Effective Tips To Make Your WordPress Site Ready for the Holidays

The most awaited time of the year is here again. The festive season is all about celebrations, gifting presents, and baking cakes. Of course, enjoying your favorite TV series by lying on the couch. For many of us, the holiday season means some time off from the hustle-bustle of life where you can relax and enjoy to the fullest.

However, you might utilize the time for some well-deserved rest, your WordPress site will continue working 24*7. For the smooth performance of your site, you will require the assistance of the best WordPress development company that will take care of its maintenance, mobile-friendliness, security, etc. 

Within this post, you will learn the tips and tricks to make your WordPress site ready for the holidays. Let’s analyze them in detail:

# 1. Prepare your site for the traffic surge

Are you running an eCommerce store? The holidays can be a time when your site will face heavy traffic. Wondering why? Well, the majority of shoppers will spend their holiday gift shopping money online. One of the most important things that you should look into in this context is your website’s speed. 

Note that the slow loading time is the key factor for a rise in the cart abandonment rate. If you are a business owner, then you can lose out the potential customers that mean business to you in no time. 

The first thing that the WordPress development services should do is to check your host and plan out effective measures that they can take for an unexpected hike in the traffic. Within the cloud hosting, you can include more resources in just a couple of clicks. Some service providers provide automatic scaling if required. Whatever your host has in store, it is necessary to figure it out properly.  

# 2. Check site’s mobile-friendliness

The next essential thing that you should do is to make your site mobile-friendly. Did you know that 50% of online traffic comes from mobile devices and this will continue to rise in the coming years? Yes, it is absolutely true.  

For this reason, you should make your site mobile-friendly. You should also ensure the fact that you have a responsive web design for WordPress. It is best to look for reputed web designing services that can help you in this regard and create a website that adjusts with the screen size of any device.  

However, until and unless you find any big error, avoid introducing changes to your site’s design and functionality during the festive season.  

# 3. Make tight security 

Security is always a major concern for site owners. It becomes even more necessary during the holiday season. 

Since you all take a break from work (ideally), that means if your site goes down, you might not get notified. What if your WordPress site got hacked in your absence? Hackers are highly active during the holiday season and use the general downtime for increasing attacks. So, it is imperative to tighten up your site’s security to protect your valuable data from getting leaked. 

# 4. Make support a priority

If you have an eCommerce store, then you have to deal with a lot of customers. Especially, during the holidays, there will be lots of queries and complaints regarding the products. 

This increases the need for having strong customer support. Having this facility on your website will ensure that your customers will get an apt answer towards their raised concerns on time. Thus, it leads to higher customer satisfaction.  

# 5. Clean your website

Cleaning aids in the smooth functioning of a website. If you want to clean your site, then you should get rid of extraneous data like saved revisions, spam comments, etc. This will help in clearing the workspace which will help the visitors to a great extent. Due to this, you can easily shrink the size of your site. 

# 6. Create & schedule your content 

Even though you have taken a break from work but that does not mean you completely stop content marketing. If you run a blog, it will be great to keep posting relevant content even if you have taken off. Through this, you can engage your readers and will keep on building authority. Plus, Google likes those sites which update frequently. 

However, that does not mean you have to wake up early on Christmas morning to click on the publish button. With the help of WordPress’ scheduling feature, you can eliminate this need. You can access it by hitting on the Edit link within the Publish box. After that, you can set the day and time for your blog post. 

# 7. Automation of marketing

Along with the blog post, you should keep an eye on your marketing machine as well. For this, you should ensure that your social media handles are fed. You can do it effectively by deploying social scheduling tools like Buffer. CoSchedule plugin can also help you in achieving that. 

You can also consider creating and scheduling holiday messages like “Merry Christmas” or other good wishes. The customers will definitely be going to like this gesture from your end. 

Don’t forget your email subscribers. You can compose a holiday message for them. If in case, you have blog posts scheduled for that time period, then create accompanying emails and send them accordingly.  

Winding Up 

Preparing your WordPress site for the holiday season is the most vital step that you should focus on most. From the above points, it is clear that there are a variety of ways available through which you can spruce up your WordPress site for the holiday season. 

If you follow all the above-mentioned tips, your site will easily sail through this holiday season. That way, you can spend some quality time with your family and friends as you know that your web presence is completely safe.