paying online with credit cardRunning an ecommerce site, you know the importance of the holiday season to your annual results. Maybe you feel that you're either overwhelmed by it when it's on you or trembling that it's just around the corner.

Here are a couple of ways you can make sure your ecommerce site is ready for the holidays so you can stay on top of things throughout the year.

Plan your holiday promotions now

Days before the holiday sales rush hits is no time to be figuring out what sorts of sales promotions you want to offer your frenzied customers. Best to plan your holiday promotions now while you're in the pre-holiday sales lull, reserving the weeks leading up to Christmas for arranging inventory and filling orders.

Start drawing up with promotional concepts today. Then prepare the related email and social media campaigns. Design holiday promotion landing pages. Redesign your regular pages with the holiday in mind (kind of like doing a seasonal rebranding). Schedule everything carefully and set it all up to happen automatically according to plan.

You'll be so happy you took the time now to prepare for the holiday crunch when it finally hits you.

Get your site SEO ready

Holiday shoppers are increasingly searching online for holiday gifts. To capture as much of this traffic as possible, so you have a chance of converting them to customers, you need to optimize your site for search engines.

Start with last year's data: what keywords worked best? Create fresh content for this year that includes successful keywords, like blog posts and videos. Get it all done now so your pages can be crawled and indexed by major search engines in time for holiday buying.

Use successful keywords to create special holiday landing pages for likely gift products. Catch those shoppers who are looking for steals and deals with "great gift ideas for your spouse" and "gifts under $$$" pages.

Get the nuts and bolts right

It's time to make adjustments to your site that will help it through the holiday rush. This means speeding up the site, smoothing out the buying process, and going mobile. 

  • Getting visitors to your site to click the "buy" button may require improving the checkout flow. Provide immediate online support, eliminate any unexpected price shocks, offer free shipping.
  • Make sure your site is "mobile friendly", from promotional pages through to checkout procedure. Try it yourself and see: would you buy from your site on your smartphone?

Studies say page load times at your site directly correlate to sales. Make sure you're caching your site, especially if it's more than straight HTML code. Minimize image file size, shorten text passages, break up pages. It'll mean more holiday sales if you do.

Stay connected.

Enter your email below to stay up-to-date on Humboldt news and articles