Your website is your business’s online home. It is the place where your customers get to know more about your products and services. During the holidays, your website traffic is likely to go up as consumers complete their shopping. Unfortunately, errors in your website can make a negative impression on visitors. And many will simply leave and go to your competitors’ websites instead. So, ensuring your website has no issues should be your top priority as we go into the holidays season. Here are some tips on how to improve your website for the holidays.
Test Your Website for any issue
The first step in improving your website is to figure out what is needed. To do this, simply visit your website and make sure everything works. Click various links, look at the photos, and try out various features.
You can view the pages on your site, make sure that all of the images load, there aren’t any errors like (404 not found errors), and that your contact form works.
Ensures Your Website Loads Quickly
Even if everything on your website technically works, if it takes forever to load, people will leave. When you visit each page, make sure everything pulls up within a few seconds. If it doesn’t, then focus on fixing it as soon as possible.
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Test the Contact Form
Another important element to focus on is the contact area. Ensure that any update you have done recently doesn’t lead to any error. This means you may have people trying to contact you without success. Try to send messages regularly to make sure there is no issue on your contact page.
Fix Technical Errors
In some cases, you may not notice every error just by visiting. But there are tools to help you weed out these technical issues. You can use a web crawler such as the Screaming Frog SEO Spider or OnCrawl to crawl your website. Each of them will report technical errors, 404 not found pages, redirects, and other technical issues that should be fixed. In addition, you can verify your website in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for free and they will tell you about any technical issues on your website. Once you identify the technical errors, fix them immediately.
Optimize Images
If your website loads slowly, the culprit may be your photos. There is a good chance you uploaded large files to the website. So, resize or compress the photos to the actual size you need so they don’t take up unnecessary time.
Add Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you learn more about how people use your website. You can identify popular pages and search terms. And it may even call your attention to ongoing issues like a high bounce rate on certain pages. Installing Google Analytics on your website is easy. You simply sign up for free and upload a code to your site.
Setup Automatic Back For Your Website
Hackers tend to be especially active during the holidays. They know that both businesses and consumers are really active online. So, they may try to steal your data or take control of your website. If you experience issues on your website, making a backup of your website can help you get it back up and running quickly.
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Don’t Make Dramatic Changes
If you want to make big changes to your website, the holiday season is actually not the time for that. Big changes often come with complications. So, it is best to save these for a less busy time and instead focus on fixing small problems.
“Any major changes to the design or functionality could have more negative effects than positive ones. I recommend waiting until the holiday season is over to start thinking about any major changes.”
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