5 Ways to Prepare & Optimize Your Website for the Holidays
The holidays aren’t over yet and it’s not too late to get your website in the mood for some holiday cheer. The holidays are a great time to freshen up your website for any newcomers and create a new fun look for your faithful and returning online visitors. The appearance of your website isn’t the only thing to worry about this holiday season, with the increase of traffic and online shopping, it’s important to optimize your website for the increase in traffic most businesses experience this time of year.
Decorate your website with some Christmas cheer
Optimize your site speed
This is one of the biggest ways you can optimize your website during the busy season. High site speed is an instant and easy way to lose your website visitors. Overall a good goal for most websites is to keep your average site speed load time at or under 3 seconds. This might sound easy but it’s harder than it seems. Utilize free resources such as Google Pagespeed Insights to see what improvements you can make to your website in order to keep pagespeed low in order to keep users on your site.
Keep or make your website as mobile friendly as possible
The holidays are a busy time for everyone which means that more and more people are utilizing mobile devices to order gifts and do all of their business. You have lots of people traveling to see family or spending the day out and about as they try to find their last-minute gifts. Don’t miss the opportunity for your website to be seen and to be seen well via a mobile device. Check your mobile usability and make sure that all of your pages are either mobile responsive or mobile friendly, both of which will help your customers browse your site whenever and wherever they are.
Emphasize your deals and discounts
With the holidays likely comes lots of deals and discounts, if your business functions in a retail capacity in any way you probably have thought about what ways you can increase your sales for the end of the year. Offering a holiday deal or discount is a great way to encourage sales to finish out the year – if your business has decided to implement some sort of discount or holiday special, be sure to feature those deals on your website. Put them on your homepage, create a pop-up announcement, and keep reminding your visitors of the deal they can take advantage of. Emphasize the deals for your consumers to see.
Ramp up website security
The holidays are a big time for hackers to take advantage of a poorly secured site, so don’t let your website be one of them. If your company has a network administrator or someone who handles all of your IT matters, make sure that you talk with them about what ways you are keeping your security on high alert this season. If your team is a little less education on the topics of website security, invest the time for your team to learn the signs and signals of any type of attack on your site as well as ways to protect yourself against them. Not only will the information be valuable this year, but also for years to come.
The holidays are a busy time for everyone, including businesses and it’s important for everyone to prepare your company and optimize your website for the increase in activity and traffic that undoubtedly comes with this time of year. Each website and business will be different, but we encourage you to stay on top of your game and ring in the New Year strong with new goals and a website your proud of.
Do you need help getting your website refreshed and renewed for the upcoming New Year? Sometimes a simple website redesign is exactly what businesses need to keep things fresh and updated. Maybe Marketing or SEO more of the areas you need some assistance with, contact us today – our team has a wide variety of options to help your business prepare for everything coming this year.
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