Is your website throwing 502 errors? You’re not alone.
Plenty of site owners encounter this error page from time to time. It’s typically a problem related to an overwhelmed server that’s getting too many simultaneous requests. Fortunately, there are some things you can do about it.
Error 502s can present in a lot of different ways, and you can, in fact, code how these pages will be displayed. Here are just a few examples of what a 502 error page might say:
502 Bad Gateway
Error 502: Bad Gateway
HTTP 502
Temporary Error (502)
502 Service Temporarily Overloaded
Error 502
You get the idea.
What Causes An Error 502 Bad Gateway?
There are several HTTP status codes that a browser can display as a way to tell you that something has gone wrong, and what the error correlates to.
In the case of an error 502 bad gateway, this error code typically indicates that the server was not able to fulfill the request and load the page for the user.
There are a few different things that can cause an error 502 page to show up for a user, but most often, they’re typically related to two things: server capacity, and concurrent users, i.e. how much traffic the server your site is hosted on can handle, and how many users are making requests on your website.
The Cost of a 502 Error for An Ecommerce Site
The typical internet user navigates away from a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. When your site gives them a 502 error message, how many users do you think will stick around and refresh the page? And once they leave, how many users will come back an hour or a day later?
Slow site speed coupled with 502 errors can make a dent in your conversion rate, ultimately costing you revenue and site profitability.
How to Fix a 502 Error
On the site owner side, a 502 error usually means there aren’t enough resources available to serve your webpage to all of your users. What’s likely the issue is that your host’s server is getting more traffic than it can handle. To fix this, you either need to upgrade your plan, or switch to a host with auto scaling (like us), so that when your site does get a traffic spike, users aren’t getting 502 errors.
When you switch over to Hostdedi, you’ll get a free site migration, a two-week free trial, and up to 24 hours of free auto scaling included with your plan – with no need to upgrade until you’re actually ready.
This means that the next time you do get a traffic spike, our servers will automatically compensate and deploy additional PHP workers, not only managing the extra traffic and preventing 502 errors, but keeping your website fast and high-performance.
Destiny Hagest provides value-aligned copy and content that use marketing as a force for good. She’s a writer. She’s a consultant. But she’s also a consumer, and a person living on this planet. Destiny wants to see great brands achieve more market share. She wants to see you win.
If you’ve ever had to work with servers, you’re probably familiar with UTC time, also known as Coordinated Universal Time. UTC time is the standardized time used by most computers and servers around the world.
On some level, any time your server does anything at a specific time or on a schedule, you’re using UTC time. Here’s a few examples:
Scheduling a sale
Scheduling a blog post
Charging someone’s monthly subscription order
Sending out follow up emails
UTC Offset
UTC is universal. For example, if my New York, USA server and my server in Sydney, Australia should have the exact same UTC time. This works well for computers while humans use the local time for keeping time.
To make times a little easier to work with servers, use an offset.
New York uses UTC-4h or UTC-5h when not in daylight savings time.
Sydney uses UTC+10h and UTC+11h when in daylight savings.
These offsets will affect all of your scheduled actions. If you have a blog post scheduled for 8am the server will use the offset to determine when the post should publish.
Application Offset
In addition to a UTC offset for your server time, there are also application offsets. Here’s the timezone settings in WordPress which can be found under Settings -> General:
Whatever application you use (WordPress, Magento, etc.), you’ll likely have similar timezone settings.
These applications will often guess or set a default location. Sometimes this is based on your server location. For example, if my store is in Denver (which is mountain time) and my server is in New York (eastern time) my application will likely assume I want to use eastern time.
And if I want to close an application or end a sale at midnight it might actually end at 10pm mountain time and midnight eastern time. You’ll always want to check your applications local time to make sure it’s correct.
Why Are My Scheduled Actions Firing At the Wrong Time?
Generally speaking, you don’t have to know what UTC time is. But when you run into an application not working correctly, you’ll have to dig in and see where a time is set incorrectly.
First, you’ll want to check your application (WordPress, Magento, etc.) and make sure those settings are correct.
If your application settings are correct, then you’ll want to make sure your server has it’s offset set correctly.
If you’re using Managed WordPress, Managed WooCommerce, or Magento Cloud you can reach out to support for help. We’ll make sure your UTC time is set correctly, check your application settings, and point you in the right direction if it’s a 3rd party app.
Patrick Rauland is obsessed with ecommerce. He’s built ecommerce websites for clients, worked for WooCommerce doing support, development, product management, and helped plan their yearly conference (WooConf).
