Traditionally, Americans begin their Christmas shopping in earnest after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is on the fourth Thursday of November. The Black Friday shopping phenomenon has gone global now, and shoppers will be on a shopping binge on the high street and the internet. They’ll shop until they drop… or until your site crashes.
Are you ready for a steep spike in visitors? Preparing your website for Black Friday (or any other time you expect a surge in visits) has two components: content and capacity. Right now is the time to have a good look at both and update as needed. Crashing at the peak of the shopping season hurts. This is the time to make sales, not lose them.
Are you offering any special discounts for the season? Do you have any new products? Which merchandise is most likely to move now? When your visitors are looking at one item, do they see any suggestions for related items that would also appeal to them? This is the time to up your suggestive sales strategy and to make sure that people can find what they want quickly and easily.
This is also a good time to give your visuals a seasonal makeover. Does your site look festive and wintery? When you are adding files, think about how to keep your load time down. Go for high-quality images with compressed file sizes. This is not the time to add dynamic or Flash elements. If you have a blog linked to your site, and we recommend that you do, this is the time to start posting gift suggestions.
Talk to your web hosting company about how well prepared your site is. You can arrange to do a load test to make sure your site is going to be able to cope with an influx of visitors. You may need to upgrade your bandwidth. If you have a service contract, ask your provider about what is covered and what they can do for you.
If you are working with a good hosting company and have a service contract, your provider can do a lot behind the scenes to make sure your site is prepared and can welcome all those shoppers with quick load times and no hassles. Then you’ll be free to worry about taking care of all of those sales!
Want to check the current status of your eCommerce website? Talk to our expert development team today .
By Irene Hislop
By Conor McCaffrey