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A 3-Minute Guide to Optimizing Your Online Store for the Holiday Season



With the most popular shopping weekend of the year only a couple of months away, businesses are getting prepared to make the most out of the season. Unquestionably, there’re lots of tasks that every business owner needs to take care of – from creating holiday deals and planning new marketing campaigns to stocking up inventory, optimizing the business website, and much more.


While the COVID-19 restrictions have been eased to a great extent, it can be easily assumed that the key focus will be on online shopping this year. It means as a business owner, you’ve to prepare your website for the holiday season, whether you own an e-commerce store or run a brick-and-mortar store with a digital presence.


Let’s see some effective strategies to optimize your website to provide online shoppers with the best experience.


Test Your Site for Optimal Performance


During the holiday season, almost every e-commerce website experiences a huge spike in web traffic. Therefore, it’s a must to make your business site prepared for handling too many visitors simultaneously.


First of all, ensure that your web hosting package is good enough to handle increased traffic. If required, choose a better package with a better bandwidth. If you feel the present provider is lacking, it’s better to migrate the site to another web host. You can also use a CDN (content delivery network) to speed up page loading.


Optimize the Site for Mobile Users


With the quickly growing number of mobile users, it has become imperative for business owners to have a mobile-friendly website. As a huge number of people use mobile devices to browse online stores during the holiday season, overlooking this aspect will only lead to losing a significant number of potential customers.


Make sure that your site is using a mobile-responsive theme. You’ll also need to focus on the site’s design and font sizes to facilitate simple navigation and better readability.


Create Holiday-Focused Pages


Holiday-focused pages make it easier for shoppers to quickly find gift packages, deals, and discounts. In the product descriptions, include relevant keywords to increase the site’s visibility in online search results.


It’s also important to feature holiday offers prominently on the home page so that shoppers don’t need to search for them. Placing interactive web banners at the top of the home page effectively highlights deals and discounts.


Focus On Customer Reviews


If you haven’t enabled customer reviews on your business website, do it today. Customer reviews help you gain valuable insights into your brand’s products and help to turn prospects into customers.


If the site is equipped with the required technical functionality, enable customer reviews with images. Many customers prefer to share images along with their reviews, which essentially bolsters marketing efforts. If certain products regularly trigger negative reviews, it’s wise to remove them from the site or make necessary improvements.


Strengthen the Site’s Security


During the holidays, hackers also ramp up their activities along with online shoppers. Therefore, it’s strongly advised to bolster the site’s security to prevent any kind of cyber attack.


For example, DDoS or distributed denial of service attacks is fairly common with e-commerce websites. If required, invest in advanced security solutions to identify such attacks immediately and mitigate them appropriately.


Parting Thoughts


While the above ones are the key elements of preparing your business website for the holiday season, many more things can be done to increase conversion rates. Additionally, performing most of these tasks effectively requires robust technical expertise. Therefore, you should partner with a leading digital marketing agency to handle them while you focus on other critical aspects of your business.



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