Do you manage a website that experiences traffic spikes, whether occasional or frequent? If so, do you have a safety net in place to prevent user experience degradation and potential revenue loss?
How Virtual Waiting Rooms Optimize User Experience
When your website experiences a peak traffic event, an online queueing system can route a designated proportion of users to a Virtual Waiting Room. Those excess users are placed in a queue to wait for access. They are kept on hold in the Virtual Waiting Room while other users continue to effectively browse, engage and transact with your website. Rather than all users experiencing site delays and/or outages as a result of your servers slowing down or crashing, the users already on your site will continue to have a high quality experience and those kept waiting are reassured that they will in turn gain access to your site.
You know how many visitors your site can safely handle, so you determine the threshold over which excess users will be routed to the Virtual Waiting Room. You also have the option of customizing the overload page with branded content and the language of your choice to keep users engaged and show them their place in the virtual queue so that they know how many users are ahead of them. As soon as current users exit the website or complete their transaction, waiting room users will be sent on to the site to complete their transactions.
Use Cases for Virtual Waiting Rooms
Common use case scenarios include:
- Ticketing
- eCommerce
- Media
- Education (at peak times, such as enrollment)
- Public sector (for example, visa applications, tax filings, etc.)
If you need to guarantee 100% uptime during these types of peak events, the Virtual Waiting Room solution is an essential feature for your website.
Improve your Site’s Scalability
If you are looking for a more permanent way of increasing your maximum number of users, you might want to work with Section to improve your site’s underlying scalability. Section’s performance engineers can help you determine the optimum ways in which you can most effectively and efficiently serve the maximum number of users at any given time with the lowest possible hosting cost.
Combine the Virtual Waiting Room solution with other Section performance and scalability features, such as image and full page caching. By deploying Varnish Cache on your website, you can cache more content locally and reduce the amount of work your servers have to do. This way, the server will only receive requests when the cache needs updating. User responses are entirely handled by the cache, no matter the number, keeping the work required by your servers to a minimum and optimizing performance on your site.
Easy Set Up
Getting started with the Section Virtual Waiting Room is easy. No code changes or deployments to your infrastructure are required. Let us help you get started today.
