The holiday season is just around the corner, and you should be preparing your website for the holiday season. It is important to plan right now on how you can maximize your website’s potential during this time.
As with everything, preparation is key to be able to pull off a winning strategy that can help your site bring about the best in itself, especially at this time of the year.
The role of a great publisher is not to predict what readers may want to read, but to help them form their opinions through strong, authoritative journalism. You win in the marketplace not by chasing readers with algorithms, but by attracting them with a superior product. Great journalism can’t be automated, because it is among the most human of endeavors.
Here are some ways on how you can prepare your WordPress site for the 2018 holiday season:
A website for the holiday season … Make Sure Your Loading Speed is Ready
One of the very important aspects that you should keep in check on your site is its loading speed. This is especially important during the holiday season when you are expecting the influx of high traffic.
You will spend a lot of effort on trying to generate traffic, and you wouldn’t want to waste all that by pushing them away just because your site is unable to accommodate all of them.
What’s worse is that if you are not pushing them away on purpose, but they do so because your site is simply taking too long to load.
Always remember, the maximum acceptable time for a site to load is 3 seconds – any more than that and you will have a lot of bounces.
That being said, make sure that your server is prepared to meet the demands over the holidays. Some of the steps that can help you deal with this is utilizing a caching solution and using a content delivery network.
This removes the need for your regular visitors to download the site again and again. It also ensures that your visitors would be loading the site from the nearest server.
Make it Festive
Dressing up your site for the holidays is a must if you are planning to take advantage of it. Multiple plugins can help you do just that and make it impressively stunning. Some of the best plugins for the holidays are the following:
Make it festive.
Christmas Music plugin
Give your site a true Christmas feel by providing Christmas music using the dedicated plugin. Your site visitors may choose to pause and play the music with a button.
Countdown plugin
You may trigger the excitement for the holiday season by using the countdown plugin and show the number of days left before an occasion of your choice. There are also numerous ways for you to customize this countdown timer to fit your site’s design.
A website for the holiday season … Scheduled WP Themes
You will also be able to change the site’s theme on a schedule you’ll set using the scheduled theme’s plugin. By doing so, the theme can automatically change when the designated date and time occurs.
This is best when you would not be around over the holidays, but you are looking at ways on how you may be able to spice things up on your site in a unique way but at the right time.
There are many other plugins that you can check out. Just make sure that you only use plugins from a trusted source to help prevent any untoward incident that a suspicious plugin can bring about.
Plan Something Unique on the Busiest Days
It is also best to come up with some events that can help you maximize the holidays in your favor.
This means that you should consider some special events that can further entice your visitors to go to your site. This can be a sale, a giveaway on a specific day and time, or a contest.
The choice is yours. But one important thing you should keep in mind is that whatever you have in mind, this should be done on the busiest days for you so that you can maximize its benefits.
If you have been around for a while, it is best to check your performance in the previous years so that you can see which days are typically the busiest.
Your goal is to make yourself even more productive on the same day or days this year. By preparing for it, you would be able to maximize the influx of holiday traffic.
Organize and Schedule your Content
One of the attributes that can set quality content from others is timeliness. It’s always a good idea to publish content at the time when they make the most sense.
As in the case of your holiday preparations, it’s a great idea to come up with content that is appropriate for the season. There are many ways for which you can write about how the holidays relate to your site’s offerings.
But saying that you should come up with holiday-appropriate content doesn’t mean that you should create and publish them during the holidays. You can do them right now and schedule them to be published on a future date.
This ensures that no matter where you may be on the date you have in mind for publishing, it can, and it will happen. Maximize WordPress’s scheduled publishing feature.
Secure your Website
Because the holiday season is busy, there’s a lot of movement regarding money as well. That is why a lot of cyber crooks who would like to take advantage of that and would try to victimize unsuspecting sites, especially those where the money is.
However, this does not mean that blog sites and other sites that don’t directly deal with money are out of danger. All types of sites can be targeted for whatever ill reasons these cybercriminals have in mind.
To help prevent your site from being victimized from these risks, and to also protect your site’s visitors, it is best for you to heighten up your security.
Make sure that you do at least the following:
Ensure that your software and plugins are updated.
This equips your site with all the necessary updates that the WordPress team has for its users, including security patches.
Utilize the protection of SSL.
This promotes a secure connection between the server and the client, warding eavesdroppers out.
Defend your site with a trustworthy anti-malware.
This prevents any harm that malicious programs pose against you and your site’s visitors.
When you prioritize website security, you are not only preventing whatever harm may happen to your site and your visitors, but you are also helping to retain the positive image that your site has.
Should you fail to provide the necessary protection, expect a big hit on your site’s reputation. It is better to be safe.
The bottom line
With the holidays fast approaching, it is best to start preparing your site right now. These tips above are some of the most straightforward ways of how you can do just that.
The holidays are a great time for any site, and you should be able to tap the season well so that you can reap all the benefits. So prepare your site now with the five tips above so you can make the most out of the holidays with your site.
Author Bio
Kenneth Sytian is a WordPress developer in the Philippines, the CEO of Sytian Productions. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is considered one of the top influencers in web design and development in the Philippines.
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
