If you’re a retail outfit, especially one with a brick and mortar presence, you’re probably too busy or too exhausted to be reading this. Otherwise, you’re probably just about to have some down time at your website. Not time when your website is down — that’s never a good thing — but time when the Traffic at your website is down.

The holiday slump

Here you can see the traffic at our lab website, www.myfreshplans,com, from July of this year to this week. Traffic rose steadily till Thanksgiving weekend, when we stayed fairly steady until school let out in most of the country, at which point we fell. We expect further falling. We probably won’t begin to rise again till January.

Most websites are showing — or soon will show — the typical holiday drop.

You don’t have to slump

So what should you do during seasonal low traffic at your website?

• Don’t worry. I watch analytics for lots of sites, and nearly all of them have low traffic from late December to early January. People are on vacation, traveling, busy with holidays, or preoccupied with their personal lives, and it means nothing negative about your website or your business.
• Make some changes. Since you have fewer witnesses, this can be a good time to make some changes at your website if it’s likely to be messy. It’s better to have your site go down briefly when you naturally have fewer visitors, and it’s a good time to experiment with things that you might not want to keep. Update those plug-ins, try the font change you’ve been thinking about, or change the header and see how you feel about it before you commit to the new look.
• Give your site a checkup. If you have some downtime in your business as well as at your website, spend some of that extra time looking at your site and thinking about ways to improve it. Here are some posts from this blog that can help:
  • Website Checkup: Content
  • Website Checkup: the Look 
  • Website Checkup: Navigation
  • Website Checkup: Errors
• Take some time off. If you look at your blog traffic and see that few people are coming to read it, you might find this a good time to send your blog on vacation. You don’t want to lose people over the holidays, of course, so you should have something going on there, but this is a good time of year to post guest blog posts, link to favorite posts from the past, or make a quick photo and caption post.

This is also a smart time to take a look at your Analytics and make plans for your digital marketing going forward.  We at Haden Interactive are Google partners, certified for Google Analytics. We’re able to delve into your data and provide actionable insights for you. We do this at an affordable price, too. Get on our schedule for January so you can start 2019 with useful information… not guesswork.

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