Each year a growing number of people are shopping for their holiday items online. This usually translates to a surge in the number of visitors to your online store. Is your website ready to accommodate the increased traffic?
Preparing your store for the holidays is more than just pushing holiday-themed products to your store and planning promotions. It is also about making and following a plan to make sure that your store is technically solid.
One of the things you can do to prepare your store for the holidays is to optimize your user experience. To streamline your store, you would need to run a user experience audit, and to do this, go through your purchase flow as if you are a new customer.
You can get a friend or family member to check out your site and let you know if the process of finding and buying what they are looking for is easy and intuitive. Find out if your website is easy to navigate and figure out which pages, content, and add-ons need a review and update.
The updates may include creating holiday-focused landing pages, including holiday-related keywords in your SEO plan, creating your gift guide, adding or optimizing your search function, adding gamification elements to your site, including a discount or email collection pop-ups, etc.
You should also make sure that your checkout interface is user friendly. 28% of customers abandon their carts because the checkout process is too long and tortuous. Make the process as simple as possible. Ask for relevant and essential questions only, while adding a variety of trusted payment methods, and ensure that they are all working.
75% of people will not return to websites that take longer than 4 seconds to load. It means that you have to improve page loading speeds as we are dealing with people who use 4G and 5G technology.
You can use the Google page speed tool to see how your page performs and check out the fixes you need to make. You can read this post that talks about improving your website speed.
Once your page is nice and speedy, you need to double-check that your page is mobile-friendly. You can go as far as creating a mobile app for your website. By 2021, it is believed that mobile commerce will account for 53% of all e-commerce sales.
You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to find out more about your website’s mobile-friendliness. Type your store link in, and Google will tell you if your store page is mobile friendly.
In the case that your store’s website is not mobile-friendly. Google will tell you about any issues that mobile users might encounter. Here are some tips you can employ to make your site more mobile-friendly.
- Use responsive website designs, so that your site works both on desktop and mobile.
- Adjust your images, text fonts, and button sizes.
- Remove flash from your website since it is not super accessible for mobile users.
- Enable mobile payments.
- Make sure that your pop-ups are the right size and easy to close.
- Optimize your page loading speed, as mentioned earlier.
If you need more tips as to how you can prepare your online store for the fast-approaching holidays, you can reach out to us at CharityHost, and we will put you through the process.
