How to Prepare your Website for Holiday Traffic
As a website owner, your top priority is increasing holiday traffic and getting viable leads or conversions for your business. The holiday season presents an excellent opportunity to attract and retain customers on your e-commerce site. However, one of the greatest mistakes you could make is not preparing for the traffic. Getting ready for unforeseen holiday traffic surges will beat the agony of missing out on crucial holiday sales.
In this post, we have strategies you can use to prepare your website to handle a boost in holiday traffic. Plus, additional tips to attract seasonal buyers to your online store and gain some market share. Let us break it down!
Opt for a flexible hosting plan. Your web host performance has a direct impact on the traffic of your site. If your online store is growing and beginning to attract lots of traffic, you should upgrade the site resources to keep up with its performance. Our VPS hosting plans are a good choice for an e-commerce website going through rapid growth and expansion.
Test for functionality. Your website could have an updated design, high-quality product images, and well-written product descriptions. However, if your e-commerce site delivers a disappointing user experience, your holiday sales will plummet. Ensure available plugins, themes, CMS options are up to date, working perfectly, and scalable to handle a lot of visitors. Plus, make sure all the links work, test lead-generation and checkout forms, images are accurate and load correctly.
Speed up your Website. Your site speed not only impacts user experience but also affects SEO and conversion rates. Use these tips to speed up your e-commerce site;
- Switch to a robust hosting plan. A big part of increasing your website speed is upgrading to a hosting plan that offers you a stable and fast server speed to ensure your site loads fast and smoothly.
- Remove unnecessary plugins. Excess plugins will affect the functionality and lead to slow web pages. Uninstall plugins you no longer use so that your e-commerce site does not accumulate files or data that you do not need to keep your site running smoothly with fast loading times,
- Implement caching plugins. Caching cuts down the resources required to run down your site by reducing the number of requests and files that load directly from the server every time a user visits your online store.
- Reduce load times on your site by optimizing and resizing images or video files, which absorb a lot of bandwidth to make them load faster.
Related: How to Speed up your Website
Optimize for mobile conversions. Mobile optimization affects nearly every aspect of your business, from brand building, traffic generation, SEO, and user experience. A mobile-responsive website changes its elements, which improves speed and functionality. Plus, with most seasonal shoppers shopping using mobile devices, you do not want to lose sales to your competitors.
Related: How to make your Website Mobile-Friendly
Prepare for downtime. Website downtime is inevitable. When your website goes down, not only will you lose out on potential holiday sales and traffic, but it will also negatively impact your SEO. Preparing your site for unexpected downtime by having the proper tools in place will make sure you get your site back up and running as fast as possible. Fortunately, we have a crash plan checklist to ensure no permanent damage occurs.
Related: Crash Plan Checklist for your Website
An unexpected surge in traffic can slow your website down, affect your search result rankings, user experience and drive web users away. Preparing for holiday traffic will draw more users into your sales funnel and ensure that your site runs seamlessly during the holiday season.
