{"id":120832,"date":"2023-09-01T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/?p=120832"},"modified":"2025-05-14T13:30:58","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T18:30:58","slug":"crush-your-sales-goals-this-cyber-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/case-studies\/crush-your-sales-goals-this-cyber-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"Crush Your Sales Goals, Not Your WooCommerce Store This Holiday Season"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Although you may be soaking up the waning days of summer, Thanksgiving and the eCommerce holiday rush are just around the corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, holiday shopping formally kicks off with Black Friday on November 24, although some analysts believe it could start even earlier<\/a>. While that might still leave you with enough time to find that great online deal, it provides far less room to get your eCommerce site ready for a spike in traffic and sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why might your eCommerce store need to be improved? For starters, online sales continue to surge, and if you’re not convinced, see this year’s Amazon Prime Day<\/a> for a\u2026prime example. The eCommerce giant’s U.S. online sales rose 6.1% to $12.7 billion in what could be an early indicator of a holiday season that’s about to burst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making sure your eCommerce site not only provides a great user experience day-to-day but that it\u2019s poised for scale when those post-Thanksgiving shoppers arrive is your ticket to higher revenues this fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re ready to crush your sales goals and not your storefront this Black Friday (and beyond), keep reading. The following sections offer a closer look at areas where you can make meaningful improvements as well as ways you can get started today! Here’s what we’ll cover: <\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Preparing for More Shoppers on Your WooCommerce Site<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

eCommerce websites are dynamic websites, and rightfully so. Shoppers expect to see only products currently available to buy, up-to-date prices, details on the latest sales, real-time cart data, and other dynamic information specific to eCommerce shopping experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These aspects of eCommerce sites mean that as shopping pages load they must use resources from the web server to render the page, much more so than static content sites which can leverage caching more extensively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dynamic nature of eCommerce sites and the additional compute resources they require mean mass traffic events like a flash sale (or Black Friday) could create a rush of traffic, and thus, a rush on the compute resources available to your store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the compute demand for your WooCommerce site exceeds your resources, your store will likely go down completely or become so slow that no one will be able to reasonably use it to shop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are several strategies you can employ to help make sure your store is prepared, including upgrading to a premium managed platform for WordPress<\/a>, offloading dynamic requests to other compute resources, optimizing your theme<\/a>, compressing your product images<\/a>, minifying your CSS\/JS<\/a>, and many other techniques for reducing the resources your WooCommerce store needs to load.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To take advantage of many of these approaches, and to ensure your store is ready for the holiday rush, check out WP Engine\u2019s WordPress hosting plans<\/a>. Our WooCommerce hosting is optimized to increase speed and drive conversions, and site migration is not only free, it’s backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fine-tune Your eCommerce Funnel   <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

With more traffic online than ever before, online consumers are also becoming savvier, and you may have to work extra hard to stand out and earn a share of their wallets. They know what they want, and it’s important for you to understand the type of eCommerce experience you\u2019re offering to see if you\u2019re falling short. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do your pages load quickly<\/a>? Can shoppers easily find what they\u2019re looking for<\/a>? Are they able to conveniently check out<\/a>? Determining the answers to these questions is crucial for building an eCommerce experience that\u2019s optimized for engagement, conversions, and revenue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some site owners, the answer may be clear\u2014you already know where your site struggles or where it excels. Others may regularly A\/B test shopping pages or test for site speed performance metrics, including Google Core Web Vitals<\/a>, as a way to identify opportunities for improving user experience and overall conversion rates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One key shopping experience that WooCommerce stores often overlook is the product search experience. 43% of shoppers use product search elements on eCommerce stores and those shoppers are more than TWICE as likely to buy. The problem though is that the default search experience in WordPress leaves a lot to be desired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why it\u2019s beneficial to leverage tools like WP Engine\u2019s Smart Search AI<\/a>, which offers sites a natural-language search experience built to deliver more accurate and reliable results for end users\u2014without metered pricing or a performance tax. Find out more in the video below: <\/p>\n\n\n\n