Test Your Website Before the Holiday Rush

Most websites break quietly. A form stops sending after a plugin update, a phone number changes and the old one stays in the footer, a booking link points at a calendar nobody checks anymore. Nothing warns you. The site still loads, it still looks fine, and the only sign of trouble is that inquiries are a little lower than they should be, which is easy to put down to a slow month.

In October, that costs a handful of leads. In late November and December, when more people are searching, buying gifts, booking work before family arrives and comparing businesses on their phones, the same fault costs the weeks that matter most. An hour of testing now is the cheapest fix you will make all year.

Test on a phone, not at your desk

Your customers are mostly looking at your site on a phone, often on cell data, often while doing something else. Your office computer on fast wi-fi is the least realistic place to test it. Pick up your own phone, turn wi-fi off, and go through the site the way a stranger would. If pages are slow to appear on cell data, your site is fast on your laptop and slow where it counts covers what to fix first.

Better still, ask someone who has never used the site to find out what you charge for a common job and get in touch. Watch where they hesitate. People who know the site already know where everything is, which is exactly why they cannot see the problems.

Every way to reach you, one at a time

List every route a customer has to contact you, then use each one yourself and confirm it arrives:

• Phone numbers. Tap every number on the site, including the header, footer and contact page. Each should dial on a phone and reach a line someone answers.
• Forms. Submit every form with a real email address and check the message lands in the inbox it is supposed to reach, not in spam and not with a former employee.
• Booking and quote tools. Make a test booking or request and make sure it shows up where your team works, then cancel it.
• Chat and text. Send a message and time how long it takes to get a reply, the same way a customer would.
• Email links. Tap them on a phone and confirm they open a new message to the right address.

While you are on the forms, count the fields. Every extra question costs inquiries, and a form that was fine for a quiet month will lose more people when they are in a hurry. Your contact form is asking for too much explains what a form actually needs.

Check what the site says about the season

Read the site for anything that will be wrong by December. Hours that change around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year should be stated somewhere obvious, and they should match what you have set on Google, or customers will get two different answers and trust neither. If you have several locations, holiday hours on Google for every location walks through keeping them consistent.

Look for last year's offers too. A banner promoting a deal that ended eleven months ago tells visitors the site is not looked after, and that impression carries over to the business. Remove anything out of date now, and decide where this year's offer will go once it is settled.

A website does not have to be broken to lose customers. It only has to be slightly wrong at the moment someone is ready to buy.

If you sell online, buy something

For any business that takes payment on its site, the checkout is the page to test hardest. Place a real order on a phone, from adding the item through to the confirmation email, and then refund it. Check the prices and shipping cut-off dates are right, that gift certificates can be bought and delivered, and that the confirmation tells customers what happens next. Ask how long fulfilment takes when you are at your busiest, and say so on the site rather than letting customers find out.

Make a short list and fix it in order

Write down everything you find, then fix it in this order: anything that stops someone getting in touch, anything that gives wrong information, and finally anything that is merely untidy. The first group is urgent. The last can wait for January.

Then put a reminder in the calendar to repeat the contact test in the third week of November. It takes ten minutes, and it catches anything that broke in the meantime, right before the period when it would hurt most.

If the test turns up more than a few fixes, or the site has not been touched in years, website development with Vizible covers mobile-first design and ongoing updates handled by your strategist. You can also see what we would change on your site in a free growth proposal.