Holidays & Website Speeds: Why Your Site Needs to Keep Up

To most business owners, the holidays truly signal the most wonderful time of the year with more sales, profit, greater returns, and opportunities to turn customers into lifelong patrons. Although it is safe to assume that most of your tools are ready to take on the biggest shopping season of the year, there’s one part of your strategy that might not be as ready: Your website.

The heavy battle that lies ahead

Compared to the other tools and facets of a holiday campaign that take a beating during the season, websites often take the biggest hit because of the greater amount of stress that it’s subject to.

Often, pages that aren’t prepared for the holidays and the larger influx of visitors that they’re bound to take end up crashing under the loads they experience. Unfortunately, these crashes often result in businesses inadvertently disgruntling or dissatisfying customers to the point where they lose conversion opportunities and fall short of their sales goals.

Although it may seem like having your website suddenly crash during the holiday is your biggest problem, the truth is that the bigger hindrances actually come from slow website speeds.

Why does your website speed matter during the holidays?

If there’s anything that’s bound to tick customers off and shoo them far, far away from your business, it’s a slow website that doesn’t want to load no matter how many times it’s refreshed.

Contrary to popular belief, compromised website speeds and loading times are the biggest deal breakers because of how negatively they can affect user experiences. Compared to crashes that can be remedied with a reload and a few minutes of patience, slower websites make for a problem that lasts hours or days and discourages customers from purchasing. 

The importance of an adequate website loading speed comes from the fact that speed (alongside reliability) work hand-in-hand to determine the operational success of e-commerce websites. Seeing that users grow even more impatient by the day, it’s also easy to see why the rate at which a website can load and operate matters when it comes to satisfying customers well enough for a sale!

How to prepare your website for faster loading times amid more traffic 

At this rate, you might start to feel worried about whether or not your website can hold up in terms of maintaining faster loading times and satisfying customers. Thankfully, there are a few preventative measures that you can set in place so that you won’t need to worry about having a website that falls behind and robs you of a successful season:

Measure #1: Upgrade your servers with a better hosting service

With a hosting solution that is more capable of taking on a greater influx of customers, your website can have the reinforcement it needs to load smoothly and quickly as expected. For instance, investing in the enterprise solutions that I/O Zoom provides will make it easier to keep everything up to spec even as the number of visitors you get grows!

Measure #2: Test, test, and test

Among the different ways you can prepare your business’s website for more success over the holidays, one of the most effective methods is continually testing. When you start testing your website’s capacity more often, it becomes easier to point out weak spots that need to be remedied or reinforced to minimize slowdowns!

Conclusion

When it comes to improving your website and ensuring that it doesn’t fall below expectations in the face of bigger crowds and more visitors, one of the most critical factors you’ll need to take care of is your page speeds. Through this guide’s help, you will have a firm understanding of why speed matters and get a keen understanding of what it takes to keep everything running as smoothly as possible!

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