you to take control of today’s performance challenges.

With over ten years experience, SciVisum has helped leading UK travel brands such as Neilson, Thomas Cook and Kuoni optimise user experience and deliver peak

performance.


https://www.scivisum.co.uk/services/website-load-testing

https://www.scivisum.co.uk/services/website-performance-monitoring

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Preparing travel - SciVisum...‘snapshot’ metrics: calculating concurrent users, for instance. The problem with this kind of data is that it doesn’t take account of users’ actual

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