3 Tips To Prepare For Holiday Shoppers

3 Tips To Prepare Your Site For Holiday Shoppers

How You can Prepare Your Website For Holiday Shoppers

Summer is over and we’re now entering the holiday months!  Is your website ready for holiday shoppers?  Don’t stress, we’ll go over a few easy way to get your website ready for holiday shoppers.  When it comes to preparing your website for an influx of traffic you need to start with your web hosting.  Does your web hosting plan support high traffic and include unlimited bandwidth?  Does your web host allow you to upgrade your plan on the fly?  Let’s get started on how you can improve performance and get ready for holiday shoppers.

Improve Speed With CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a free caching service.  They allow you to use their CDN servers around the globe to ensure that visitors get the best experience when they visit your website.  CloudFlare offers a free plan along with a few paid plans which offer firewalls and further protection.  That being said the free plan is more then enough for most visitors.  CloudFlare even has a free WordPress plugin to make it easier to implement.  You can download the CloudFlare Plugin for WordPress.

Cloudflare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the Cloudflare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: Cloudflare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare Overview

 

Evaluate Your Shopping Cart and Checkout Process

This is an important tip, make your checkout process easy and simple!  I’ve been to too many websites where the checkout process is too many steps and drawn out.  Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems website owners face.  Don’t let it happen to you!  Go through your checkout process as if you were buying a product.  You want to make it as simple and fast as possible.  Don’t make your visitors have to register on your website just to buy something.  You want to make it a clean page with the product the customer is purchasing, get their billing and shipping formation and then provide a simple payment option.  Don’t have banners or fancy images on the page.  You want your customer to be able to see what they are purchasing and get them to fill out their information.

The best shopping carts offer a seamless ordering process.  Display the product, coupon codes, billing and shipping details and payment options.  Check out this great article from Shopify on how to improve the checkout process on your website.

Add Live Chat To Your Website

Interacting with your visitors in real-time gives you a huge advantage.  Adding Live Chat allows you to engage your visitors and answer their questions.  You can even walk them through the order process to ensure you get the sale.

You can increase your conversion rate by over 200% by simply adding Live Chat to your website.  Live Chat gives your customers immediate access to help and gives you a direct channel to your customer to find out what they are looking for.  It saves costs on phone support and most people these days prefer to chat rather then call in.  Adding Live Chat is one of the best things you can do to improve conversions and improve your customers experience.  For example if you have a hesitant customer you can offer a coupon code to them directly through your chat and get the sale.  Live Chat is invaluable and you should really consider adding it to your website.

You can add Live Chat to your website here.

With these 3 simple tips you can improve your website and customer experience for Holiday Shoppers.  What are you waiting for, get started!

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