The holidays are just around the corner, which opens a world of opportunities for your business.
This year, holiday retail sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion, which is why it’s the perfect time to attract more shoppers to your website. Online traffic is increasing more than ever, with shoppers planning ahead to avoid shipping delays and favoring a hybrid retail module.
Luckily, optimizing your website’s accessibility with the help of an accessibility app like XCompliant is the best way to avail this rewarding opportunity.
Keep reading to learn why and how you should prepare for the holiday season by changing up your website.
5 Reasons to Optimize Your Website for Holiday Shopping
Optimizing your website’s accessibility for the holiday season can lead to quicker checkouts, more sales, and more conversions. Undoubtedly, adopting a hybrid retail module on your website is the best way to prepare for holiday shopping.
More Conversions
One of the main reasons you should optimize your website’s accessibility is that it leads to more conversions. Your incentives, products, and descriptions may be enticing, but many websites make the mistake of leaving purchases inaccessible.
It’s an easy error to make: including the most eye-catching product or brand descriptions but forgetting to include an actionable CTA.
It’s not enough to write where and why the customer should buy your product. Including a redirecting link to said product or landing page is crucial to make conversions possible, quick, and efficient.
Well-positioned, functional CTAs are one of the most crucial aspects of an accessible website, which you can verify with the help of Google Analytics.
During the holiday season, this aspect of accessibility is more vital than ever, considering the traffic of shoppers looking for Christmas gifts.
Hybrid Retail Module
As e-commerce advances, the line between digital and in-store retail experiences blurs. There’s little you can do in-store that you can’t also do while online shopping from home, making shoppers adapt to a hybrid retail module.
Not only is this module more affordable for businesses, but it’s also extensively accessible to all kinds of users. People with cognitive, situational, and physical disabilities can alter their online shopping experience with just a few clicks, but only if your website is accessible.
By adopting a hybrid module this holiday season, you can create a multi-tiered customer journey for all Christmas shoppers to streamline online purchases for both parties. Around 76% of US adults shop online, so it only makes sense to cater your website to them.
More Sales
With the holiday season comes a new and big wave of shoppers navigating your website. Gaining traffic isn’t hard once Christmas comes around, but keeping visitors impressed enough to stay can be challenging.
An accessible and easy-to-navigate website with a quick visitor-to-buyer journey is the best way to garner more sales. However, a great product often isn’t enough to guarantee a sale; gaining your potential customer’s trust is also key.
For example, websites with security badges, Better Business Bureau accreditation, and customer testimonials are likelier to bag more sales in the holiday season. It may seem otherwise, but security is an unskippable step in achieving accessibility compliance.
Quicker Checkouts
Due to complex and lengthy checkout processes, all industries suffer from an 81% cart abandonment rate. Optimizing your checkout process for general shoppers isn’t enough; you must also cater to those with disabilities.
For example, you must correctly tag all elements on your website to aid those using screen readers or navigating via their keyboards. In addition, you must also tag CTA buttons for Apply Discount and Place Order appropriately.
Another example of an accessible online checkout is one with high-contrast colors, simple information input, and alternative text. These specifications lead to quicker checkouts, drastically reducing your website’s cart abandonment rate.
During the holiday season of 2021, the cart abandonment rate across all industries was 79.88%. So it’s essential to do your best and lower this rate for this year’s Christmas.
Better Preparation
Optimizing your website for better accessibility will help you during the holiday season in all aspects. Most industries have recently become vulnerable to supply issues, causing shipping delays or insufficient stock.
As a result, shoppers plan ahead for the holiday season to ensure all Christmas gifts arrive on time. However, to welcome this new wave of strategist shoppers, you must ensure your website can handle the oncoming traffic and has enough incentives to keep them interested.
This is the perfect time to stand out in the industry and launch holiday promotions, gift guides, and one-of-a-kind deals on your website ahead of time. While your visitors navigate these discounts, your website’s accessibility is the main factor that’ll turn them into buyers.
