Is Your Website Ready for the Boxing Day and January Sales?

It is no secret that Boxing Day marks the beginning of a big sales period for retail, so e-commerce websites can expect to see a noticeable increase in sales and traffic during this time.

However, just like the physical shops, a degree of preparation and planning needs to be completed beforehand to ensure you can make the most of this time with the least amount of issues or delays.

The weeks are quickly passing by, so is your website ready for the Christmas sales?

Handling Increased Traffic

As an e-commerce business, you expect to get a certain level of traffic to your website each week. But there will be times when this level will increase, and the Boxing Day/January sales period is one of these times.

It is important to ensure you have prepared your website ahead of time to be able to handle this increase in traffic and avoiding the site crashing. This would mean your customers can’t access your site and you will miss out on valuable sales.

To prepare your site, you should contact your hosting provider and explain when you are expecting peaks in traffic so that they can prepare the server on your website is on.

In some occasions, you may be required to pay upgrade fees if the server you are on is unable to handle the amount traffic you’re expecting. However, this will be unlikely for many of you if your hosting provider has you on a good server and recognises that you’re an e-commerce site and do see peaks in traffic.

Ensuring your server is prepared will also help with page speed and page loading times, something we will go into more detail about later.

Keeping Customers Data Secure

Another very important part of preparing your website for the sales period is taking a look over all your security protocols, this is especially important for e-commerce where customers will be making payments online.

To begin with, make sure that your SSL is up to date and paid for. The SSL shows your customer that they have a secure connection and is vital for a website which takes payments. If your SSL has expired, contact your web hosting provider to get it renewed.

It is also a good idea to look through your website plugins and make sure that these are all up to date. If you’re hosted with Daneswood this is something you may have included in your hosting package so we will manage all of this for you, but if in doubt, give us a call.

If plugin updates aren’t included in your hosting package, speak to your web hosting provider if you are unsure how to update your plugins, or if you would like advice on any additional plugins which would help with your website security.

Prepare the Backend of Your Site & Test

A great thing about making sure your website is ready for the Boxing Day and January sales is that so much of it can be done ahead of time.

All of the backend work that goes into making sure your website is ready for customers can be done now. This includes things such as making sure all your products are listed correctly and that stock checks are completed.

By doing this now, you can concentrate on processing the orders you get at the time, meeting demand and not worrying about over selling or out of date product listings.

You can also take this time to make sure all your tracking links are in place so that you can see where people have come from and use this data in your marketing planning moving forward. Information gathered this way will help in future promotions and targeting.

Similarly, make sure your contact forms are all working correctly so you can gather the email addresses of customers for email marketing.

Optimising User Journeys

Once you have all the technical aspects covered, you should also remember to take a look over the customer journey on your website. This is the process that the customer goes through when visiting and using your website.

When doing this there are a number of things to consider, including page loading time.

Page speed is a really important factor to user experience and making sure your website loads quickly on mobile devices is a must. People are increasingly shopping when they’re on the go which means using their mobiles.

1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load.

You can use PageSpeed Insights to check your website’s Google Page Speed score.

Also, make sure information on returns and delivery are clearly available, along with any other important information that a customer may require.

Finally, go through the checkout process and to see how easy it is to use and if any improvements can be made to encourage completion.

For help with getting your website ready for the Boxing Day and January sales, contact our team today.