7 Ways to Get Your Website Ready for the Holidays, Part 2

We previously shared Part 1 of the this post with some great tips on how to use your website to capitalize of the biggest shopping period each year.

While those tips are most suited specifically to the holidays, the tips below focus on areas of your site that bring far more benefits than just during the holiday season. They can be done at any time, but are perfect to implement now to prepare for holiday traffic and start the new year off with a bang.

Let’s dig into Part 2!

4. Prep your website for the extra traffic

If you’re planning to launch a big holiday promotion or announce some particularly juicy news, there is a chance that your website could crash if too many people try to access it at once.

You need to find out how much bandwidth is provided in your {website hosting} package, and what provisions your host provides for getting your site back up and running as quickly as possible in case of a crash.

If you’re not ready to upgrade your hosting package just yet, one free/low cost alternative is getting a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which helps to distribute the traffic coming to your website to ease the load. You can check out CloudFlare, which offers a free package and is easy to implement with WordPress sites.

5. Ease the minds of your security-conscious customers

With the prevalence of hacking and identity theft, many people are afraid to use their credit cards online. As a result, if you’re not proving that your site is secure, you might be losing out on a sale.

The tech-savvy security-conscious consumer will look for a couple signals to determine whether your website is safe. The first sign is that the URL for checkout pages (at least) start with https:// instead of the standard http://. This means that these pages are SSL-encrypted, which means all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private.

The second signal of security is an SSL-certification symbol in the footer of the website, like we’ve done below with the GeoTrust button on the SINGER website. Clicking on the symbol will take you to a page which states:

“One or more sub-domains within singer.com.jm can use GeoTrust services to protect your credit card and other confidential information. Information exchanged with any address beginning with https is encrypted using SSL before transmission.”

6. Start building that mailing list

When it comes to marketing your products and services in the digital age, your mailing list trumps everything else, even social media.

Why? Because people use email for everything – business, personal, shopping, etc. – and it’s much easier to get their attention in their inbox than it is on a social network, where you’re competing for attention with hundreds of other tweets and posts.

Therefore, companies should be giving high priority to collecting email addresses and building their email marketing database, even if they’re not ready to use it just yet.

So include a prominent opt-in form in your header or footer, and if you have a blog, include it at the end of each post as well. You could also consider pop-up forms, but be careful how you use them.

7. Fix all those issues you’ve been putting off

That one button that doesn’t work, the pages that need a bit of editing, the images that disappear when someone browses your site on mobile…

All those issues that you’ve noticed throughout the year and plan to ‘get around to fixing’ some time, that time is now.

Set apart some time to go through your website and make a list of all the little quirks that bother you. Or better yet, have a few clients, friends or colleagues to do it for you, so you don’t miss anything.

If these are changes you can make on your own, do it. Otherwise, call up your trusty website experts (cough, cough) and have them make the changes so you have a perfectly functioning website come January.

That’s it from us! Do you have any more tips on how businesses can spruce up their website for the holidays? Do you plan to implement any of these on your own site? Tell us in the comments below, or drop us a tweet @thinkchrysalis.