5 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Holiday Shopping
Now that you know why you should optimize your website’s accessibility for the holiday season, it’s time to learn how. Catering to mobile users, increasing load speeds, and improving security are ideal ways to optimize your website for the season.
Mobile Friendliness
Forgetting to make your website accessible for mobile users is the worst mistake you can make for your online business, as 187.5 million users actively shop from their smartphones. More specifically, mobile holiday sales exceeded $3.6 billion last year.
Optimizing your website to become more responsive to mobile users is crucial, as customers value a seamless online shopping experience above all. If you’re advertising your products on social media, you’ll find most of your traffic coming from mobile sources.
Accessibility solutions like XCompliant and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help ensure your website is accessible for mobile users. That includes enabling mobile payments, optimizing page load time, and adjusting pop-up sizes.
More importantly, XCompliant helps you adjust font and button sizes, change icons’ position, and guarantee a responsive web design for mobile users by performing a complete scan.
Faster Load Speeds
Accessibility isn’t just about your website’s design; it’s about guaranteeing a quick visitor-to-buyer journey for every customer. Your website’s load speed plays a significant role in this aspect, as you lose 57% of consumers if the page takes longer than three seconds to load.
Faster load speeds benefit visitors with disabilities and those without, allowing them to navigate your website in minutes. You can target load speeds and accessibility in one go with digital landmarks to break up text blocks.
In addition, adding alt text is another practice that improves accessibility without compromising load speeds. Finally, you may use compliance tools like XCompliant to ensure that your website’s speed matches accessibility requirements.
Improved Security
You may be ecstatic about the big wave of shoppers trafficking your website during the holiday season. However, while handling your new set of potential buyers, you may overlook the reality of hackers who exploit such periods of increased transactions to steal from you.
Keeping your website secure from such threats is a vital aspect of accessibility, as it benefits your customer just as much as it benefits your business. More importantly, your team should stay educated and alert for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
XCompliant helps maintain your website’s security and customers’ privacy during this busy season by guaranteeing GDPR & CCPA compliance. These laws protect data subjects and give certain rights to consumers, making your website perfectly accessible.
By performing regular cybersecurity audits on your website, XCompliant can prevent vulnerability to DDoS attacks and other cyber threats during the holiday season.
Consistent Layout
You may think the holidays are the perfect time to change your website’s layout to keep things fresh and new, but that’s not the case. Instead, most online users prefer consistency.
This study details that consistency in your business visuals can guarantee more sales and customer retention.
Instead of making your website look new, you can make small but notable changes that keep your brand suitable for the season. For example, you can dedicate landing pages to your holiday deals, blogs, and incentives.
This is also a great time to structure your website’s content with proper headings to make it more accessible for screen readers. More importantly, users must be able to easily navigate your website’s content via the keyboard alone.
Luckily, you won’t have to make these changes manually, as XCompliant does them for you with just one scan. The solution covers interface colors, compliant icons, alt text inclusion, keyboard operability, and screen reader accessibility.
Optimized Images
Lastly, your text isn’t the only thing that must be accessible for disabled users. It’s also crucial to ensure that your website’s images and dynamic content, such as pop-ups, lightboxes, GIFs, and overlays, are accessible.
You may think there’s no way these elements can trouble any user, but that’s not the case. For example, magnification software users may zoom in on the wrong area, while keyboard users get trapped on overlays.
In addition, epileptic users can react negatively to dynamic content, especially colorful GIFs. You can prevent this by ensuring that your videos aren’t set on auto-play and your website is integrated with ARIA roles and alerts with the help of XCompliant.
Conclusion
The holiday season can be hectic for most e-commerce businesses, but it’s also the most rewarding. Keeping your website functional, enticing, and accessible during this season is the best thing you can do for more conversions.
Aside from increasing sales and traffic, web accessibility is also legally required due to ADA & WCAG standards. XCompliant is the best way to comply with such standards and prepare your website for Christmas shopping.