It’s November, the nights have gotten longer and the decorations are starting to pop up across the town. The Christmas countdown has officially begun. We know how hectic this time of year is for everyone, including businesses, so we have put together a step by step guide to make preparing your website for Christmas festively simple this year.
Make your website festive
Make sure your website has a festive feel to it and ensures your customers are going to get into the christmas spirit whilst navigating your site. Add some, and we emphasise some, (be careful not to bombard your customers with too many pictures of Santa) festive content to your site. This can be in the form of banners, festive adverts, a temporary change of colour scheme or even specialised Christmas products/services you are offering over the next few weeks. Be careful not to redesign your whole website, but ensure your customers know they have come to the right place for the perfect Christmas gift.
Ensure your content is fresh and season appropriate
Online shopping, especially this year (thank you COVID) will be most people’s port of call. Therefore, the online marketplace will be a busy one, so ensuring your content shines above other sites for the perfect gift is important. Your content needs to be fresh, straight to the point and informative with that important festive touch to grab the viewer’s attention. Fresh content will also help drive traffic to your site. This can be done by preparing blog posts in advance and schedule them for the month ahead in the run up to Christmas during the busiest time. Include content that gives your viewers ideas for christmas gifts as this is a great way to focus your SEO efforts on your most popular products/services that are bound to make a great gift for a loved one.
Holiday Promotions
If you want your website to entice Christmas shoppers, offers and promotions are the perfect way to do this. This can be effectively done by being added into an advent style countdown, with different promotions or giveaways each day. Although you might not want to do this every day up until christmas as you want to ensure your business is still making a profit, this is the perfect idea to drop randomly throughout the month to encourage viewers to buy.
Social media is also a fantastic way for your business to promote any giveaways and promotions. Interacting with bloggers and providing them with discount codes is a great way you can increase your post reach and engagement, which in turn results in an increase in traffic to your site over the festive period.
Make sure everything is running smoothly
Last but not least, you need to make sure your website is in tip top shape at all times, let alone throughout the year’s busiest few weeks. Ensuring all pages images, and links are working properly to avoid customers landing on a broken page and immediately leaving your site. It is important to check this in advance, so you are not having to hassle over technical issues during the christmas season and you can be confident that your viewers will have an enjoyable experience navigating through your website.
