9 Helpful Tips To Make Your Website Ready For The Holiday Traffic

The holidays are the perfect season to boost your revenue. Do you know that almost half of an average retailer’s sales happen in November and December?

But is your website ready to handle the extra load of holiday shopping traffic? Well, now is the time to ensure everything is in place to maximize your revenue in this festive season.

Speed up your website

According to a study, even a one-second delay in your website can result to at least seven percent reduction on your total conversions. In another mobile study by Google, at least 53 percent of mobile visits are abandoned if a site’s page took more than three seconds to load.

So if you want to improve user experience in your site, increase your site speed, especially during the holiday season. You can test your site by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, as it will give you valuable insight on how to solve your problem. More often than not, an influx of holiday shoppers will hardly waste any time for your website to load.

Prioritize your website’s security

One major concern of mobile shoppers these days are their safety. So before the holidays arrive, and your online store experiences surges of traffic, check your site and do your part to avoid a data breach. One way to prevent this is not keeping your customer’s payment information, because once it falls into the wrong hands, you might pay ten thousands of dollars because of fees and fines.

Keep your e-commerce platform secure by making sure it is up to date. Also, regularly scan your site for Cross-site Scripting, SQL Injection, and other vulnerabilities. Lastly, keep your server safe by avoiding shared hosting sites. In a shared environment, it’s relatively easier for others to exploit your site, so choose dedicated hosting instead.

Optimize your website for mobile buyers

Mobile technology has completely taken over a considerable chunk of our everyday lives. That’s why having a mobile-friendly site is critical, these days. While having an app is essential, it’s not the only feature of mobile-readiness. You need to have a website that’s compatible with all mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, or else you’ll be alienating your target audience. You’ll be losing out a substantial
portion of your company’s revenue as well.

Observe the “8 Second Rule”

8-Second-Rule

In its most basic form, the 8-second rule is the amount of time that you convince a typical website visitor to stay on your site. Although this varies depending on the circumstance (this doesn’t apply to return customers or the people searching for you online.)

The 8 Second Rule is all about giving a strong impression to your viewers, most especially to people who are visiting your site for the very first time. Your primary goal is to engage and convince them to make a purchase. One fantastic way to do this is by integrating festive headers that are bound to capture your viewer’s attention.

Optimize the checkout process

Do you know that 76% of customers abandon their cart because of a confusing and overly exhausting checkout process? As much as you can, make the entire checkout process short and sweet. Ensure that the whole buying process is working flawlessly and it should be relatively easy to understand to an average customer. Otherwise, people will be turned off even before they make a purchase and will likely move on with your competitors.

Stock your inventory

Stocking-Your-Inventory

Having a solid inventory management strategy is crucial to have all year long, most especially during the peak season. Compare the last year’s trends, and come up with a plan of how you can make better sales this year.

That’s where the convenience of dropshipping comes in. That way, you don’t have to worry about your shipping or inventory. You can use that valuable time to focus on other essential things in your business such as crafting an effective strategy to make more sales.

Promote on social media platforms

There’s no doubt about it ‒ social media is a powerful tool to connect, engage, and sell with potential customers during the holidays. You can utilize it by sharing and posting pictures and other media of the latest offers, sales, discounts, product information and more. This guide will teach you how to build a robust social media strategy and digital marketing strategy that will make more leads, conversions, and eventually, sales.

Provide great customer service support

Customer-Service-Support

You want to give your customers the best holiday shopping experience as possible. So, it’s incredibly vital for you to know how to manage situations, especially in one of the busiest and stressful time of the year.

To begin with, hire the right people. Hire individuals who have the personality to deal even the most stressful customer situations. Staff properly ‒ you must have the right number of staff to meet the demand.

To become genuinely customer-focused, don’t take it personally if customers will take it out on your employees or your business. Just do your best to deliver the most stress-free and frictionless experience to your customers as much as you can.

Always use high-quality photos

The presentation is a deciding factor whether potential customers will buy your product or not. That’s why having high-quality photos that will present your product pages and ads is essential. It’s true ‒ high-quality images are bound to make more sales than low-quality ones.

Not only it gives customers a closer look at your product, but it also shows them the quality, helping build their trust and confidence in your products. If you want to create high-quality photography, follow this product photography guide.

In Summary

These days, shopping has never been convenient. Shoppers shop more, as they can do it even at the tip of their fingertips through their mobile phones. That’s why the typical website that you use all year round won’t nearly do the trick. You need to have it optimized at this time of the year so that you can give your customers a little bit of holiday cheer.

Author: Harshal Shah

Harshal Shah is CEO & Founder of Xhtmljunkies, Located in Gujarat, India, XHTML Junkies is one of the best companies that offer unique eCommerce solutions by the virtue of its dedicated professionals. Our professionals are extremely proficient in offering development services pertaining to eCommerce. You can find Harshal on Google+ and Twitter.