How To Quickly Customize Your Website For Seasonal Events

A website (particularly in business) isn’t something to be left alone for long stretches of time. When that happens, the content grows stagnant, and both visitors and search engines start to lose interest. To keep it fresh, you need regular updates: new blog posts, tweaks to the copy, design adjustments, and even new features to make the site more valuable.

That simple commitment to freshness will set your site apart from the many sites out there that haven’t been changed in months (or even years), but if you really want to maximize your site’s performance, you need to factor in seasonal events. Consider the run-up to Christmas, for instance: during the festive season, having an appropriately-themed website (and the right selection of products if you’re a merchant) will delight visitors and drive them to stick around.

Minimalism is great, but there’s nothing wrong with getting extravagant from time to time. So how do you manage this from a practical standpoint? How do you customize your website for seasonal events without taking up too much time or effort? Here are some tips:

Install a seasonal effect plugin

If you run your website on a fairly-modern CMS, you should have access to a variety of plugins capable of adding functionality to your website in just a few clicks (they’re plugins for WordPress, but may also be called extensions, add-ons, or apps). And the great thing about seasonal events is that they come along every year, so you can use any plugin developed for any season in any previous year — well, assuming it’s updated and compatible with your system, at least.

What can these seasonal plugins do? Typically, they’ll add effects or change colors and styles: a Halloween plugin might add some spooky lighting and splatter blood effects everywhere, for instance. Alternatively, they can add features to the site, such as an interactive advent calendar (click on the day’s window to see what’s inside). Here’s a good set of Christmas plugins for WordPress, so take a look to see if any of them would fit your site.

Create some themed images

An easy way to spruce up your content is to take existing images and make them more seasonally-appropriate. Thankfully, it isn’t all that hard to achieve: there are plenty of online services out there that can easily add some seasonal filters to your images. Here’s just one example: pick filters for Halloween, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, and apply them easily (you can even use animation effects to really catch the eye).

If you’re running an eCommerce store, you can even use filters like that to update your product images. It’s a great way to add some stylistic flourishes to your lineup. Adjust your product copy accordingly (around Christmas, you could place focus on how viable each product is like a personal or corporate gift, and what kind of person it would be suitable for) and you can radically overhaul the efficacy of your product listings.

And for anyone running a brick-and-mortar store as well, it’s a perfect accompaniment to in-store decorations: if you’re using a modern system like Shopify POS to unify your online and offline retail, then you can show off your jazzed-up product images on your in-store digital display. You’re surely going to the effort of tweaking your store displays to embrace the seasonal spirit, understanding how important it is for foot traffic that your store has the right look: this is about completing that look and hopefully driving some more conversions.

Throw some simple listicles together

Most content production can’t reasonably be called quick: it can take many hours to write just one high-quality post, and it’s even worse if you’re not an accomplished writer. Does that mean that you’re limited to stylistic changes? Not exactly, because you can still produce content: you just need to make it short and sweet.

Think about what people are likely to be searching for regarding the season — for instance, around the festive season, people will generally be searching for gift ideas, recipes, and opening times — and use that ideation to come up with some easy listicles. A listicle is just a piece of content that lists things. For instance, you could devise the title of “5 Great Gift Ideas for Christmas”, then go ahead and write the piece.

Opinion-based listicles are so much faster than other pieces because you can be creative with them, and because they don’t need to be very long. Your gift idea piece could be just 400 words: throw in product links and some GIFs, and you have a solid piece that might well pick up some traffic without really needing to do much.

These tips should help you get your website ready for important seasonal events, all without costing you much (or any) money. So what are you waiting for? Check the calendar, and start thinking about what’s on the horizon.

Author bio

Rodney Laws is an e-commerce expert with over a decade
of experience in building online businesses. Check out his
reviews on EcommercePlatforms and you’ll find practical tips