How to Optimize Your Magento Site for the Christmas Shopping Rush

For any ecommerce merchants like you, the store website is their bread and butter, especially during major sales seasons like Christmas. With unusually high traffic to your website these days, your site might encounter problems like slow speed, crashing which brings about terrible shopping experiences for your customers. But if your site runs smoothly, customers will enjoy shopping with you and may come back in other sales events. Therefore, having a healthy website during this shopping spree is like running in a race with a good pair of shoes.

I bet that almost all online store owners are already keeping their nose under the grindstone to improve their site performance. You don’t want to be left behind in the game, do you? Sure, here are tips for Christmas website optimization that Magento merchants like you definitely need!

1. Make SEO a priority

Before worrying about your site crashing because of too high traffic, be sure that the traffic is high enough. In that case, you need to maintain good SEO performance to keep the site reach increasing. Once your site is noticed by the search engine, you’ll:

• Achieve a higher return on investment (ROI)
• Maximize the exposure of your brand on the web
• Help potential customers find your products and services

My advice is to have an ultimate Magento SEO checklist, which includes checklists for on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. This type of checklist can spare you from missing anything when doing SEO for your Christmas website.

2. Speed up your Christmas website

Have you ever felt annoyed when waiting too long for a shopping page to load? Well, I have, especially on big sales events. And usually, when my patience is dampened by several times of waiting in vain, I’ll exit the shop to go to another.

I’m sure you never want your customers to experience the same. Because it neither boosts your revenue nor persuades your customers to re-visit your store. 

To avoid such cases, lessen the number of animated graphics or big buttons used to decorate your Christmas website because it is those elements that slow it down significantly. If necessary, use a tool to improve loading speed. Lazy Load is one of them. This FREE yet powerful tool speeds up your website by 70%! With this extension installed, the website will not load images and videos until a user scrolls down to them, making the loading time decrease dramatically. As a result, the SEO score is bettered, which ensues higher Google ranking.

3. Enhance your Christmas website conversion rate

Increasing conversion rates for your site is vital, especially before Christmas, because high conversion rates boost your website dramatically without you allocating too much resources on advertising. You can better conversion rates by:

• Adding ALT text to your images for SEO
• Speeding up checking process
• Writing relevant and appealing product descriptions
• Use clear, high-quality images

4. Gasp visitors’ attention at first glance

There are millions of ecommerce stores competing to attract shoppers to their Christmas sales events. Try to stand out. Inform your customers about your sales campaign beforehand and if possible, make them remember it. Another advice is that when they land at your Christmas website, encourage them to shop with discounts right away. By doing that, you stand the chance to steal customers from your rivals.

Creating a pop-up for your Christmas website is a brilliant idea, because it is economical and labour-saving. If you’re interested in a tool to help you effortlessly build a Christmas notification pop-up, consider Popup Builder – one of the flagship products from Magezon. As its name suggests, this extension helps build high-converting popups of any kind within minutes. With more than 30 tasteful ready-made templates, you’ll save a lot of time and budget hiring a graphic designer. If you already have our Magezon Page Builder and Blue Form Builder, Popup Builder is a superior choice as it is fully compatible with those two Builder extensions!

5. Highlight your offers and discounts on the Christmas website pages

Since the purchasing of your customers is your source of revenue, make it run as seamlessly as possible. Be sure to feature your Christmas offers on the most visible pages to inform and remind the visitors of the sales happening; and so that your shoppers won’t have to search for them. 

If you can allocate some budget on creating Christmas banners, Magento 2 Promo Banner can be a wise choice. This extension helps to build striking banners and close buttons, too. It allows you to display your promotional banners wherever you want. A perfected purchase trigger you shouldn’t miss out!

So how about off-page promotion? Well, you can frequently publish posts about your Christmas deals and discounts on social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. By that way, shoppers will be informed about your promotional program as well as getting to know your website if they haven’t.

6. Tighten the security of your Christmas website

Website security needs to be ensured everyday rather than on sales events only. However, on such days, you should be more cautious than usual because hackers are ready to take advantage of a huge number of transactions being conducted. Apart from monetary loss, hacking can result in a sharp decrease in traffic, your website then being suspended or crashing, and even identity theft. Your personal data, and that of your visitors, could be at stake.

It is recommended that you should keep you and your team aware of signs of cyber attacks, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This type of attacks occur regularly and it is getting more and more sophisticated. Investing in cyber security is a must if you want to detect and tackle any potential issue beforehand.

7. Reinforce your customer support

People shopping in holiday seasons have a host of queries about the campaign-related topics such as discount terms and policy, returns and shipping method. And they want to find the answers as soon as possible as they’re in a rush to get the best deals and have no time to spare. In that case, you’d want to display your contact info on all the pages of your website so that they can reach you immediately.

Bear in mind that excellent customer service is the backbone of every successful e-commerce business. And customer satisfaction through customer service is not all about speed, but also efficiency. Here are some tips to enhance customer service for your Magento store:

• Live chat/ Chatbots: Shoppers would definitely love it if there are instant messaging options like live chat or chatbots on the website to support them right away. A study shows that live chat on ecommerce stores drives 3-5 times more conversion, this can be because quicker response satisfies customers and thereby encouraging them to make a purchase.
• FAQs: In case your customers prefer self-service, or you’re not able to be on hand 24/7 to support them via live chat, create a FAQ page consisting of base knowledge about the Christmas sales event. Offering regularly requested information on your Christmas website will not only help to cut down on customer support time and labour but also good for SEO. Using this Magento FAQ extension can aid you in creating and customizing a SEO-friendly FAQ page faster.
• Customer service software: The fastest way to streamline customer service is to combine effective human support and innovative technological solutions. These tools let you better manage customer tickets and respond to them in a blink of an eye. Consider installing this FREE Advanced Contact Form extension. With features like monitoring the contact info of customers from the backend, setting up automatic responder, and customizing email templates, it will be a boon to your customer service process.

8. Bolster mobile responsiveness

With more than half of all internet traffic shopping from a mobile device, it is vital that website is primed for mobile viewing. Moreover, buyers usually come from social networks like Facebook or Instagram, which they access on their smartphones or tablets. If you’re advertising products on these platforms (as you should be), you’ll have to have a mobile optimized website to house the influx of customers you’ll be recruiting. Otherwise, there’s nearly no use of social media advertising.

What can you do to make your Christmas website mobile responsive? Have a look at these pieces of advice:

• Opt for a mobile-responsive theme or template
• Minimize the size of images and CSS files
• Adjust button size and placement
• Space out your links
• Use a legible font
• Avoid too many pop-ups
• Test regularly

And that’s all you need!

After reading the article, please don’t mistake that website optimization is for major events, but rather for everyday running your ecommerce website. With these tricks up your sleeve, I am certain your business will rock this shopping season. And however harsh the sales race is, you’ll stand firmly on your foothold and see money flowing into your pocket, won’t you?