The stakes are high during the holiday season, and retailers cannot afford to have their sites crash and burn, If you run an online retailer, there’s a good chance your annual performance hinges on the next couple of weeks.
The best way to prepare your website for Christmas is to aim for optimum performance the whole year round:
“Providing a reliable online experience should be part of a long term, proactive approach.”
“Retailers are faced with the year-round challenge of fickle customer loyalty — if your website experience doesn't match their expectations or is too slow your customers will quickly turn to a rival brand.”
What you can do now
Website uptime matters all the time. But it matters even more at this time of year. So to help your site remain available, it’s worth following these four tips:
Avoid big changes.
When M&S changed its website earlier this year, sales dropped by 8%. When you make sweeping changes to a site, it's common for conversion rates to drop temporarily while customers adjust. So if you're planning to launch a redesigned website, hold off until 2016.
Check your hosting and domain names.
You don’t want your site to be suspended because your domain expires or you hit your traffic limits. Make sure everything is ok for the rest of December.
Know who to call.
If something does go wrong, you won’t want to waste time scrambling to find contact details. Put together a file containing this information and make sure everyone knows where it is.
Arrange out-of-hours cover.
Online shopping happens 24/7, so make sure someone monitors your site out of hours. And yes, that includes over Christmas, because Boxing Day is one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
Finally, if you don’t already have it, set up website monitoring. Various services will send you emails or text messages to alert you to problems. After all, you can’t fix an issue unless you know about it.
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