5 Tips to Scale Your Shopify Store This Holiday Season

Last Black Friday and Cyber Monday, merchants on Shopify processed $1.1 million sales per minute, with more than 10,149 orders per minute during peak time. With these figures in mind, it makes sense to focus on making your Shopify store ready for the upcoming holiday season. As the holiday season brings in crowd from all around the world, you will need to brace yourself for an upsurge in web traffic. In this article, let us take a look at 5 tips to help scale your Shopify store during the shopping season.

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1. Use a Content Delivery Network to enhance site performance

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‍You can turbocharge the speed of your Shopify store by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN consists of servers that are located in various parts of the world. The CDN delivers content to visitors from the server closest to their location, which helps to increase speed.

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‍What you must do:

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Shopify recommends that you use CDN with your tag management system in order to enhance site performance. What the CDN does is, it pulls tags from optimal servers and loads them on the fastest servers. This holiday season, you can expect visitors from all around the world visiting your website, and it makes sense to use a CDN to brace yourself for the traffic surge. Shopify lets its users access Akamai's CDN, which is its Media Delivery Network.

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‍2. Optimize your reviews for the holiday season

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‍You would be surprised to learn that more than 95% of customers use reviews to make purchase decisions, with almost 86% considering reviews an essential resource. Research also shows that when a product gets its first review, traffic to the product page increases by 108%. Of course, conversion rates increase too, by 65 percent.

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‍What you must do: Promote your reviews on social media along with your products, and use reviews to woo back customers who abandon carts. You can also include the best reviews you get in holiday marketing campaigns sent over email. If you sell products on retail partners' websites, you can syndicate your reviews to reach shoppers on those partner websites as well.

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‍3. Make sure Liquid loops are not causing trouble

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‍If you are a Shopify Plus user, you might be using Liquid. This is a powerful proprietary language that helps your web store load quickly. However, it can also cause problems during for-loop iteration. When your store has to loop, search or crawl through all your products to look for specific criteria such as tag, price, or certain product details, Liquid may cause issues.

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‍What you can do: If you have a number of products in your catalog, Liquid loops may cause issues. To avoid this, get a website audit and ensure that your web store code is efficiently written. You may need professional Shopify optimization assistance if it takes too long to crawl through your vast collection of products.

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‍4. Test and optimize your store for mobile performance

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‍Mobile use has increased drastically, and there is every reason to believe that your next customer probably searches for products using their mobile device. Last Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Shopify witnessed a growth of 64% in mobile sales. Shopify also reveals that mobile e-commerce sales will hit a peak figure of $250 billion by 2020.

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‍What you must do: This is why, to help you scale your Shopify store, you should test and optimize your store's mobile performance. You can use Google Labs' PageSpeed Insights to test both mobile and desktop performance of your store, and fix issues with CSS and JavaScripts that may be slowing down your website.

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5. Eliminate homepage sliders if possible

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‍A number of e-commerce stores use homepage sliders to make their web stores more attractive. While they may enhance the visual appeal of a website, they tend to slow down a website and cause optimization issues. Shopify recommends eliminating sliders altogether, and putting a well-thought-out hero image in its place.

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‍What you should do: What you really need to do is follow UX best practices as advised by Shopify, and implement a hero image with a clear call-to-action (CTA). If you really want to keep sliders on your homepage, do not keep more than two or three slides.

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‍Keep your website in top form for holiday rush

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‍As you can see, there are a number of things you can do to optimize your Shopify store. Firstly, make sure that you optimize your reviews to market during holiday season. Second, use a content delivery network to enhance the speed and performance of your web store. Optimize your website for mobile performance and eliminate issues with Liquid, if possible.

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In addition, eliminate sliders altogether so that your website loads quickly. As the holiday season brings in new customers from around the world, it makes sense to keep your website in top form.