As the year rolls to an end some of the most important dates for both retailers and consumers appear on the horizon with names like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, and New Year’s Day. According to small business and entrepreneurship site Inc.com, November and December are the two most important months in the retailer’s calendar as they tend to be the busiest and most profitable ones of the year.

This, then, should serve as a wake up call if you have been caught off-guard and the year-end just crept up on you. While it might not be too late, it is important that you act now if you plan on making some serious sales and, hopefully, a lot of money by the end of December. The one thing you need to do is make sure your business website is up and ready to take on the challenge of mad rushes and increase of traffic.

To help you with that, we have put together a checklist for you to go through to make sure your site is up to the challenge. Tick the ones that you have completed and try to go over it until all are check-marked!

1. Put on the Cheers and Appropriate UI: people who go shopping at this time of the year are – for the most part – in a cheerful mood. Most of them are spending the money they have saved all year long just so they can share the holiday spirit with loved ones. Your website should join in the spirit and reflect that you too are happy about the festive season and have freebie goodies left and right and prices that have been slashed top to bottom. Your website should also be jolly and bright and decorated with the right templates. People should be able to visit it on any device – big or small. Make sure you have impressive page load times as people will be (quite understandably) impatient around this time of year too. Your sales process should be the shortest – click, load, buy! Your enthusiasm should not only show, but also be contagious: sell, sell, and sell!
2. Prepare for a Crash with your Hosting Provider: if you don’t have it yet, now would be a great time to have a backup plan. You should have a chat with your hosting provider to figure out what would happen in case there is a sudden influx of traffic, for example. You should talk about backup/restore plans, increase of bandwidth and disk space without having to go through a haranguing process. You should get some guarantee on the expected uptime and figure out a way to keep your site up by, perhaps, using fault tolerance and redundancy methods like clustering. In short, your hosting provider should be prepared to back you 100% up and have the right staff waiting to give you expert advice and support should something go wrong.
3. Security, Security, and more Security: once you have your site running as smoothly as it should, you can now move on to locking it all down. Just like you are out to make some money, albeit honestly, others too will be seeking to rake in ill-gotten profits from vulnerable people and compromised devices around this time of the year. While you won’t be able to do much about your clients’ devices you can make sure you don’t expose their details while they are on your site or after they have made their purchases. Therefore, before the shopping season makes it impossible to stop and think of bringing your site down for even a minute, shut all accesses and isolate your website. Install all the required security software and upgrade those that you already have. As a matter of fact, upgrade all your software to the latest versions. Reset all passwords and make sure your staff, if any, does the same with their personal passwords too. Next, slowly open the ports, accounts, and other accesses one at a time depending on who you want to grant permission to. Once done, have your hosting provider run a check on your site (or even your whole server, if they are willing) to see if there are any outstanding vulnerabilities that need to be covered. Finally, bring in a security expert to have a look at everything and implement any more suggestions they might have.

This is a crucial step that might cost you a bit in terms of time and money now, but it will definitely prevent you from having to pay a dear price in case your data is stolen.

4. Market your Website Like Never Before: whether you are using social media, discount coupons, word-of-mouth, offline ads, promotions, etc. it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you are persistent and intensive about it. These two months will soon be over, so push your website into the faces of as many potential customers as possible. Get your name out there – even if you don’t make sales this year, you will be easily remembered next year. That will be the first step towards creating your brand.

Season’s Greetings and May the sales force be with you!