10 Things to Prepare Your Website for the Holidays
Every year it seems like the holidays come quicker than they did the year before. The holiday season always comes early and consumers know this, so you need to ensure that your site is streamlined for the holidays. Here’s a checklist to help you prep your ecommerce site for the holidays:
1.) Make Major Changes Now
The holidays are one of the busiest times of the year for an ecommerce site. You want to make sure that your site is free of errors and able to operate smoothly. With the amount of traffic your site is about to receive, you don’t want to run into any problems during the busiest season of the year. If you’re going to make changes to your site, do it now, but if there’s nothing major that needs to change, and you feel confident that your website is fully optimized to give you the best chance for conversions, you can move to the next step.
2.) Streamlined Checkout Process
According to the Baymard Institute, abandoned cart rates are almost at 70% across the industry. How much will this increase over the holiday season? Streamlining the checkout process is one of the most important things you can do before the holidays. To decrease this rate, cut out any unnecessary pages, make the process easy to understand, or provide a guest checkout option so people don’t have to create an account. A streamlined checkout process will have a huge impact on the number of sales that your site receives throughout the holidays.
3.) Optimize for Mobile
4.) Holiday Content Calendar
Create content leading up to the holidays. Make the content catered around holiday themes to motivate people to use your site to do their shopping. Create Christmas shopping lists, holiday-specific blogs, or even create a fun giveaway to get people in the door.
5.) Look at Site Speed
Article written by AmericanEagle.com.