How to prepare a website for the sales and the holidays

Both shoppers and sellers look forward to the season of holidays and sales. But each side waits, and prepares, in its own way. Everyone from small online shops to large online retailers tries to get their store ready for the holidays and the sales, when buyers arrive in force. Business owners are after two connected things:

1. good service for shoppers during the period when they order from online stores most actively;
2. the highest possible profit, through handling orders well, special offers and other marketing campaigns.

We will go in detail through all the work worth doing before the holiday sales and the seasonal spikes in buying.

Which holidays should a shop be ready for?

First let us work out how often sales happen and which holidays people buy most around. That matters for knowing when, and for what, to prepare an online shop.

Here are the holidays that bring sales and spikes in buying in Europe, America and other English-speaking countries:

1. New Year,
2. Valentine's Day (14 February);
3. Halloween (31 October);
4. Christmas (both 25 December and 7 January);
5. Mother's Day (the second Sunday in May);
6. Labor Day (the first Monday in September, marked mainly in English-speaking countries);
7. Back to school (1 September);
8. Thanksgiving (the last Thursday in November in the USA, the second Monday in October in Canada);
9. Black Friday (the first Friday after Thanksgiving);
10. Cyber Monday (the first Monday after Black Friday).

Different countries may also have seasonal sales for independence day and other national holidays. It is best to prepare a shop at least three weeks before a sale starts — all the more so because holidays shape whole seasons of sales, which makes life easier for marketers and business owners.

Holidays affect e-commerce most of all. But discounts and special offers appear on service sites too. Discounts on online courses and software products are especially popular.

The only real limit is the marketer's imagination.

Keeping the site up and protected

For a business to get through the sales season confidently and profitably, the site has to be sound and fast. We suggest making sure in advance that it carries no critical vulnerabilities.

DDoS attacks: what they are and how to defend against them

A DDoS is an attack meant to overload a site, slow it down critically or take it offline altogether. Attackers use an abnormally high number of requests to push a server past its resources until it fails.

The result is that all visitors, or some of them, cannot use the site.

DDoS attacks are often a tool of unfair competition, and in the sales season that fight sharpens. What effect and what risks does a DDoS attack bring?

1. Sales and profit fall.
2. Reputation takes a hit.
3. Search engine positions drop.

How do you protect a site from DDoS attacks? The most reliable way is to hide the IP address or spread the load across several servers. Cloudflare can do that.

To protect a site from break-ins and attacks you also need to:

1. update the CMS and every plugin regularly;
2. use a vulnerability scanner;
3. scan the site with antivirus software.

The right type of hosting

Sites can live on shared hosting, on VPS servers or on dedicated physical servers. The second and third options suit large projects. If you notice that, under a wave of visitors, resource consumption on your plan is close to its peak or the site has started to drag, you may have to move it to a higher plan or a more powerful hosting plan before the sales begin.

Before the sales period starts, double-check the payment dates for hosting and the domain, and make sure the services do not expire at the worst possible moment.

Optimising how fast the site loads

A site can run slowly even with no DDoS attacks, no peak in visitors and powerful hosting behind it. Why?

Every situation is individual and calls for a technical audit. But most often load speed falls for a handful of reasons:

1. images are not optimised (outdated file formats and files that are too large);
2. the CMS and the site's plugins have not been updated in a long time;
3. the site's theme has not been updated;
4. too many plugins are installed, some of which could be removed;
5. there are a lot of third-party scripts (analytics systems, banner code and so on);
6. compression of html and css files is not configured.

To avoid problems with load speed and with the experience of your visitors, check the site's speed in advance through PageSpeed Insights

Apply as many of the service's recommendations as you can. Some of the work you can do yourself by installing and configuring plugins. Some cases will need a developer.

SEO for the site

Before the sales, the site has to meet SEO requirements. It is also important to plan the publication of seasonal content: text, visuals, landing pages, video.

Get it right and you will not only make money during the sales season — your business will get a push towards further growth, improve its reputation and gain new, satisfied customers.

Run a site audit

Technical errors will stop your site getting traffic from Google, so they need finding and fixing in advance. Run an audit for that. There are several tools for the job:

Google Search Console

Search Console shows you how well the site's pages are being indexed. Use the Coverage report for that.

The next metric to look at is page experience. Every URL should meet Google's page experience requirements.

