How to prepare your website for the holiday shopping season

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas are super important dates in the diary for online businesses. They are the two largest online selling days of the year! One of the most important things to prepare for the holiday shopping season is your website. You want every aspect of your website to be ready to handle more traffic and increased sales.

We’re here to help. That’s why we have created a list that will show you exactly how to get your website ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday!

Prepare your eCommerce website for the holiday shopping season

1. Mobile, mobile, mobile!

With more and more people using smartphones and tablets, you need a mobile-friendly website. Preferably a website with a responsive design. Why?

During Black Friday 2019, 61% of all online retail came from smartphone transactions. During Cyber Monday 2019, almost half of the orders were mobile orders – even when most people are already back in the office on Cyber Monday.

Also important: having a mobile-friendly website plays a huge role in your search engine ranking! And where do most people look for the products they want? Exactly: search engines. Having a mobile-friendly website will make your chance of being found by potential customers a lot bigger.

So what is a mobile-friendly website?

A mobile-friendly website is a website that works on any device. This means that it loads fast, that links work well and images and infographics load quickly. Your potential customers must have a good user experience on your website.

2. Improve your SEO

If you already have a website, you’ve probably heard about SEO before. In short, SEO means optimizing your website for search engines. Getting a good SEO ranking can take a long time. However, it’s never too late to start.

3. Choose a good hosting provider

Your hosting provider can affect your SEO and website’s performance in many ways. Therefore, it’s super important to choose a great hosting provider. A good hosting provider will make sure that your website has high uptime, loads fast, and is secured – we all know that no one wants to wait around for your website to load.

4. Make sure navigating is easy

You don’t want potential customers to get frustrated. Therefore, it’s important to choose a website design that is easy to navigate. This means that potential customers should be able to find what they need quickly and that the checking out process is flawless. Make sure that getting from A to B can be done with the least amount of clicks.

5. Optimize your images

To avoid crazy load times, you can resize your images and use proper formats. Want to do it perfectly? Then make sure to add descriptive names to your images.

6. Create a quick & safe shopping experience

The shopping experience for potential customers needs to be smooth. Make sure your products are categorized in a logical way, that there is an option to search, an easy to find shopping basket and that finalizing the payment can be done quickly. To make it even easier: make checking out as a guest possible.

Potential customers will also want to know that their personal information is safe on your website. One way to do this is to set up an SSL certificate, to display endorsement from other websites, and share other webshops or social accounts that have shared your products. This will build trust.

7. Create a buzz!

Building suspense can help to make your sales more successful! Start teasing deals through social media marketing, e-mail marketing, and paid advertisements on search engines such as Google.

Is your website ready for 2021’s shopping season?

If you fail to prepare your website, you could be looking at lost sales and disengaged customers. Luckily, you’re not too late to prepare your website yet! Get started now and end 2021 with a bang!