HOW TO PREPARE YOUR ECOMMERCE WEBSITE FOR BLACK FRIDAY CYBER MONDAY

There is no point in having a great product if a customer gets lost on your website. Studies show trillions are lost due to poor website user experience. And you definitely want to avoid that during one of the busiest shopping times: Black Friday Cyber Monday. Having a user- and mobile-friendly site will help you make more sales. The good news is that there's still some time before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so let's prepare your site for the smoothest shopping experience for your customers.

1. Minimise pop-ups

Yes, pop-ups do a great job at grabbing attention. But users hate them. Showing a pop-up before the site fully loads or right after it can be very annoying, as the customer is asked to make a decision before they even had a chance to understand what the company does. Some sites display an even worse practice — showing multiple pop-ups in a row.

Do you know that bad pop-ups can actually increase the chance of low-rankings in search engines? So the pop-up game can be a truly detrimental one!

Solution: Minimise the amount of pop-ups that you show and carefully consider if you need them at all. Knowing when and where to place a pop-up is key. Where will they be least harmful and most relevant? Make them deliver the value, instead of just being annoying.

2. Make sure your CTA stands out

You must ensure that your call-to-action — the main thing you would like your users to do — stands out. Your CTA has a big impact on engagement and conversion rates.

Solution: To catch attention, consider using colour combinations that stand out. Make sure your CTA is large and has enough whitespace around it.

A great way to test your CTA is by running our AI-generated heatmap analysis. The simulated heatmap shows the areas that will attract users the most. This way you can check if what you want to be highlighted is actually the centre of attention. At the end of the article, we talk more about where you can do the heatmap analysis.

3. Simplify your navigation and make sure it works

Can a user easily find the product that they are looking for on your site? If the site's structure is messy, users will lose patience and leave the site. Your purchasing journey can have the similar effect — if it takes a long time and lots of brain power to go from shopping cart to placing an order, only the ones with an abundance of patience and desire for your product will stick to the end. Another important navigation issue is opening new links in the same tab. If the user clicks a link and it opens a new window or tab, the user's back button breaks as well as their mental model of navigation. This is especially a nuisance on mobile devices.

Solution: Make your site's navigation and purchasing journey are simple and straightforward. You might consider having all of your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions on one page. However, make sure not to over-clutter the page to the point that customers get lost and overwhelmed.

4. Test all of your links

A very silly mistake that happens so often is having broken links on your site. Not much explanation is needed, as it is clear to everyone that it completely defeats the purpose of your site and can have a big negative impact.

Solution: Check your links, especially the most important ones.

5. Check the language

Needless to say, misspelled words undermine your credibility. Also mixing US English and UK English can leave an unprofessional feel to the readers.

Solution: Check for misspellings and stick to one variant of English.

6. Make sure your site is accessible

It's very important to make sure that your site works for users with disabilities. You need to mark different sections and images on your site correctly, so screen readers can do their job well. Also, allowing site users to enlarge font sizes without it breaking the page layout is important.

Solution: Use headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) to have nicely organised content that can be interpreted by screen readers. Use a similar approach for images. Describe the key points of an image in alt text (except if the image is included for only decoration purposes, then you should specify an empty alt text).

How to actually do it all?

Now you have a lot of things to check and fix. We can ease your job with our AI user experience bot Poe that finds issues on your site much faster than you can. The bot will point out the problems that you have and give you suggestions for fixing them. For example, Poe can actually find all broken links on your site and misspellings, so you don't need to spend hours on it yourself. Also Poe has been taught how to generate a heatmap of your landing pages, highlighting the areas that will attract the most attention from humans. And those are just a couple of examples, the power of Poe goes much deeper.

Check out our free intern plan to get 1-3 observations of your site or subscribe your site for a free daily monitoring that will notify you if some of your critical functions break down. And if you want to have the best site this Black Friday, then Advisor or Expert plans are right for you.

Wishing you a successful Black Friday Cyber Monday!