How to maintain your website over Christmas

How to maintain your website over Christmas

‘Tis the season to get festive and it’s not just supermarkets and department stores that are preparing for a seasonal makeover, your website will be too!

Many online businesses now operate 24×7 and it’s not hard to see why with the endless amount of resources, connectivity and digital communications available to us. The internet is fast and highly available and certainly doesn’t have a Christmas break. In fact, for many eCommerce stores, it can be a very stressful time with increased sales, traffic spikes and high volumes of enquiries, as people flock to online shops to buy gifts for their loved ones. 

To help you better maintain your website and enhance your user-experience during this time we’ve put together a few helpful tips that will hopefully allow you to sit back, relax and get into the Christmas spirit. 

Speed

A speedy website is crucial to ensuring your website loads fast with quick page load times. Slow load times have been known to affect conversion rate, with consumers turning to the likes of competitors to purchase similar products. If you are likely to expect high volumes of traffic you may need to increase your server bandwidth, for example, to cope with additional spikes over the holiday period. 

Secure shopping

Providing a secure payment system creates a safe environment for consumers to purchase goods and services with peace of mind, ease and convenience. It’s far more reassuring for consumers to know that their data and personal information is less vulnerable to hackers, who otherwise may take their custom elsewhere. This may also affect your repeat purchase rate.

Clear communication

Clear and concise messaging should be displayed on your website to inform customers of potential changes and updates, such as opening hours and contact information. This will help keep customers informed of any necessary processes that should be followed should they have a query or need to contact relevant business departments.

Utilise scheduling

There are a wide variety of scheduling tools which can be used to ensure brand consistency if your business is preparing to close over the festivities. This means that your brand can be active without being 100% physically available. Preparation can be key to scheduling creative content in advance, social media posts in particular have become an important element of a business’ content scheduling strategy. 

Reliable Hosting

It’s crucial you have a reliable hosting provider who will be on hand to help deal with any technical problems immediately. Our dedicated support team will still be on hand throughout the Christmas period and will be happy to answer any questions our customers may have.

For many, the festive season is often one of the most profitable times of the year (especially for smaller-sized businesses) and with some lockdown restrictions still in place, a high amount of Christmas spending is forecasted to be spent online.

Want to know more?

If you would like any further information or have any technical queries surrounding what could be one of the busiest digital Christmases, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team today. We’d be happy to help!