Get Your Site In Shape For the Holidays

by Charlie Morris

Experienced Web site owners know that seasonal trends can affect their Internet strategies in several ways. Make sure your site is prepared for the upcoming holiday season.

Be prepared for extra holiday site traffic.

Retail sites can expect to see a big increase in visitors throughout the holiday season. How much of an increase you get depends on your site. Some holiday-sensitive retailers, such as gift shops and greeting card makers, may depend on the month of December for as much as a third of their sales for the year.

The most obvious concern is whether your hosting service is up to the heavier traffic. Whatever your hosting arrangement is, take some time to give it a check-up before the holiday crowds start to arrive.

Most hosting deals allow for a fixed amount of network bandwidth and a fixed amount of hard disk storage space. If you go over either limit, some potential customers may be turned away. Make sure this doesn't happen, compare recent monthly traffic figures with your existing bandwidth quota. Project a generous increase in traffic, and upgrade your service level if needed. You can always drop it back later, and the extra money spent will be less than the cost in lost sales and lost face if your server overloads due to heavy holiday traffic.

Don't forget your disk space quota. If you're saving and archiving your server log files (as you should be), then increased traffic can cause your disk space to fill up more quickly. Make sure you won't lose those important December traffic reports.

Leverage the extra visitors by having your site in perfect shape. Make a pre-holiday sweep for outdated information, dead links and other traffic-losing details. Test catalogs, databases, search engines and other site features to be sure everything's running smoothly.

Be prepared for special holiday requests.

E-commerce sites that don't already offer gift wrapping and other holiday-related services should try to get it together, as these can be lucrative sidelines. Since a lot of items will be bought as gifts, make sure that it's easy for a customer to ship merchandise to a third party, and that international orders can be placed smoothly.

Think about holiday pricing.

It's a fact that people will pay different prices for things at different times of the year. If you're selling Christmas trees, make sure that your catalog will reflect a drop in price on December 26. Online Christmas trees might be an improbable example (or a business opportunity for someone), but you get the point. If your pricing is holiday-sensitive, fine-tune it using your e-commerce tools. Some e-commerce packages allow you to automate sales and special offers, so use these features to their fullest.

Add special holiday content.

Many site users have special concerns during the holiday season that need to be addressed. For example, if your business will be closing during the holidays, make sure the complete schedule is available on your site.

Seasonal content is always popular. If your site includes news or feature articles, it can't hurt to include some holiday-related material. If there are any seasonal angles to your product, try to incorporate them in your marketing copy.

And why not spiff up your pages with some holiday graphics? People want to have fun doing their holiday shopping. More serious sites may add a holly leaf here and there, while a children's site, or one that sells holiday gifts, might go for a complete graphic overhaul.

As with any graphics, don't go overboard. You probably don't need a complete set of animated reindeer flying across your home page (then again, maybe you do). Slow-loading pages definitely have a negative effect on site traffic, so don't squander your Christmas crowd by chasing them away with too-fat graphic files.

Finally, use what you learn this year to prepare for next year. Once the holiday season is over, carefully analyze your Web server logs to see if you can spot any trends that you could capitalize on next holiday season.

08.05.2007. 23:48

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