With the summer coming to a close it’s time to get ready for the fall. More specifically, it’s time to get ready for the holiday season once again. During this time of year, your site will rack up a ton of traffic. 

This could spell bad news for you if your servers can’t handle a sudden flux of users coming in or if you don’t have enough staff to take care of it. To help you tackle this yuletide challenge, here are a few tips on how to get website traffic to work for you during the busy holidays months.  

1. Make Sure Your Server Can Handle It 

If you’re selling holiday accessories like Christmas lights or Thanksgiving greeting cards, then your servers could become overloaded fast. For every hour that your servers are down, that’s an hour worth of sales that you could have been making. 

To avoid losing money, talk to your web host and see how much bandwidth you’re using right now. If you’re reaching your limit on a normal day, you should probably upgrade before the holidays arrive. 

2. Hire More Online Staff

If you have a live chat on your site to answer customer questions, you may want to have a little holiday hiring spree. Your site will be seeing many questions and requests during this time. 

If you can’t answer a customer in a timely manner because your chat is backed up, then they will get impatient and go elsewhere. 

3. Make the Site Mobile Friendly

Even if you don’t have a recipe blog or holiday advice site, you still may want to make your site mobile friendly. People are always on the go during the holiday months rather it’s shopping or cooking in the kitchen. 

Laptops are mobile but that doesn’t mean someone wants to lug there’s into the kitchen while they cook. 

4. Update Old Holiday Posts

Of course, you’ll be posting holiday themed blogs if your website has a blog section. On top of posting up new blogs though, consider going back and tweaking your old ones. 

This is because of Google algorithms. It looks at your popular posts and then the last date they were edited. Thanks to this, if one of your holiday posts made it big last year, you can give it a few adjustments and make it relevant again.  

They don’t have to be large changes. You can update the photo, add a little extra content, change the date to the current year, or replace any dead links.  

How to Get Website Traffic to Work for You During the Holiday Months 

The holidays are a busy time for everyone. This includes websites. You need to make sure that yours is ready for the increase in traffic. 

We hope that you’re able to use these tips on how to get website traffic to work for you to ensure yours doesn’t crash this season. 

Don’t have your site up and running yet? Check out our site for tips on how to build yours.