Getting Your Ecommerce Website Ready for the Christmas Rush

October isn’t even over yet but online retailers will be gearing up for what is, for many, the busiest time of the year.

For many online retailers, Christmas can make or break the whole year. If yours is one, are you prepared for the festive shoppers?

We caught up with some of the specialists at Degree53 to get their advice on preparing your retail site for Christmas. Here are the questions they suggested you should ask yourself before flinging your virtual doors open to the Christmas trade.

Are You Fast Enough?

Nothing sends an online shopper running for the hills (or to your competitors) faster than a slow website. If your server’s running slow or your images are crashing your customers’ computers, you’ve got problems!

You can find out more about your website’s load speed at Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix and get advice on improving it.

Before an increase in shoppers, make sure you’re servicing them speedily.

Are you Mobile Ready?

In Q4 of 2015, over 40% of online retail sales were made on some form of mobile device.

It’s a safe bet to suggest that it will be at least that quantity again over Q4 of 2016.

Familiarise yourself with the devices your users are visiting your website from (you can do this using Google Analytics device reports) and take a look at the sites from those devices. Tablets and mobile devices will be a huge source of revenue from the retailers who are meeting the needs of shoppers on those devices.

Are you genuinely user friendly?

If you’re in tune with your site’s performance, you’ll already be aware of your conversion rate. It goes without saying that the better you convert your visitors to customers, the more money you’ll make from your traffic generation activities.

Conversion rate optimisation is often a long and on going process, but if you have any stand out UX issues on your site, it’s worth trying to identify and fix them before Christmas.

You can use tools like Hotjar to see how users interact with your website and, of course, get the advice of user experience specialists in terms of improving things.