Every year on Thanksgiving Day, Americans loosen their belts to make way for the wealth of turkey, stuffing and gravy gracing their dining tables. And the following day, Black Friday (News - Alert), they instead loosen their wallets (and bank accounts) to prepare for the abundance of sales and deals greeting them online and in stores.

This year will be no different when the holiday rush kicks off on Black Friday, Nov. 25. In fact, last year, U.S. e-commerce sales totaled a whopping $142.5 billion on Black Friday alone.

While Americans are just beginning to prepare for their pending shopping frenzy, e-commerce sites must take cautionary steps to accommodate the lion’s share of online sales that take place during the holiday shopping season.

Luckily, load testing and performance-monitoring provider Apica has the following top 10 recommendations for readying your e-commerce site for what’s sure to be a never-ending rush of holiday shoppers this season.

1.       Put vanity aside: In order to minimize response times, Apica recommends limiting the number of high-resolution images and videos on your site. However, if you find yourself too attached to let them go, now is the time to invest in systems that can manage short response times as well as bulky content.

2.       Accelerate: Try using a CDN/Accelerator solution to speed up the delivery of rich content, including images and videos, to shoppers. This type of service won’t cost you an arm and a leg, but will help you avoid a lag in your website.

3.       Cache, cache, cache!: To help your customers avoid having to download page content over and over every time they visit the page, cache as much static content as you can in the browser. This is a more affordable method of accelerating Web traffic and achieving performance improvements.

4.       Look externally: Rarely optimized, external content that you have no control over should be evaluated.

5.       Test, monitor and optimize: To ensure the best customer experience, Apica recommends frequently testing, monitoring and analyzing your site. Load testing companies like Apica can perform these tasks by simulating peak loads and often offer complimentary surveillance services.

"For e-tailers, the online holiday shopping season is a 'can't miss' opportunity. Yet, many overlook testing for increased load and performance issues, as evidenced by Target (News - Alert) recently. E-retail competition is fierce; if a customer experiences problems on the site, the competition is a mere click away," said Sven Hammar, Web performance expert and CEO of Apica. "An online site with slow performance -- or even crashes -- is tantamount to slamming the door in a consumer's face, something that would never happen in a 'brick and mortar' situation.”

6.       Be user-friendly: When it comes to making a purchase, customers need clear and visible choices for the buying process. Make sure these choices are “above the fold,” or on the visible part of the site without having to scroll.

7.       Avoid complexities with temporary promotions: Use smaller, quick-loading landing pages for daily, weekly or monthly deals.

8.       Stay on top of testing: Designate an in-house team to perform testing and monitoring on your site, and do so during specific hours to lower variables.

9.       Use analytics tools: Pinpoint the top three to five business processes customers are conducting on your site and maximize them for peak performance.

As Dennis Drogseth (News - Alert), vice president at Enterprise Management Associates, suggests, "Any company seriously trying to sell online should be prepared to capture those 'breadcrumb indicators' of human experience across peak activity levels, as well as normal, day-to-day volumes."

10.   Over-prepare: At this point, it’s hard to predict your shopper turnout, so make sure your site can handle a large influx of customers without crashing. To do so, use load testing and external performance measurements of service quality to conduct a risk analysis.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin