Shoppers plan to spend $902 this holiday season, with ecommerce being the most popular way to shop, according to a 2024 survey of US consumers from the National Retail Federation.
The week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday will account for a large part of this, with 23% of online holiday sales happening during this week in 2023, according to Salesforce data . However, there’s still plenty of opportunity to capture sales throughout the season, with 2 in 5 shoppers saying they still needed to shop for “all or most” of their gifts in a Retail Brew survey conducted 10 days before Christmas 2023.
So whether you have a few hours, a few days, or are already thinking about how to make next year run smoothly, here are some ways to prepare your site for increased traffic and boost holiday sales.
Predict and prepare for peaks
Estimate traffic
Even a very high-level prediction of holiday traffic is useful to set expectations and assign responsibilities. Take a look at:
Peak traffic of last holiday season;
Percentage increase in peak traffic compared to last year’s typical daily/weekly average, especially if that average has changed year-over-year;
Busiest days and times (Cyber Monday, weekends, workday lunchtime, etc).
If you work with technology vendors that take care of hosting your site, it’s good to reach out to your customer representatives and give them a heads-up about these estimates.
Set up clear team communication
Make sure that the developers, marketers, merchandisers, and other stakeholders responsible for holiday ecommerce are aligned on:
Which metrics will be monitored, such as page load speed, mobile site speed, server utilization, number of errors, bounce rates, etc.
Where these metrics can be found, ideally in a dashboard or with automated alerts.
Potential issues to look out for, especially if they led to downtime in previous years.
What actions should be taken if problems do pop up and who is responsible for taking them.
How to communicate updates and issues, such as in a dedicated Slack channel.
Secure and stabilize the site
Take steps to minimize the amount of surprises that can happen during your busiest days:
If your commerce and content platforms don’t provide automatic security updates, install the latest security patches.
Update third party plugins and integrations.
Run scalability tests to find and fix major performance bottlenecks, taking into account different browsers, devices, and network connection speeds.
Implement a code freeze for expected peak traffic times.
Ensure backups are ready so that you can quickly restore if something does go wrong. Depending on the platforms you use, your technology vendors might take care of backups for you.
Optimize delivery for holiday traffic
While teams most likely won’t be making any major structural changes to improve website performance right before the holidays kick off, there’s still time for some relatively quick steps to help this season run a little smoother.
Action | Explanation | Example |
Simplify operations | During the busiest holiday periods, consider pausing slower website elements or simplifying customer journey steps that typically use a lot of real-time calculations. |
|
Configure caching | Increase the length of time that frequently requested pages stay alive in the cache to reduce the load on the servers. This prioritizes scalability over content freshness, so how you cache dynamic pages likely shouldn’t change, and the configuration can be flipped back after peak holiday traffic. | Double the cache lifetime of relatively static pages such as the homepage, FAQS, and marketing campaign pages. |
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) | A CDN stores cached versions of your website on multiple servers worldwide, shorting the time it takes to deliver content to global end users. CDNs also help with load balancing to spread out traffic between servers. How simple it is to set up a CDN will depend on your technology, some vendors provide CDN capabilities, and there are also third-party options like Cloudfare and Fastly . | Berlin-based visitors will be served content from a data center in Germany, if those servers get overwhelmed or fail, traffic will be diverted to a data center in Belgium. |
Spruce up essential content
Check that your most important pages and products are good to go. A priority list based on factors like traffic and conversions helps make sure that high-value content gets attention.
Clarify customer service details
Create a stress-free experience for shoppers and ease the holiday strain on your customer service team by making sure practical information is easy to find and to understand.
Contact information
Put contact information in a prominent spot and confirm that all contact methods (email, phone, chat, etc) are working.
Shipping and delivery
Holiday shoppers need to know if their gifts will arrive on time, help them feel confident by:
Clearly display delivery times and shipping costs.
Check that the email flow for shipping notifications and package tracking is working.
