2020 Christmas Checklist For Website Owners

The Christmas season is just around the corner and, whether you are trading as usual or shutting down for the period, there are things you can do to ensure 2020 kicks off successfully.

1. Christmas eCards / Email Campaigns

There is no better time than the holidays to send a thank you note to your client base. It is a prime time to send a customised Christmas eCard. You can also use this correspondence as a way to highlight your Christmas closures, any specific promotions currently running or to simply thank your clients for doing business with you throughout the year.

Use colorful designs, beautiful pictures, and numbers that prominently display discounts. No one wants to read large chunks of text, so keep it simple and to the point.

2. Analyse Your Website Operations

Update your store hours for the holiday season across your website, search engine listings (Google My Business, Bing etc.) and social media profiles (Facebook, Pinterest etc.) If you are going on holidays during the period and are pausing your online store, consider implementing an auto reply or store notices to avoid customer disappointment.

3. Plan Your Google Ads Campaigns

The last thing you want over the festive period is for your Ad budget to be depleted and to miss out on valuable traffic leading up to Christmas. Check your budgets and plan ahead to ensure you are prepared for the period.

Ensure you have your account configured to pause and enable your campaigns accordingly. For example, pause all Christmas campaigns on December 24th and reenable your standard ads after Boxing Day.

4. Optimise Your Website For Sales

Google Analytics conducted a study to find out which days within the holiday season generated conversions2. This was looking at what days shoppers clicked on ads or actually bought something. These days saw the biggest transaction volume:
  • The second Monday in December
  • The third Monday in December
  • The second Tuesday in December
By understanding the best converting days, your business can implement measures to optimise your store’s conversion rate.

5. Schedule Your Content

WordPress allows users to schedule when new posts will be published live on your website. In this way, you can create blog posts before you close for Christmas and can set these to go live while you are on holiday. The same can be implemented for FaceBook posts, too. Doing so, ensures that fresh content is added to your site even when you are not there to manually publish it. Not only does this keep your SEO efforts active but it also shows your customers and visitors that your website (and therefore your business, by extension) is looked after and attended to at all times of the year. This is a positive consideration from a customer service point of view.

6. Review Your Site Security

If your website and it’s plugins are up to date, it is unlikely that your website will go down over the Christmas holidays. However one way a website could be compromised is through a hack attempt. Your website team will be able to advise a contact and a contact name who you could reach out to in the event of a seasonal attack. Otherwise, it is a good idea to have some core maintenance and updates done on your site to ensure it ticks along smoothly over Christmas.

7. Implemement New Systems & Website Changes

If business tends to slow significantly over the holidays it is an optimal time to roll out new technologies or test new systems. This minimises disruption to your usual customers. For example, appointment bookings could be moved online, payment gateways could be implemented or significant changes could be made to your website.


2Waisberg, D, Whittenburg, J. (16 October 2014). Online retailers: The secret to seasonal success in 2014. Retrieved September 21, 2015 from http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/10/online-retailers-secret-to-seasonal.html

Published on Wednesday, 13 November 2019 under Online Marketing.