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The season of gifting and sales is nearly upon us. I know, I know, Halloween hasn’t even been and gone yet, but us marketers have to plan ahead. Black Friday, Christmas, and the post Christmas sales are looming, so is your website ready for all that entails?
If this is your most busy period, any issues or downtime could be extremely costly.
Whether from:
Have you allowed enough time for any new pages or seasonal design changes to be implemented by your developers? Are your seasonal or sale pages ready and optimised for search?
There’s lots to consider, from both a technical standpoint, and from a more onsite, content related standpoint. So how do you prepare for this period and keep your site up and running smoothly. How do you ensure everything is ready to take full advantage of this busy time?
Important all year round, but if it isn’t managed, come your busiest periods, your site can fall down.
This one seems simple but is of great importance for functionality and security. It’s incredible how many sites we find that are riddled with out-of-date core versions and plugins. Keeping your WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP (which we’ll address separately further down the page) and plugins up-to-date is vital.
They are updated and patched for good reason. They continually make improvements to performance and security, to ensure your website is working well, and is secure. The older versions are no longer supported, thus pose security risks, and could cause compatibility issues, causing things to break.
Now, you don’t want to just go to your live site, press update all, and hope for the best. This could cause issues in itself. The latest version of WordPress or WooCommerce might not be compatible with the current version of a plugin you use. There may be new features which could change things onsite.
This is where staging sites come in. If you don’t know what a staging site is, you can learn lots more in our post “what-is-a-staging-site’. But essentially, it’s a more or less identical duplicate version of your site. It lives on a different server hidden from Google and visitors.
It gives you a site which should behave identically to yours where you can test any code changes, plugin or theme updates, or WordPress Core & PHP version changes without the risk of breaking your live website. You can identify any bugs, clashes or issues, before you make any changes to your live site.
As for PHP, this can be a little more complex. PHP is a very widely used, open-source scripting language. It’s the foundation of WordPress, and much of the web in general, including the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, Slack & Etsy. It’s even used for many offline applications and software. If you’d like to know more, we have a blog post on what you need to know about PHP.
PHP receives regular updates, and less frequent new version releases to improve performance and security. New versions in particular, will bring in big changes which will require development work to websites and plugins. This is to ensure they remain compatible with the latest, most secure PHP version.
Are you making and safely storing regular backups for if the worst happens? Having a very recent backup is your saviour if something takes your site out of commission.
If this all seems a lot and you struggle to get it done internally, take a look at our Support & Maintenance plans. They cover WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin updates, back up and ongoing performance optimisation. Most also include a staging site for testing before deployment.
If your site is running an out-of-date and unsupported PHP version, we can audit it for you. Then carry out the development work required to polish its codebase, and ensure it’s compatible with a new PHP version. Find out more about PHP here, or simply get in touch.
Is your hosting robust enough for an increase in traffic? Would a spike send it down?
Make sure your web host has scaling options to keep you up and running during unusually busy times.
Also, is your hosting provider easy to contact if things do go down? Some of the more basic and cheap hosting providers are notoriously difficult to speak to. They also offer little in the way of scaling.
Find out about how moving to our managed WordPress hosting, massively improved performance for our client Tollring.
Again, this is always important. Poor security could lead to your website going down, or getting hacked, during the busiest times of the year.
Keeping your site and plugins up-to-date, along with quality hosting, are a great start for keeping your site secure. But there are additional measures you can take to ensure your site doesn’t go down. Or so it doesn’t get hacked and filled with spammy links, or even worse, have your sensitive customer data breached.
This shouldn’t have to be said anymore, but we still come across sites without SSL certificates.
An SSL is a standard security technology that protects data transferred between a website server and a browser. The SSL encrypts data passed between the servers and browsers to ensure that the data remains private.
Browsers like Chrome will actively penalise websites without an SSL certificate. They display a message to all visitors, warning that the website they are about to view has an unsecure connection.
Please, if you haven’t yet moved from HTTP to HTTPS, get it done!
A quality WAF acts as a gatekeeper for your website, inspecting and filtering all traffic before it reaches your website. It sends potentially malicious traffic away, whilst letting good traffic (your users) in.
Not all Firewalls are created equally, and some are less efficient. You want a DNS Level Website Firewall which routes and screens traffic via cloud proxy servers. So it is filtered before it gets anywhere near your website. As it operates outside of your website it doesn’t put any strain on your website or server resource.
Some use Application Level Firewalls, which screen traffic once it hits your site (but before most WordPress scripts load). This can place extra load on your server, which in the event of a spike, could take it down.
For our own clients, we include Sucuri as part of most of our WordPress Support plans. Sucuri is the leading website security choice for WordPress. With a DNS-level firewall, brute force prevention, malware and blacklist removal services, and a great deal more.
Regularly audit your plugins. Are there ones you are no longer using? Delete them. Are there some that don’t seem to be maintained and updated by their developers? Can you find a better, more trustworthy solution to replace them? Is it something that could be custom developed?
We recently shared a blog post on managing WordPress user roles. As with plugins, audit your users and their roles regularly, looking for anyone who should be there, or anyone with permissions they don’t need.
Also remember to remove access for people who no longer work for your business.
Ensure you and your team practice good password security habits. Weak passwords, and passwords used for numerous accounts, make it easy for hackers to brute force their way into your site. We have a whole post on password best practices.
What if something does go awry in this period? Are you positioned to find issues and fix them swiftly, to minimise loss?
Have you got developers in-house who can get you up and running again, and do you have an easy, quick way to contact your hosting provider? Do you have a website support agency on hand that can get everything sorted for you in the event of any issues or bugs? Got an SLA in place? What about out-of-hours Support?
If downtime or broken functionality would cause significant lost revenue, then it is very important to have something in place. Many smaller, more generic hosting providers can be hard to get hold of, and many support services are automated and slow.
Make sure you have a solution in place where you can speak to real people, and they will identify and resolve your issues with urgency.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive support plan, with WordPress technical experts on hand and easy to reach, you can download our Support brochure here.
The temptation after the busy period, or a seasonal event, is to take down the pages specific to it. But this might not be the best idea from an SEO perspective if these are recurring events/sales.
Google shared this page Engage shoppers with deal pages in Google Search earlier this year. It was then reshared by John Mueller of Google in September on Twitter, where he answered some questions people had about the specifics.
As you can see, rather than taking these pages down or redirecting them to a less relevant page, John suggests leaving them up and indexable, but removing them from your navigation until needed again.
You could remove anything actionable, like actual products, add-to-basket buttons, or offer codes, so if anyone stumbles upon it during this time, there’s no issue. With it up and indexable, it remains indexed by Google, and you don’t lose the value of any links it has picked up. Once the right time of year comes around, you can add it back into your navigation, and link to it from your homepage and emails.
Having these pages with fixed URLs to be used every year, will also be a great help with your display and PPC campaigns. You won’t need to remember to change your destination URLs each time.
Make sure you’re in contact with them. Speak to your Account Manager well in advance of the busy period. Here are things to remember:
Depending on your business and site, there are numerous things to consider in advance of the Black Friday/Christmas/Boxing Day/January Sales period.
We’ve covered a fair number of website-specific ones above, which will help you keep your site up and running smoothly. Ensure your event pages are already indexed by Google, and that you’ve given any development partners plenty of time to make any seasonal changes to your website.
Let us know if you can think of any others you’d add to the list.
If you’re considering a WordPress/WooCommerce Support & Maintenance Agency, take a look at our range of plans and download our Support brochure. We take great pride in keeping our clients up and running all year round. We offer UK based technical experts, on hand to solve your problems, and to take the work of maintaining your website off your hands.
