Christmas website advice isn’t all snowflakes and countdown timers. That side of it matters, and I have written about giving your site a festive makeover before. This post is about the less glamorous half, the practical bits that quietly decide whether the enquiries and orders actually reach you.
Autumn is the right time for it. Once November arrives you are trading, not fixing. Anything you sort now has time to be tested properly, and if something is broken you will find out while it is still cheap to deal with.
Here is what I would work through, roughly in order of how much damage it does if you get it wrong.
Publish your cut-off dates before people have to ask
If you sell anything physical, the single most useful thing you can put on your site is a clear last order date for Christmas delivery. Not buried in a shipping policy. On the homepage, on product pages, in the checkout.
Customers are making a decision under time pressure. If they cannot tell whether something will arrive in time, a good number of them will simply buy from someone who has told them. Put the date somewhere obvious and repeat it.
Service businesses need the equivalent. When is your last available appointment? When do you stop taking new projects until January? Saying it plainly saves you a fortnight of emails asking the same question.
Sort your opening hours and your out of office
This is the one that catches almost everyone. Your website says you are open, your Google Business Profile says something different, and your contact form goes to an inbox nobody is reading between Christmas and New Year.
Worth checking:
- Festive opening hours on your website, updated and dated so people trust them.
- The same hours on your Google Business Profile, which has a specific field for holiday hours.
- An honest auto reply on your email that says when you will actually respond.
- Any booking system blocked out for the days you are closed.
Being closed is completely fine. Being unclear about it is what annoys people.
Test your checkout and your contact forms properly
Actually test them. Place a real order, or submit your own contact form and confirm the email lands somewhere you will see it. Do it on your phone as well as your laptop.
Contact forms break silently more often than people realise. A plugin update, a hosting change or an expired integration can stop the emails arriving without anything looking wrong on the page. If you have not tested yours since the summer, assume nothing.
While you are in there, check that your returns and cancellation information is accurate. If you sell online you have specific obligations around cancellation rights, and the GOV.UK guidance on online and distance selling sets out what you need to tell customers. Gifts complicate this, because the person buying is often not the person who ends up wanting to return the thing. A clear extended returns window over Christmas is worth stating explicitly.
Check your site can cope with the traffic
If you are expecting a busier few weeks, a slow site costs you real money. People abandon a checkout that stalls.
Run your homepage and one product or service page through PageSpeed Insights and see what comes back. The usual culprits are enormous uncompressed images, too many plugins doing too little, and hosting that was chosen on price three years ago and never revisited.
You do not need a perfect score. You need a site that does not fall over in the first week of December. If the numbers look grim, image sizes are almost always the quickest thing to improve.
Make the seasonal stuff easy to remove
Whatever festive content you add, plan how it comes off. Countdown timers that expired in December and Christmas banners still up in February do more harm than the banner ever did good. They tell visitors nobody is minding the site.
Write yourself a note in the diary for early January listing everything that needs reverting. Ten minutes of planning now saves an awkward discovery in the spring.
The short version
If you only have an hour in October, do these four:
- Add your Christmas cut-off date somewhere obvious.
- Update opening hours on your website and your Google Business Profile.
- Submit your own contact form and confirm the email arrives.
- Diarise a January date to strip the seasonal content back out.
None of it is complicated. It is just the sort of thing that gets postponed until it is genuinely urgent, which is usually the worst possible moment.
If you would rather have someone look over it with you, I offer a free 30 minute brainstorming session. No pitch and no pressure, just a proper conversation about what is worth doing before December and what can wait. You can book a slot here, and if you decide afterwards that you would like a hand, my website maintenance and hosting and security services are there as a backup rather than a starting point.
