Now's the time for online retailers to start planning for the busy holiday shopping season. The holiday shopping season is crucial to digital businesses, so get started on 2024 now. 

Preparing your team for the holidays now will help them handle the stress of executing and operating during peak online shopping periods, as well as building experience with new team members and third-party partners before the peak season begins. To deliver an excellent customer experience, it is important to ensure that you and your team have proper planning and execution in place prior to the holidays. This will allow you to focus on areas such as logistics, supply chain, and many others that are vital to delivering a great customer experience.

This holiday conversion checklist ensures your website is ready for the holidays and maximizes conversions.

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7 Ways to Prepare Your Website for the Holiday Season

Even a slight delay in loading times can result in lost sales and a negative customer experience during this time. Several techniques have been developed over the years to boost website speed, and for good reason- improving site speed directly impacts funnel progression, conversion rates, and average order value.

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1. Content Optimization‍

On average, unoptimized images account for 75% of the weight of a webpage, which can significantly slow down your site. Optimizing images, scripts, and other resources is an essential component of reducing their size and improving load time. Use next-generation file formats like AVIF to achieve smaller file sizes while maintaining image quality. By prioritizing this, you can significantly improve the user experience and retain potential customers.

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2. Caching for Speed

‍Browser and server-side caching can help you deliver content more quickly and reduce server load. Rather than making users wait for pages to load after clicking, Predictive Caching can anticipate what content the user will want to view next. By caching pages locally before users interact with the site, N7’s Predictive Caching allows pages to load in milliseconds. With this approach, the edge extends directly into the user's device, ensuring content is ready for loading as soon as the user clicks, resulting in a sub-second load time.

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3. Leveraging a CDN

‍Your content must be distributed across multiple global servers through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) during peak shopping periods to minimize latency for users. Your site can handle higher traffic without slowing down when images and HTML are cached on edge servers. CDNs, such as N7's, provide dynamic content caching, as well as fine-grained control over HTML document edge caching. This can result in substantial speed gains.

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4. Minification and Compression

‍One of the best ways to speed up your site is to minify CSS, and JavaScript files. You can reduce the size of your files by removing unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments. The data transferred between your server and users' browsers will be minimized by enabling Gzip or Brotli compression, further reducing load times. 

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5. Lazy Loading and Strategic Media Loading

‍Due to the content richness of eCommerce websites, it is important to use lazy loading techniques to delay loading of non-critical sections until the user can see them. By doing so, the page renders faster and prevents the browser from being overwhelmed with unnecessary media files during loading.

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6. Make site more visible to Google Crawlers

‍Online retailers need to improve visibility to search engine crawlers during the holiday season, which can lead to higher SEO rankings and increased organic traffic. To ensure all content is properly indexed, websites can serve static, pre-rendered pages to search engines, especially JavaScript-heavy pages that are difficult to crawl. By providing an efficient pre-rendering solution, N7 SERA ensures your site remains visible, fast, and SEO-friendly during the busiest shopping season.

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7. Intelligent, Fully Managed Security Solutions

‍When websites face heightened cyber threats. These advanced solutions automatically detect and address vulnerabilities in real time, securing flaws and stopping complex threats like malicious bots, API attacks, and malware. Managed by certified security experts, they provide round-the-clock protection, ensuring your business remains secure whether you're at full capacity or operating with minimal staff. This robust defense layer not only protects your customers' data but also ensures uninterrupted service, enhancing trust and maintaining smooth user experiences throughout the busiest time of year.

In summary, optimizing your website for the holiday season goes beyond load times—it's about creating a seamless, secure experience that boosts conversions, customer loyalty, and search visibility. Techniques like image and video optimization, caching, CDN integration, lazy loading, faster indexing, and robust security solutions ensure your site is not only fast but also protected against threats like malicious bots and API attacks. This combination prepares your site for heavy traffic while offering a smooth, safe user experience, driving higher sales and engagement during the busiest time of the year.

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If you’d like to get specific advice for your site’s performance, simply request a free Holiday Readiness Assessment from our team. Email us at n7sales@n7.io.

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