While the holiday season doesn’t officially start for a few months, it is important to get prepared now. This is so you can make sure any issues are resolved before the big shopping season. Online shopping booms for the holidays, with $1 out of every $4 spent on retail during the 2021 holiday season being spent online. Using Fyresite’s guide to preparing for the holidays, you can be prepared for the high traffic and sales of the holiday season.

What You Should Prepare

There are some steps you can take to make sure that your shop is in tip-top shape. These may seem intimidating. If you need help with any of the following steps, you can reach out to Fyresite to see if we’d be a good fit for you.

Make sure your site loading time is optimized

If your site takes too long to load, you risk losing customers. In fact, half of customers will abandon their cart if pages take too long to load.

There are a few different ways to check how fast your site is loading, but here at Fyresite we recommend gtmetrix. If your site is loading too slowly, or you want to see if you can get it to load faster, you can do a few different things.

Another tip is to ensure apps/plug-ins/scripts are up to date and working as intended. Remove any that you are not actively using.

You should also enable browser caching. This will store a cached version of your site in your customer’s computer, allowing the site to load faster when they visit again.

Making sure your media is compressed and properly sized will load your site faster too.

After the holidays, if your platform was unable to keep up with the traffic despite the above adjustment, you should consider switching your platform. Our recommendation would be Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus makes your site ready for the holiday traffic and rarely has bugs that force crashes. You can read more about why Fyresite recommends Shopify Plus here.

Make sure your checkout is streamlined

Offering guest checkout means customers don’t have to login to purchase, and they can go through the checkout faster.

Offer different checkout options. These can include 1-click buy, dynamic checkout buttons, and express checkout. Shopify allows you to enable express checkout easily, and you can read more about that here.

Make sure your site is mobile friendly

As mentioned above, a large percentage of holiday shopping is done online. With smartphones making it easy to shop from the phone, it is important that your site is mobile responsive. This means that your site scales down to fit the mobile screen. You can implement a responsive layout to make your website work on all screens. You can also work with a development team to help.

Set up abandoned cart emails

Abandoned carts are a huge problem, with almost 70% of carts being abandoned. Setting up cart abandonment emails will remind customers that they have items in their cart, encouraging them to come finish the process.

If you use Shopify, you can use marketing automations to send these emails, which you can read about here. Other eCommerce platforms have plug-ins/scripts that you can add for these emails.

Need Assistance?

There many things that need to be done to make sure your shop is ready for the pressures of holiday shopping. You may want to reach out to someone for help. Someone like Fyresite. We are a Shopify Plus partner with over a decade of experience with eCommerce.

If you have read this blog and would like to reach out to Fyresite to see if we’re a fit for you, contact us here.