5 Steps to Prepare Your Website for the Holidays

List your customers' holidays

Start by making a list of the holidays your customers celebrate. Include both big and small occasions so you can experiment with different holiday marketing ideas. Shopping-friendly holidays span national dates like New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day, Canada Day or Independence Day, Halloween, Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Boxing Day — as well as ethnic and cultural holidays such as Easter, Passover, Ramadan, Cinco de Mayo, Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, Diwali, and Mardi Gras.

1. Show holiday greetings on your website

Getting your website ready for the holidays doesn't mean a complete redesign. The changes are fairly simple — start with these basics:

• Create a holiday-themed message to greet visitors, usually on your home page. If you can, link it to a holiday promotion you're planning.
• Post your holiday business hours in addition to your regular hours.
• Share your holiday shipping details, focusing on delivery times — customers are anxious about getting orders on time, even at the last minute.

2. Run holiday promotions on your website

Around the holidays, people are in the spirit to shop. That's a great opportunity to create promotions and drive extra sales. Here are a few ways to nudge more customers toward a purchase:

• Offer a special, holiday-themed sale.
• Publish or share articles that position your products or services as great for the holidays.
• Create promotions that link what you offer to the holidays or gift giving.
• Provide incentives that make customers more likely to buy from you than a competitor.

To spark more ideas, think about the holiday-specific needs your products address, the concerns of your audience, and how you can inspire positive feelings — then tailor your promotion to match.

3. Automate your holiday marketing

Holidays repeat each year at roughly the same time, which means you can save time by reusing your marketing materials annually. Consider email software that lets you schedule messages to send automatically on specific dates each year. And if you haven't already, start encouraging visitors to sign up for your email list so you have an audience to send to.

4. Make your website work fast

During the holiday season more people search for seasonal products and services online, so you'll get more visitors than usual. More traffic can slow an unprepared site down as it gets overloaded. Before the season starts, audit your website's speed and make improvements where needed so it stays fast when it matters most.

5. Make your website mobile friendly

More people access websites from smartphones than from desktop computers. Because phone screens are small, your site needs to be easy to use on them. Check how well your website loads and behaves on a phone — if it's hard to use on mobile, fewer visitors will buy from you.

These updates prepare your website for the holidays, but they also double as a chance to review other aspects of your site that affect how it performs for your business all year long. Happy holidays!