It’s hard to believe that the holiday season is already here! For a lot of us, it means a time of festivities and celebrations with friends and family. It also means it’s time to get your website ready for the holiday season. There are a few things you need to do before your site goes live to ensure your business stays at the top of its game. Check out these four tips for getting your website ready for the holidays.
Ensure your site is up to date
It can be easy to get busy and not update your site for a while. But now is the perfect time to ensure everything is up-to-date, especially before the holiday season. There are many new things happening in digital marketing, like changes in Google’s algorithm, so make sure you incorporate those updates on your website.
It might also be a good time to think about refreshing your branding or updating your images. You want to make sure that your site looks current and up to date with what’s happening in the digital world.
Check for broken links
What better time to have a broken link than during the busiest time of year? It sounds counterintuitive, but it happens. Even if your website is updated monthly, there’s a chance that a link has been broken for a while and you just didn’t notice.
One way to check for broken links is to do an internal crawl of your site. This involves navigating through all the pages on your website and checking to see if any of them are no longer live or lead back to 404 pages.
If you’re not sure how to do this, let Google be your guide! You can use their free tool Fetch as Googlebot on Webmaster Central. It will tell you what pages Google sees and whether they’re working properly for it.
Add some holiday decor
This is the most obvious of the four steps. But it’s also one of the most important. Add some holiday decor to your website so that it matches the season. This doesn’t have to be anything too fancy. A simple banner or Christmas tree will do!
The holidays are a time for family and friends. So, make sure to add some images of people enjoying time with one another on your site, too! This will also create an emotional connection between your business and your customers.
Protect your site from cyber threats
Your site is your company’s virtual storefront. As such, you’re always looking for ways to increase traffic and conversions. The more people visit your site, the more money your business will make. Cyber threats are a major concern for businesses during the holiday season due to the increased traffic to their site.
What can you do to protect yourself from cyber threats?
- Install an SSL certificate on your website. This will encrypt your data so even if it’s intercepted, it can’t be read by scammers who could steal valuable information on your customers or employees.
- Upgrade your security protocols to keep up with new technology that hackers may use.
- Monitor any suspicious activity on your site and have an emergency plan in place if disaster strikes.
Need assistance in sprucing up your website to reflect the festive season? Our web development team is always happy to help!
From all the staff at Hosting Australia, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!
