WordPress E-Commerce Tips for the Holiday Season

The time of year has arrived when WordPress e-commerce sites are at their busiest. Shoppers around the world are looking for the perfect gifts to the give their loved ones, along with a little something special for themselves. To prepare for the holiday season, install some of these helpful WordPress e-commerce plugins and perform a few simple tasks to ensure your site performs optimally.

Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

Adobe predicted that holiday season e-commerce spending would reach above $100 billion this year. Of those billions of dollars customers will spend, 54 percent of all visits to e-commerce sites will take place on a smartphone or tablet. Sites that are not mobile-responsive lose customers. If you’re concerned that it will take too much time to make the necessary changes, try WordPress plugins like  WPtouch, AMP, WP Mobile Edition, Jetpack, or WordPress Mobile Pack to make your site mobile-friendly.

Maximize Customer Spending

To increase your average order value, it is imperative to find ways to make it easy for customers to buy more from your business. Cross-promote related items, bundle merchandise, and upsell add-ons and accessories to maximize how much each person spends on your e-commerce site. You can even create dedicated landing pages that show shoppers how to save by purchasing more or lists all of your holiday bundles.

Prepare for Increased Traffic

Load testing or stress testing allows you to see how well your site performs when usage is high. For instance, more people will navigate to your site to make their holiday purchases. Do you know if your site can handle the additional traffic? Tools such as Pingdom, GTmetrix, and PageSpeed Insights analyze your site and provide details for optimizing your site, as needed.

Additionally, these tools provide insights into whether or not your site speed is up-to-snuff. If your site is moving sluggishly, shoppers will click away and find an alternative e-commerce site that doesn’t make them wait. Don’t let slow site speed get in the way of a gangbusters holiday season for your organization. Install WordPress plugins such as W3 Total Cache and/or Autoptimize to prepare your site for the high-traffic holiday season.  

Send Abandoned Cart Emails

The holiday season is hectic for everyone. Someone might be in the middle of shopping your site with a cart full of merchandise but get distracted and navigate away. With a WordPress plugin such as WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart, guest and logged-in customers are notified via email when they have abandoned their orders. Using an email remarketing tool recovers up to 25 percent of abandoned shopping carts so it’s worth it to install this WordPress e-commerce plugin.  

Set Up Retargeting Ads

Maybe shoppers are perusing the products on your site but leaving before they add anything to their carts. In this case, you would want to have a plugin such as Perfect Audience Retargeting installed. A cookie is placed in a person’s browser when they visit your site. When they navigate away, retargeting delivers your ads to these individuals on other sites. These ads remind users to go back to your website to make the purchases they were considering earlier.

Need help getting your WordPress e-commerce site ready for the holiday season? Contact the WordPress experts at Proactive WP today to discuss a yuletide game plan for your business.