The holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for most businesses. Unless your business is shut down for the holidays, you probably make a significant portion of your annual revenue during this frenetic time when everyone is spending their discretionary income. To stay in the game, make sure that your website is firing on all cylinders.
Ask yourself what promotions have worked in previous holiday seasons
And which ones haven’t. If you can’t remember exactly how last year went, you may want to go back to some Google Analytics reports from last December and see where most of your inbound traffic (and particularly traffic leading to conversions) was coming from.
Ensure you have adequate bandwidth on your site.
We recently wrote about this in the context of Black Friday. Basically, any downtime of your site during the holiday season when people are shopping for presents could be costing you real money.
Make sure your SSL certificate is up-to-date.
This is both for your own security during the time of the year when a lot of business happens, and also for the legitimacy of your website. The last thing you want when a customer is deciding whether to patronize your business or that if your competitor is a warning in their browser that your website may be compromised (which frequently happens when the SSL certificate is not working as it should).
Don’t make any major changes to functionality.
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, hold off on any big changes until the holidays are over. You don’t want to risk breaking something on your site during the implementation, and you also don’t want to confuse established customers with a new look or feel to your site.
Ensure you have adequate staff on hand for customer service.
If you sense that your product or service is one for which the potential customer may have questions before they buy, consider implementing a more seamless customer service interface such as a Live Chat feature that’s popular with many websites right now. You can even look into some of the options for outsourcing your customer service and be able to get 24/7 coverage, if you find that’s something your customers are looking for.
Make sure you account for holiday shipping.
Most people ordering this month will be trying to get their merchandise before the holidays hit. Make sure you’re accounting for shipping delays around holiday-time in what you promise customers. More importantly, feature this information prominently on your site, where customers can find it easily.
Accept that something will break.
It’s the nature of systems that they break down more when they’re under heavy use. Go into the holiday season expecting that you may have one or two things that will come up on your site that will have to be fixed on the fly, and that’s ok.
We hope these general tips will help you get your website through the holiday season! If you have any questions or comments about your CanSpace hosted site, don’t hesitate to contact us!