Highlight any buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) options, which is especially important as the delivery windows close. A third of orders during the week of Christmas 2023 were BOPIS, according to Salesforce’s analysis of global holiday ecommerce data .
- Adding a banner or message such as “place your order by the following date for guaranteed Christmas delivery”. Here are the most common holiday shipping deadlines retailers used in 2023, though be sure to confirm any cut-off dates with your shipping partners.
Return policy
In 2023 retailers across all verticals saw a 20% holiday return rate , according to Salesforce data.
Return policies are an important decision factor when buying gifts, with an easy process prioritized over free returns, according to a 2024 survey of holiday shoppers . Make sure the return process is clearly explained and information is consistent throughout the site, especially if you have a special return policy for holiday sales.
Product guides
Including useful guides in the product page can help gift buyers make their decision, and help recipients get the most out of their gifts. For instance:
Instruction manuals;
Care and cleaning advice;
Related products, accessories, and services;
Related editorial content like project ideas or style guides.
Loyalty programs
Welcome new customers with clear information about how they can earn rewards, especially right after the holidays when gift recipients are meeting your brand for the first time. Search interest in loyalty programs was 50% higher in January compared to December, according to Google consumer insights .
Help shoppers find the perfect gift
Point holiday visitors in the right direction as quickly as possible with some seasonal tweaks to the site:
Show high-converting products and holiday best sellers to the homepage, such as with a product carousel or a banner that links to a holiday landing page.
Create temporary categories in the product navigation like gifts by price point, holiday deals, or most popular items.
Update top-performing landing pages and blogs to include current products.
Create gift guides around your most popular products, trending topics, or the search keywords you already rank well for (“24 small gifts for a DIY advent calendar”, “Presents with a dark academia aesthetic”, “Gifts for people who love cute office supplies”).
Put positive customer reviews on product pages, category pages, the homepage, and any other relevant pages.
Adjust the product recommendations model to be more influenced by trending and popular items than by past purchases, as shoppers are looking for gifts for others.
Alternatively, keep the recommendations model as is and change the tagline to something like “treat yourself”, as 61% of people buy something for themselves while holiday shopping .
Offer gift cards as an add-on at checkout, as 65% of consumers plan to buy them as gifts for others this holiday season.
Make next holiday season stress-free with composable commerce
If it felt like this year’s plans revolved more around the limitations of your technology than the needs of your customers, then modernizing your tech stack should be a top new year's resolution.
As companies scale digital business, many of them run into growing pains caused by legacy platforms that were designed for simple, static webshops. Taking a composable commerce approach allows teams to gradually move towards a modern tech stack that can handle complex needs and high traffic all year round.
Pick your own best-of-breed tech stack
The core idea of a composable approach is that companies can “compose” their own unique tech stack with modular solutions that best fit each area of business. Instead of being locked into a set of features from a single vendor, composable commerce lets you mix-and-match capabilities of different solutions and easily add, remove, or replace the components of your stack as needs change.
Build fast websites with the latest best practices
Composable solutions are typically headless , meaning that backend and frontend code are separated or “decoupled”. Backend platforms deliver all information in a standardized way via APIs and teams can use their choice of frontend frameworks and rendering strategies to build high-performing websites that can handle Black Friday levels of traffic any day of the year.
Alokai is a Frontend-as-a-Service (FEaaS) solution that lets teams quickly build, deploy, and manage their composable storefronts. Alokai provides core frontend components, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and an API orchestration layer that makes it easy to bring together data from all your composable tools and deliver a consistent experience across all your digital channels.
Push out changes quickly and safely
With backend and frontend code decoupled, changes can be made to the website without the risk of disrupting backend functionality.
This means that holiday campaigns don’t require weeks of back-and-forth between marketing and development teams. Marketers can push out content in minutes, allowing them to quickly make improvements and react to trends all throughout the holidays.
To learn more about the drivers, benefits, and barriers that are shaping the composable commerce landscape, check out our latest report: Composable Commerce Trends 2025 .
