Christmas is usually one of the most lucrative times of the year for retailers, but it can also be incredibly stressful and hectic. With Black Friday and the start of the Christmas shopping season approaching, you can expect a surge in website traffic and increased demand for your site’s ecommerce services. But is your website up to the task?
To ensure your website can cope before the crucial Christmas shopping season really hits, bear these essential tips in mind:
Check that your site can cope with an increase in traffic
The first step is to contact your web hosting provider to confirm any limitations on traffic as well as how your site would cope with a sudden surge in traffic. You may need to upgrade your server, which will result in an extra cost but is well worth doing if it means you aren’t turning potential customers away because the site can’t cope.
Improve page loading speeds
Research by Hubspot revealed that on average, website pages took around 3.9 seconds to load. If your website is taking any longer than this to load, especially on a mobile device, you could be losing customers. To improve page loading speeds, consider:
- Resizing or compressing large images
- Remove any scripts (or reduce the number of them) from third parties that take time to load, provided you aren’t using them.
Create landing pages for your digital, email and social campaigns
If you’ve geared up special promotional content to really push your products and bring in new customers, make sure your website is ready. You need a dedicated landing page for each route a customer will follow – for example, clicking through an email, social media post or online banner ad. This landing page needs to be specially tailored to both the promotion and the marketing platform, so that it meets customers expectations and gives them a clear next step to take advantage of the offer, find more information or purchase the product they are interested in.
A top tip from hostinguk.net is to leave these landing pages up after the season is over. If you keep them up, updated with relevant but not time-specific content (unless it’s a countdown to the next Christmas) you can build on them for future Christmases. This is great for SEO, helping these pages to rank higher for more competitive search phrases as they are established pages with some history behind them.
Consider changing your delivery and returns policy
A new report has suggested that around half of consumers would abandon a purchase if they weren’t happy with the available delivery options. Even more compelling is a statistic that shows that 39% would never return to a retailer if they had a negative delivery experience. With this in mind, it could be worth amending your delivery and returns policies, even if it’s just for Christmas.
For expert help with setting up or managing e-commerce sites this Christmas, or at any time of the year, contact the Ambos Digital team.