5 things you need to start thinking about now, so you can implement before holiday shopping starts this fall.
In February of 2019 I launched my first ever crowdfunding campaign where I was able to raise enough capital to manufacture goods in China and ship them to the US to start my board game company.
While this took a lot of planning to pull off – it actually made the launch of my first game incredibly easy. So easy, I thought I was forgetting something the entire time but it turned out I could actually just relax and let my marketing automations do the work for me.
Today I want to share how you can use the same strategies to automate your sales and marketing for the Black Friday/Holiday shopping weekend and make money without stressing yourself out.
Design Landing Pages
First things first: design any landing pages. Landing pages are a way to highlight products & content specific to a campaign, sale, or interest. Not all stores need landing pages but if you have certain products heavily discounted it’s worth putting them all on one page so visitors can view the best deals, get interested in your store, and then start adding things to their cart.
Unless you only have one or two key products, landing pages are one of the best places to send your fans. And if you plan on doing any advertising or newsletter blasts (hint – you should be thinking about both of these) then a landing page is one of the best places to send them. And it’s why you should start with this a month or so before the sale.
Create Tracking Links
I’m a big fan of tracking & measuring everything possible so that I can figure out what worked and in future years double down on the strategies that made me money and ignore the ones that didn’t work. And since each industry is so different in ecommerce what makes perfect sense for one industry may not work at all in another so you will have to try various strategies and learn and improve each year.
One of the ways to monitor this is with UTM parameters. You can create UTM parameters using a generator for any campaign you’re running and in tracking software like Google Analytics you can see where people are coming from.
As an example I created custom links for all of the influencers who made videos about my products. And while many of them sent over dozens of people who ended up purchasing the product one of the influencers only had one confirmed sale.
In future years I wouldn’t use this influencer again. Since my product is only $15 getting one sale isn’t worth all the admin time spent emailing back and forth and sending them a demo product.
Here’s a few custom links you could create for your site:
Links from Twitter
Links from Facebook
Links from your newsletter
Links from influencers
Links from forums / discussion groups
Links from your email signature
Etc.
Schedule Sale Prices
Once you have all of your landing pages & links set up it is time to schedule the sale prices. Whether you use WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, or another online store just about all of them let you schedule both the start & end of sale prices.
Here’s what it looks like in WooCommerce.
If you’re doing a storewide discount, discount an entire category, or other more complicated setups, this isn’t typically included in the core software but there’s almost always apps, extensions, and modules that let you do this.
Plan Your Ad Strategy
Every retailer knows that Black Friday is one of the biggest sales opportunities of the year and many retailers go all out with advertising right before Black Friday. That means ad prices soar right before Black Friday so you’ll quickly find your self spending more than you make if you don’t plan in advance.
One of my favorite strategies is to come up with new ad concepts in spring, A/B test them throughout the summer, and wind them down in the fall. When Black Friday comes around you can retarget your existing audience which is far cheaper than targeting new people who are probably overwhelmed by the amount of ads and will be unlikely to trust a new company.
If you haven’t started ads and you’re reading this today, there’s still plenty of time. Get some ads out there next week and start building your audience so you can retarget them down the line.
Schedule Email Blasts
You have landing pages, tracking links, and all of your products are discounted. Now comes arguably the most important piece. Letting people know!
And yes, you can and should announce things on social media & on your website but today we’re going to talk about your #1 asset and that’s your email list.
These are easy to schedule in any email marketing tool. And what you want to do is setup a bunch of emails and you can send them to segments of your email list based on how active & how much they spend on your store.
Here’s what’s coming on Black Friday (7 days ahead)
Here’s what’s coming tomorrow (1 day ahead) – For people who regularly open your emails
Black Friday is here (Black Friday)
Don’t Forget Black Friday (Saturday) – For people who didn’t open yesterdays email
Don’t Miss the Best Sale of the Year – For people who have made multiple purchases
And you can create even more than this and if you have a large list with even more data you can continue segmenting your list and writing emails for those segments.
Preparation is Key
At the end of the day it’s all about coming up with a plan. Almost all of the tools out there have scheduling functionality so once you make a plan, write a few emails or lines of ad copy go ahead and get it scheduled.
I planned my crowdfunding campaign for 6 months and raised $10,000 off a non-existent product. With a few months to go you have plenty of time to build your audience, come up with attractive deals, and let your audience know about those deals.
Good luck!
Patrick Rauland is obsessed with ecommerce. He’s built ecommerce websites for clients, worked for WooCommerce doing support, development, product management, and helped plan their yearly conference (WooConf).
