The holiday season is an opportunity to make massive sales for online shops and small businesses. Shoppers are eager to buy gifts for friends and family, and store owners look for ways to cater to their customers’ shopping goals.
To get the most out of this upcoming holiday season, you should optimize your website’s user interface design and user experience design. If not, you will miss out on sales and possibly lose your customers.
In this blog, we will expand on this idea of optimizing your eCommerce website for UI and UX design. Plus, we will include some tips and tricks for delighting online shoppers during the holidays. Let’s dive in.
How to make your website’s UI and UX design ready for the holiday season
Designing your website to reflect the holiday spirit can boost sales and other success metrics. Therefore, we’ve highlighted some tips to achieve this below.
Redesign your website homepage
Everybody loves a little holiday cheer. Change up your website’s homepage so it reflects the holiday spirit. This is an excellent way to tell your customers that you have them in mind for the holiday season. It also creates an impression that your store is the perfect place for their holiday shopping.
You don’t need to redesign the whole website to achieve this; you can redesign elements like fonts, photographs, and color palettes. You can also change your homepage promo highlights to holiday-specific items such as gifts, holiday messages, and links to gift guides. Adding festive CTA buttons, merry social media icons, and holiday themed colors can also excite your customers to make purchases.
Use responsive design for mobile phones
Many shoppers prefer to shop with their phones during the holiday season. According to a statistical report survey by OuterBox, 79% of smartphone users made a purchase online using a mobile device in the last six months of February 2022. Therefore, it is essential that you make shopping easier for your customers by using a responsive design.
A responsive design for mobile should fit into any screen size and shape. This way, customers can easily view your products, see prices, add items to their cart and make purchases regardless of the type of mobile phone they use. You may also consider creating a mobile app for your website to make things easier.
Optimize your website speed
A fast-loading website is crucial for your success this holiday season. Several studies have confirmed that a slow website negatively impacts sales, conversion, and ranking on search engines.
To avoid these situations, you should carry out website performance optimization to ensure a fast and responsive website. You can use website optimization tools like Google PageSpeed or GTmetrix to know your speed score and see recommendations for improvement.
Some general tips to improve your website page speed include; using a caching plug-in, using the latest WordPress version or WooCommerce, optimizing product images, and using Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Improve your website search system
You can make it easy for your customers to buy from you by improving your website search system. Many shoppers use the search button when the homepage is not showing exactly what they want. If your customers find it challenging to use your search, they will bounce off your website.
Here are some tips to improve your eCommerce search;
- Make the site search visible
- Optimize your search for the terms your customers use, even if it might be jargon.
- Use the autocomplete and error correction features.
- Have enough filtering options.
- Suggest complementary items in the search result.
These tips on improving your search system can boost conversions and improve sales.
Display product recommendations based on interest
Recommending products to your customers based on their interests can increase sales. This includes products they recently browsed or purchased. They can be displayed in pop-ups, shopping carts, or even on redirected pages. You can also show your promotional offers and discounts.
Doing this can improve the conversion rate, decrease the bounce rate and boost the average order value.
What should you avoid when developing a search-optimized website?
Here’s a list of items to kick to the curb when optimizing your website this holiday season.
- Using many ads above the fold
- Duplicate content
- Buying cheap links to build domain authority
- Using hidden texts or links
- Keyword stuffing
Instead of these activities, consider practicing white-hat SEO.
Conclusion
An optimized website for user experience and user interface will increase overall sales during the holidays. Follow the optimization of website tips recommended in this article, it will place you among the season’s winners.
