5 Tips to Improve Your Website for Holiday Sales

The holidays are almost upon us, which means soon enough shoppers will be descending on not just the brick-and-mortar stores out there, but online stores as well. In fact, according to a study by consulting firm Accenture, more people plan on buying online than in-store this holiday season. While there are several things you can do to prepare for the increased traffic around the holidays, here are five relatively quick and easy ones that should help you welcome your online visitors with open arms:

1. Make sure your servers are ready. Every minute your site is down can cost you lots of money and have a negative impact on customer loyalty. Make sure that you have the appropriate server resources that are able to scale as the traffic to your site does. Additionally, if you don't have a content delivery network (CDN), get one immediately! CDN's are affordable, relatively easy to set up and can be a lifesaver.

While CDNs aren't exclusively responsible for keeping a site up, they make a huge difference in a site's performance. They allow you to store copies of website assets or files on many servers distributed across the internet so those files can be served from a location geographically as close as possible to the browser downloading the site. What does this mean? It means your site is going to load much, much faster, and your customers are going to be able to get to your products and check out much, much quicker.

2. Update your look. While most retailers take the time to decorate their brick-and-mortar stores to showcase their holiday spirit, they often neglect their online stores. It makes a big difference and goes a long way when consumers are given something different when they come to your website. While unique content and offerings are a given, design subtleties can go a long way as well to warm up to your holiday customers. Furthermore, consistency on all fronts matters, so if you're sprucing up your stores, make sure you spruce up your site as well. In a season with a lot of comparison shopping, every detail matters.

3. Get cozy with analytics. The great thing about an e-commerce site, or really anything online, is the ability to analyze and measure. You're able to see exactly what people are shopping for, the path they took to get to a product and what they left in their cart (if they happened to have abandoned). Set up specific goals and funnels in your analytics package to help determine more specifics about actions taking place on your website. You're going to get a ton of return visitors during the holiday season, so be prepared to cater to their needs. This means that someone within your organization should be tasked with checking analytics multiple times a day. Analytics not only allow you to take action now, they also can have an even bigger impact for next year's planning. Analytics provide you with irreplaceable intelligence into what is and what isn't resonating with your online shoppers.

4. Get more mileage out of your email list. Email lists still aren't being taken full advantage of by most retailers. While your list may be significant in size, not to mention filled with some of your most loyal customers, the same message shouldn't necessarily be sent to everyone on the list. If you have the ability to segment your list and messages, take advantage of that feature. If not, make sure you're sending out unique newsletters and promotions on a consistent basis during the holiday season — and don't be shy if you're sending more emails per week than you normally do. Consumers tend to be a little more forgiving as long as you're providing them new and exciting deals with each new email that comes through.

5. Ask your vendors for help. There are a lot of moving parts in running a successful online store, and each one generally includes a lot of vendor partners as part of the process. So with that in mind, make sure to contact each of your vendor partners to see what kind of tips, upgrades or resources they can offer, or, more importantly, what kind of deals they may be able to provide you with. It's not uncommon for shipping or credit card partners to make adjustments to your current rates. With shipping costs being such a big part of the decision-making process for consumers, any deal you can pass on to them is going to have a significant impact on your conversion rate.

There are an almost endless number of ways you can tweak your site for the holiday rush, but following these five simple tips can put you head and shoulders above your competitors. Be sure to analyze your results year-over-year — you may find yourself with a little extra holiday cheer this season.

Keith Scandone is the CEO of O3 World, a web design company.