The world of the ecommere is full of narrow margins and high risk. Prioritisation means focussing on one thing means skipping or delaying something else. When speaking to ecommerce management teams a frequent topic of conversation is finding budget for site improvements. Everyone wants to have a reliable, fast website – but how can you justify the time and energy it takes to create one?

There are high expectations from users for council websites to be up and reliable. They are also required to adhere to guidelines set out in the Service Standard to make their website accessible and user friendly. Alongside these challenges, councils are often underfunded and understaffed which can make council web management teams stretched. Here are three key metrics that councils should be measuring to improve website reliability.

If the World Cup was decided on teams’ website performance, Serbia would be lifting the trophy for the 2022 tournament. That’s the findings of the Web Vitals Index – a league table powered by next-generation website monitoring specialist, RapidSpike.

We recently featured in Ecommerce Age. If you missed the write up, you can catch up in full, here… As ecommerce continues to outdo the high street, Black Friday sales are becoming as much of a tradition as Christmas dinners. But shoppers are very influenced by external factors, from the economy to website experiences. We outline the key ecommerce challenges this Black Friday…

While it makes for bleak reading, the frenzy of sales and online shopping activity surrounding Black Friday, means this pre-holiday season is a key period for cybercriminals. And each year we see an increase in cyberattacks during what should be a feel-good time. The picture is all-the-more worrying in 2022, as this Black Friday weekend (25th-28th November) falls on the same date as the USA vs England World Cup game – a highly- anticipated day of betting for bookmakers.

Last week, we were thrilled to launch a new website overview dashboard in RapidSpike: the Third Party Management Dashboard.

We’re excited to announce that we now offer Secure Variable Storage for synthetic user journey scripting! If you have sensitive data that you wish to use in journey scripts then you can now store them in your account’s own encrypted vault. This is useful for data such as email addresses, passwords, usernames and API keys.

We are always looking for ways to improve our products and processes at RapidSpike. We’ve recently completed an upgrade to our Google Lighthouse service software to Google’s latest version 9.6.7. This required us to almost entirely rearchitect how we run the tests, which allowed us to take advantage of the latest AWS technologies. This blog post explains what this change required.

Last night the Channel 4 website and app suffered an outage leaving football fans unable to stream the game. The highly-anticipated game between England vs Germany took place at Wembley Stadium on Monday, September 26. Channel 4 had the rights for this match and streaming was exclusively on their website and app. Kick off was at 7.45pm, with coverage from 7:00pm. The first Channel 4 website issues reported on Down Detector came in at 7:32pm and issues continued throughout the night.