Beef Up Your Website to Make It Ready for the Holiday Season

October has officially come to an end; kickstarting what is known as the season of holidays. From Thanksgiving followed by Christmas to New Year, the next couple of months are when consumers throng online shopping sites scouring for the best deals and discounts. For businesses, the season presents a great opportunity to boost eCommerce sales and profits before the commencement of the next quarter in the New Year. However, before the onrush of holiday shoppers sets in, it’s crucial for online retailers to brace themselves and prep their website to meet the rising demand effectively.

Here’s a look at some of the criteria you should focus on during a holiday season website revamp:

Reduce Loading Time

Speeding up the page loading time is essential to prevent visitors from ‘bouncing’ to your competitor. To begin with, restrict the use of resource-intensive media on your site and optimize any graphics or images used. Considering the increased influx of shoppers to your site during the festive season, it’s also a good idea to switch to a dedicated server for a faster response time.

Monitor Cart Abandonment Rate

Most shoppers who come to online shopping websites are usually on the website only to know more about the product. They usually then go offline and buy it from a nearby retailer. This is known as ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline). Websites should look to tackle this by offering deals that cannot be replicated by offline retailers to an increase in their checkout rates.

Focus on mCommerce

With eCommerce making inroads onto the mobile space, more consumers prefer accessing online shopping sites through smartphones. Hence, it is mandatory to ensure that your website is optimized for the small screens of smartphones. You can either set up a mobile site or adopt responsive web design to deliver seamless shopping experiences, across all devices.

Implement Chat Feature

Conversations through emails and phone calls are lengthy, tedious and cumbersome processes, which can deter shoppers from contacting you at all. The best way to assuage the fear of first-time shoppers and reduce cart abandonment is to set up a chat feature that enables consumers to get their queries cleared up in real-time with your customer support team.

A website redesign for the holiday season doesn’t warrant the need to build everything from the ground up; rather all it takes is a few upgrades to find your sales skyrocketing in no time. Don’t know how? Get in touch with us and we’ll revamp your site to make it holiday-ready.