10 tips for preparing your website for 2020 holiday season

Holiday shopping season is just around the corner

Millennium Group Staff //November 11, 2020//

10 tips for preparing your website for 2020 holiday season

Holiday shopping season is just around the corner

Millennium Group Staff //November 11, 2020//

Do you hear what we hear? Holiday shopping season is just around the corner. There are just a few weeks left until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which means–it’s that time of the year again.

While the shoppers are preparing and checking their lists twice, now is the perfect time to prepare your web presence for the holiday season. Here are 10 tips for preparing your website for 2020 holiday season.

1. Spice Up Your Website

The holiday season is a great time to make your visitors feel welcome with new seasonal décor. Why not give your Website a fresh look for the holidays? Consider updating your main banner, or highlight your seasonal product offers. You can also give your website a refresh with a new theme that creates a festive feel. Digital snowfall is also a popular choice. The possibilities are endless when it comes to decking your website halls. Tastefully decorated sidebars, footers, or navigation can sure spread the Christmas cheer.

2. Optimize Your Website Speed

It won’t come as a surprise that the time it takes for your web pages to load affects your sales. The increased volume of traffic during the Holidays can affect response times and availability. A slow website with errors is one sure way to ruin your chances of making those sales. Ensure that you optimize your Website speed, resolve any error 404 pages, fix lost landing pages, broken links, and redirects. Nobody likes a broken website, especially around the holidays.

3. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Mobile devices play a large role in online shopping – more than half of Google searches are mobile searches. You must optimize your website for mobile users. If you have not yet invested in making your site mobile-friendly, now is a perfect time to work with your web developer to ensure easy navigation on mobile devices.

4. Protect Your Website from Hackers

Thousands of websites get hacked daily, and the cybercriminals don’t stop in their tracks during the holidays. You have no doubt worked hard on your website, and it’s essential to take the time to secure it. Learning to protect your website against hackers is a critical part of keeping your site safe around the holiday shopping period and in the long run.

5. Create Engaging Web Content

The holiday season is an excellent time to increase your website traffic and improve sales with engaging holiday related content. You can easily make small changes with a significant impact. After all, content is all about quality and engagement, not quantity. Don’t miss an opportunity to spread some Christmas cheer in a newsletter or by highlighting your seasonal product offers. Consider posting a Google update to show that your business is in the holiday spirit. Tastefully designed holiday content with a specific type of messaging and tone can be priceless.

6. Design Eye-Catching Holiday Graphics

Consider adding an eye-catching coupon code to draw more interest in your brand. Using creative calls to action, you can make significant changes and direct your visitors to where you’d like them to go – whether that’s signing up for your Newsletter or purchasing a highlighted product. For that extra festive feel, you could also add some Christmas elements to your logo. From tempting candy canes to Christmas trees and lights, the options are infinite for graphics, icons, and vectors. Whatever your choice, make sure that you are creating consistent messaging across all your web presence channels.

7. Keep Your Audience Engaged

It’s important to stay engaged with your audience, especially first-time shoppers. Make your customers thrilled to hear from you and give value through your interactions. Provide timely service, answer questions, and maintain a personal touch. If you have not already done so, consider integrating social media buttons on your website. By engaging with your audience on social media, you are widening your opportunities to increase sales. You could even customize your social media icons with festive elements.

8. Reduce the Cart Abandonment

The biggest nightmare before Christmas are the abandoned carts. You need to learn how to identify the reasons for cart abandonment. The nightmare will become less daunting once you acknowledge it and identify the reasons why it’s happening. When you understand the issues, you can learn from them and create solutions. You should also be ready to retarget those who leave your website. Make sure you have re-marketing options prepared for the holiday shopping period.

9. Optimize With Festive Specific Keywords

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential technique to adopt when preparing your website for 2020 holiday season. If you neglect SEO, you will lose a large portion of potential revenue in just a few weeks. You must ensure that your keywords are festive specific and that your product and service descriptions are attuned to festive needs. Investing the time and effort in keyword research and optimizing your content will sure improve your website SEO for the holidays.

10. Measure Your Success With Analytics

From website traffic, page views, and bounce rates to new vs. returning audiences – you need to be well equipped to use your data for the holiday campaign win. Depending on your business type, you will want to narrow down your analytics to include the most relevant key performance indicators that will reflect your brand’s success.

Millennium Group‘s digital marketing team shared these tips. Millennium Group can help design websites for the holidays, too. Call 970-663-1200 or visit mghelpme.com