The autumn / winter season is the most important part of the year for many businesses. Usually it’s best to start preparing in August and including the website(s) of the business. In this article I’ll give you 3+1 tips to help you to prepare your website for the upcoming important period.
Make Your Website Faster!
Those who have been following me for a long time are probably bored about this topic, but I feel like I cannot say it enough time: pay attention to your website speed! Why is that so important? First of all: visitors don’t want to wait. Your website has 2 secs to load in or half of your visitors will leave (based on the survey of digital.com, 2022). It’s painful, right? Especially if you have actually paid for these visitors (I mean they came by paid social or paid search). Another part of the story is Google and their expectations for website speed: it decreases year by year which means website load time should be lower and lower, currently about 1.5 – 2 secs. In conclusion, if you’d like your website to be ranked higher by search engines, you have to improve website speed.
Update Information on Your Website!
In most cases a business website is a living, organic, constantly changing thing – or at least it should be. What does it mean? First of all, you (your team) should update information constantly. There shouldn’t be broken links, outdated pieces of information, expired sales opportunities, or “all right reserved 2019” in the footer. (Because you have copyright info in the footer, right?) Your website is your shop window, so it has to be tidy and up-to-date, otherwise it will erode trust in your business instead of building it, or worse, your potential customers will think that your business isn’t active anymore. Showing and updating all the necessary information is crucial when you prepare your website for the busy season.
Check the Technical Background!
Plugins, CMS version, storage capacity. If you don’t really get what these words mean, I suggest you ask your developer. Otherwise, do the necessary checks and updates before starting your autumn / winter campaigns, especially if you have a webshop with several products and variations.
+1 Data Tracking
Learn from the past! Check out the data from last year’s same season, and use the conclusions in your plans for this year. Google Analytics, Google Trends and Facebook statistics can help you a lot to avoid last year’s errors and unnecessary spending. You have all these tools for your website, right?
These are necessary but not sufficient requirements if you want to get your website ready for the big campaigns and don’t want to lose valuable visitors and potential customers. If you wish to learn more about this topic I warmly suggest you my guide for a better converting website. Don’t want to do it by yourself? I’m ready to help you through the process. Otherwise, grab your coffee, open your website admin and have fun!