How to give your website a Christmas makeover

During the Christmas season you can enjoy a festive atmosphere not only on the streets and in stores, but also online. Website owners should ask themselves what they can do to prepare their website for the Christmas season. From SEO measures to participation opportunities to social media engagement, website design and performance optimization, there are plenty of ways to make your website more festive and engage your customers.

Throughout the year, but especially at special times like Christmas, it’s crucial that you use search engine optimization - SEO for short - to ensure that your website performs well in Google search rankings and is found by as many users as possible. This involves ensuring that your website content is optimized in several ways - from content to media to text structure and more.

A few important actions you can take include writing meta information, inserting internal links, and adding keywords. Before you add any keywords, however, you should first conduct thorough keyword research to find out which terms and other phrases perform best in terms of search volumes.

Also, make sure that the data across all your pages, but especially on your landing page is always up to date. Visitors are easily irritated if they are greeted with Halloween content during the holidays. Make sure users feel right at home the moment they access your site.

It makes sense to announce any participation promotions on social media to attract existing and new users. Linking your website and content to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. isn’t just beneficial during Christmas time, but all year round. Through social media marketing, you can increase awareness of your website, but also your sales. Here are a few ideas:

• Christmas updates, e.g. with videos, pictures and info from your website crew and/or your products
• Announcement of promotions and coupons for your website
• Showing an altruistic side, supporting a Christmas fundraiser and keeping users updated about it
• Advent calendar on Facebook with different coupon codes
• Sending an exclusive discount code when retweeting on Twitter
• Small gift for the most beautiful winter photo on Instagram

You should also consider linking to your social media profiles in your newsletter. Send a digital Christmas card, to share holiday greetings with customers and clients in a more creative way. However, be mindful of how you address your customers. Your copy should always be polite and in line with your website branding. For some, a generic Christmas greeting is adequate. For others, a casual “To all the good and naughty ones out there!” or similar will work.

Admittedly, some website owners will overdo it with the festive look of their website, but there’s nothing wrong with a little winter magic – on the contrary. By discreetly adapting your website to featuring festive content, you are ultimately showing your customers that you’re maintaining a professional web presence and are committed to keeping it up-to-date. Some website builders provide templates that you could apply. Other suggested design consideration are listed below.

You could also embed holiday-themed melodies and songs to your website. Similar to visual decorations, WordPress website owners can install an audio plugin like “Christmas Music”. Alternatively, you could upload a desired music file to your website’s storage space. However, make sure that you use songs, compositions and melodies that are royalty-free. You can purchase these on sites such as Musicfox. Next, locate the page code and embed the following code text:

Simply insert the name of your selected song here instead of “songtitle”. A “true” at Autostart ensures that it will be played as soon as the page is opened. Swap “true” with “false” to turn off autoplay. Do the same with the Loop feature, which decides whether the song runs in continuous loops or not. We also recommend that you adjust the volume level. Avoid large music files as they may slow down page loading speed.

Once your website is all set for the holiday season, it may see higher traffic than usual. So far, so good - but beware! A high number of website visitors could mean longer page load times for your site and thus a poor user experience. Managed or shared hosting solutions can help you to address the problem. In addition to the highest security standards, these models offer optimized loading times for your website as well as protection against server failure.

If your website is an online store and you do not have in-depth knowledge of web development, consider using a webshop software to keep your e-commerce activities as straightforward and easy to manage as possible. If you purchase your desired online store platform through a hosting provider, you’ll receive technical support and your store will be ready for a rush of visitors. This way, you only need to worry about the content on your site and welcoming the holiday season with open arms.