Blog

Black Friday is coming soon, but you still have time to prepare! Begin by taking these simple steps that make it easier for people to find deals. Prepare your site content, your servers, and your network to handle a surge in traffic so shoppers don’t get impatient and go somewhere else. You will also want to consider some quick upgrades to your site content, to make your holiday deals easy to find.

Web Content Checks

When customers reach your site, you want to make sure the whole shopping experience is fast and error-free. Slow website performance is one of the main reasons people give up on a site and go somewhere else. Try some of these sales tactics to boost conversions and perhaps get more organic search traffic:

·        Make sure your discounts, sales, combo deals, and shipping deals are obvious.

·        Is it easy to share a gift idea with someone else?

·        Are any special conditions obvious? Make time limits and limited quantities apparent.

·        Are you cross-selling?

·        Do you have a valid meta-description for your homepage and any pages advertising holiday deals?

Implement some changes as needed based on your answers to those questions. Spend some time on your network, servers, and software too.

Technical Site Checks

Buggy code can cause issues that drive people away. Clean up the code on your site. Doing a thorough code review and revision by Black Friday is probably impossible, but you might have time to take a couple of steps. First, look for old scripts that are no longer doing anything useful. Second, consider removing some third-party snippets.

Server and Network Checks

Are you sure your site can handle a sudden surge in traffic? Upgrade your servers or hosting plan. And, if you want to migrate to upgraded hosting, find out how long it will take and don’t waste time. It could take a couple of weeks to get everything moved over before the morning of Black Friday. You probably want that extra bandwidth available for Thanksgiving night, because more and more people are starting their holiday shopping after dinner and sports. Don’t find out that heavy traffic is bogging down your site on Black Friday.

Consider caching your web pages so they are more readily available to load. Caching puts a copy of the page and associated files in one place in random access memory. This avoids a page needing to pull information from multiple tables or URLs to complete a request. If your e-commerce site runs on WordPress you can use W3 Total Cache. This is only one of several software options. 

Consider resizing some images. Big, high-resolution images take longer to load and may not be adding much value to the shopping experience. At least look at compressing images on popular items and your home page. These are areas where slow loading and broken image links are most likely to frustrate shoppers.

Make Sure Your Retail Site Is Ready

Begin taking some of these steps as soon as possible and your customers will encounter fewer issues while finding it easier to buy from you once they reach your site. Your improvements will pay off later as your business grows. If you want some expert help to update your website or optimize your current e-commerce site’s performance during the coming Holiday Season, and for 2022, DevDigital can help.