Optimize Your Magento Store for the 2019 Holiday Season

Just as one would prepare a traditional brick-and-mortar store for the holiday sales season, say for New Year, Halloween or Christmas, preparing an eCommerce site/store for the crush of online visitors is also important. After all, a vast portion of shoppers shop online now!

Twas a few months before the holidays, and all through the night, Clever merchants were prepping, their eCommerce websites.

The quote, by Magento, is both amusing and meaningful.

The holiday season is one of the most wonderful time of the year, both for merchants and customers. The season accounts for half of all annual sales and offers endless opportunities to engage and delight shoppers as they search/buy the perfect gifts for their loved ones. Thus, it’s important for merchants to maximize their holiday sales by adopting proven eCommerce strategies.

Here, we are particularly talking about Magento merchants or store owners. Below are some of the tips that Magento Commerce users should consider employing to ensure a

Robust Digital Holiday Season
Preparing your storefront

Check for Your Storefront’s Security
Don’t let cyber grinch hamper the holiday cheer!

During this high-traffic holiday period, competition is widespread and cybercrime is rampant. Majority of merchants face the conundrum of protecting their customers or store from fraudulent transactions while ensuring that genuine customer transactions are not blocked in the process.

For this, ensure your storefront has the latest security by running your site on the latest version of Magento Commerce. This includes the technical stack and extensions, such as PHP, Fastly and/or ECE Tools.

Further, you can also utilizeMagento’s Security Scan tool for the utmost security and safety of your store and give your customers pleasant shopping experience.

Optimize for a Fast eCommerce Site
Speed is one of the most critical aspects of a successful digital storefront. Without a proper speed, you might not only end up losing customers but incur huge losses.

The images that enhance your store and help customers to make a buying decision might sometimes slow down your site. Thus, it is important to utilize image resizing so that your site loads as fast as possible. You can also speed up your site by taking advantage of full-page caching.

Take Advantage of Online Video
Product videos are a great addition to the sales process. Once your customer finds a product and clicks on it to learn more, make sure you’re doing all you can to merchandise and sell that product. This not only gives clarity and satisfaction but help the customer in making a quick buying decision. Here are the steps for adding a product video to your Magento website.

Update to the Latest ECE-tools Package
Don’t forget to take care of the cloud infrastructure!

Ensure that your cloud environment is updated to the latest version of ece-tools to take advantage of the enhancements delivered in Magento deployment tooling.

The recent releases keep on bringing enhancements like improvement in local development experience, speeding up the deployment of static content or adding self-service capabilities for enhanced productivity.

Think Mobile First
Mobile eCommerce, or mCommerce, is ever-growing. It has become crucial for brands to adopt a mobile-first approach to stay in the long run.

A good starting point is to ensure all omnichannel engagement templates are designed for mobile. Try and design templates as well as wireframes that fit the small screen so that distracted shoppers don’t discard the brand message, whether it is via email, social, web, apps, or live chat. You can also adopt a few tricks to optimize for mobile.

Summary
The holiday season isn’t far. Before it kicks in, make sure your Magento store is ready to make a boom. After all, this is the time when you can not only make profits but gain customers for life.

So don’t wait and start optimizing your Magento store for the holiday season.