The third step of the audit is checking sitemap.xml. Indexing of the site's pages depends on that file. Through Search Console you can submit the sitemap and test it.

Serpstat

This is a professional, paid tool for SEO audits, so it is worth weighing up whether buying it pays for itself. That said, Serpstat's entry-level plan is far cheaper than those of comparable services.

For anyone who does decide to use it, here is how to audit your site with Serpstat.

Step one. Find the site you need in the project list and click the Start audit button.

Step two. Set the crawl speed and the page limits. If the site is small and on modest hosting, set the lowest crawl speed. For most sites medium and maximum speed will do.

Step three. Wait for the service to finish crawling and look through the results. The SDO metric shows how well the site is optimised.

Lower down the results screen you will see the list of errors and recommendations for fixing them. For instance, if there are problems with the H1 heading, Serpstat will advise adding one or checking that the page has only one H1.

The main errors to check the site for:

1. 404 errors,
2. broken images,
3. problems with title and description,
4. too little text on the page,
5. duplicate content.

All of these are better dealt with before the seasonal wave of customers arrives.

Write titles and descriptions specifically for the holidays

For the holidays, the meta tags of existing and new pages need reworking. Before the sales, people are asking:

1. Where can I buy presents at a good price?
2. What should I give?
3. Does the company have special offers on its services?

If your snippet promises an answer to one of those questions, you stand a good chance of getting the click.

We wrote about how to compose titles and descriptions properly in one of our blog articles.

Refresh the site's content

By content we mean:

1. banners and visuals on the site;
2. blog articles tied to the holidays;
3. video;
4. landing pages.

What exactly you need depends on your niche. It could be pages with special offers, with gifts for the holiday and so on. To each of those URLs you can add photos styled for the occasion, banners and more.

Examples of holiday and sale visuals and landing pages

Let us look at examples of how a site can be dressed up for Black Friday and other sales.

An education platform's site:

Another example from an education site. Black Friday is signalled by two visual accents:

And this is what the special offers page looks like on Amazon

A few more examples of page design:

This is how a jewellery shop announced its discounts.

And here is an advertising banner from a chain of petrol stations:

And one more example, from a clothing shop:

Work on your social media pages

Your business pages on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube should match the style of the coming holidays. On YouTube, change the channel banner and release a few videos connected with the coming holiday and the sales.

On Facebook and Instagram

Plan your posts in advance. There are several scheduling tools for Facebook and Instagram that let you stop thinking about social media at the hottest moments of a sale.

On Instagram, be sure to use holiday and seasonal hashtags. To pick them you can use:

1. hashtags.org;
2. ritetag.com;
3. hashtagify.me.

Schedule a mailing with your special offers

Email marketing remains one of the main channels for talking to an audience. It helps retain customers, raise ROI and lift the average order value.

Do use this traffic and sales channel during the holiday peaks in buying.

Message sequences are usually planned in advance around the holidays. But even if you have not done that, you can quickly put together emails with special offers and send them to your subscriber base.

To build a subscriber base for mailings you can use:

1. SendPulse,
2. MailChimp,
3. eSputnik.

There are other mailing services too. Almost all such tools offer:

1. builders for subscription forms,
2. email templates,
3. analytics functions,
4. ready-made mailing scenarios with triggers and so on.

Set up and launch search advertising

Depending on the niche your site works in, the best solution may be:

1. text ads in Google's search results;
2. product ads in Google Shopping.

In the second case traffic goes straight to product pages. Potential customers see ads with an image, a price and a link to the shop. Those ads also appear for relevant search queries.

Setting them up is rather more involved than ordinary Google Ads advertising, so it is better to go to certified professionals for that.

Summary

It is best to start preparing a site for the season of holidays, sales and discounts 2–3 weeks ahead. In that time you can:

1. check that the hosting is stable,
2. scan the site for vulnerabilities and fix them,
3. publish new content (products, video, posts, landing pages and so on),
4. carry out or finish the technical optimisation of the site,
5. launch advertising campaigns for search queries connected with the holidays and the sales,
6. build up your link profile through publications on external sites linking back to yours.

The Host4Biz team will help you get through the sales period successfully, with reliable hosting and useful content about growing a business.

A checklist for preparing a site for the holiday sales

Как подготовить сайт к праздничным распродажам.pdf 160.40 KB pdf

Download it and share it with your colleagues. The checklist is in Russian.