What primary strategy should a growing e-commerce company employ to handle increased website traffic during peak sales events?

For a growing e-commerce company, conducting rigorous capacity planning is essential to effectively manage increased website traffic during peak sales events. Capacity planning involves assessing and forecasting the demand for IT resources, such as bandwidth, storage, and server capacity. This proactive strategy ensures that the company can scale its infrastructure appropriately to handle spikes in traffic without experiencing performance degradation or downtime.

By conducting capacity planning, the company can identify critical traffic thresholds and prepare for high demand, ensuring that its systems are adequately provisioned to maintain a smooth customer experience. This preparation helps avoid potential issues like slow load times or outages, which can lead to lost sales and damage to the brand's reputation.

The other options do contribute to the overall functionality and effectiveness of the e-commerce platform, but they do not directly address the primary concern of managing increased website traffic. For instance, increasing staffing for technical support may help manage issues as they arise but does not prevent them. Reducing website functionalities might alleviate some server load, but at the cost of user experience and reduced sales conversions. Investing in social media promotion is beneficial for driving traffic but does not ensure that the infrastructure can handle that increased traffic effectively. Therefore, rigorous capacity planning stands out as the most strategic and comprehensive solution for handling peak traffic events.