With people spending more time indoors to escape the chill of winter, they may also spend more time on the Internet, preferring cyber shopping to the real thing. That can mean a boon to your business—especially in light of the upcoming holiday shopping explosion. Black Friday and Cyber Monday will drive many shoppers to web-based businesses. Here are a few ideas to get your website ready for the winter shopping surge.
(Pixabay / fancycrave1)
Check your Speed
Make sure your website opens fast enough to keep customers engaged. Speed is key. If your pages are slow to open, virtual shoppers may lose interest and move to another website
The best way to assess your website and see how fast it opens in comparison to other sites is to perform a speed test. GTmetrix is a free tool for assessing website speed. If the speed is not at par with the industry standard, GTmetrix can make recommendations for improving it. It can also perform daily, weekly, or monthly monitoring of a business website and provide real-time alerts when a site is slowing down.
W3C Compliance
Websites must comply with the code standards set up by those who invented and made the World Wide Web work. The HTML and CSS codes of a website must conform to the standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, an international community that develops open standards to ensure the growth of the Internet.
Optimizing Images
A common problem among websites is slow-loading images, including thumbnails. Slow-loading images will have a negative impact on a website’s ranking, which will also result in losing potential customers. The use of image optimization plugins, such as WP Smush Image Optimization, could solve this problem and bring in more potential customers.
Before winter hits, invest a little time getting your website ready for the crush of holiday and winter Internet shoppers.
