5 Ways to Prepare Your Website for the Holiday Season
If you’re the average human being, it is quite possible to put your holiday shopping plans off until the very last minute. But if your business depends on the holiday season to end on a high note, waiting until the last minute can be devastating to your sales and marketing plans.
Websites today have become increasingly critical for taking advantage of the end of the year. It’s important not just for online retailers, but for offline retailers too. Many shoppers find information they are looking for on a website before ever setting foot in a store to make a purchase, or even making a purchase online.
The practice of researching online before purchasing is as common as drinking water. Today, revenue from holiday shopping is around $100 billion. If it is mid-year, smart retailers are already redesigning and preparing their websites and sales and marketing campaigns for the very busy holiday season.
If you haven’t started, here are some ways to get you on your way:
1 Test, Test, Test
Before traffic even begins making its way to your website, it is very important to perform a variety of tests to help understand your site’s capacity under normal and spiked conditions. Pay attention to metrics that impact response time, availability, and other errors that affect website performance. Run tests that imitate real visitors arriving at your site from multiple locations.
2 Think Globally
Ensuring your website is built on the right infrastructure includes accounting for response times in other regions that may be slower. Slower response times could impact revenue negatively as well as brand reputation. Since customers may access your website from all over the world, consider working with a global CDN to ensure solid performance.
3 Optimize for Mobile
Very simply, in today’s world, if you’re not on mobile, you don’t exist. Mobile devices play an increasingly critical role in the online shopping experience. More people are connected to their devices today than ever before. To ensure a solid professional experience for potential customers, use mobile browser detection and if you have video on your site, streamline your video delivery for mobile formats.
