Every year we see the same story. A business invests in ads, prints flyers and plans its offers for the busiest weeks of the year, and then the website slows down, shows last year’s opening hours or loses orders at checkout. This holiday website checklist exists so that doesn’t happen to you. It is written for small business owners, not developers, and most items take less than an hour.
Whether you run an online store, a restaurant, a salon or a service business, the end of the year brings more visitors, more questions and less patience. Use the list below two to three weeks before your busiest period.
Why a holiday website checklist matters
Your website gets its biggest test exactly when you have the least time to fix it. Traffic can multiply in a few days, customers compare several businesses in parallel and a single bad experience sends them to a competitor. The good news is that almost everything that goes wrong is predictable, which is why a holiday website checklist works so well.
Part 1: Infrastructure and safety
1. Check your hosting resources
Ask your hosting provider what your plan can handle and whether you can upgrade temporarily. If your site is already slow on a normal day, it will be much slower when traffic doubles. A one-month upgrade is often cheaper than one day of lost sales.
2. Make a full backup and test a restore
A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. Make a complete copy of files and database and confirm it can actually be restored. We will cover a full strategy in a dedicated article later in this series.
3. Freeze big changes
Do your major updates at least a week before peak season, then stop touching things. The worst moment to discover a broken plugin update is the busiest day of the year.
4. Set up uptime monitoring
A free uptime monitor checks your site every few minutes and alerts you by email or SMS if it goes down. Without it, you find out from customers, or not at all.
Part 2: Speed and mobile
5. Test the pages that matter
Test your homepage, your main service or category page and your contact or checkout page, especially on mobile. Most holiday shoppers browse on their phones. If you need quick wins, read why your WordPress site is slow and how to fix it.
6. Compress your new banners
Seasonal banners are often uploaded straight from a design tool at several megabytes each. Convert them to WebP and resize them to the width they are actually displayed at.
7. Remove pop-up overload
Newsletter pop-up, cookie banner, spin-to-win wheel and chat bubble, all on the first screen of a phone. Customers close the tab before they see anything. Keep one, and make it easy to dismiss.
Part 3: Information customers look for
8. Update opening hours and holiday closures
This sounds obvious, yet it is one of the most common problems we see. Update your website, your Google Business Profile and any directories at the same time. Wrong hours are the fastest way to lose trust in December.
9. State delivery and booking deadlines clearly
“Order by December 18 for delivery before Christmas” or “Last appointments available on December 23”. Put the deadline on the homepage, product pages and checkout, not only in the FAQ.
10. Make offers easy to find
Create one clear page for your seasonal offers and link to it from the homepage, emails and ads. If you sell online and run discounts, apply them in bulk rather than editing prices one by one; we explained how in Black Friday in WooCommerce: bulk category discounts.
11. Answer the obvious questions upfront
Gift cards, returns after the holidays, delivery times, payment methods, parking. A short FAQ on your offers page saves dozens of phone calls.
Part 4: Contact, checkout and payments
12. Test every contact path
Send yourself a message through every form, click the phone number on mobile and test the WhatsApp or chat button. Then check that the emails actually reach your inbox, not the spam folder.
13. Place test orders or bookings
Use every payment method you offer. Confirm the payment is captured, the order status changes and the confirmation email arrives. For stores, the checkout deserves special attention; see our tips for a faster WooCommerce checkout.
14. Check stock and capacity
Nothing frustrates a customer more than paying for something that isn’t available. Sync stock with reality, or limit bookings to the capacity you can actually handle.
Part 5: On the busy days
15. Monitor and respond
Keep three things open: your uptime alerts, your orders or booking dashboard and your inbox. Assign someone to answer calls and messages quickly, because questions grow with traffic.
A few rules for the peak days:
- do not install new plugins or change themes;
- do not edit prices manually if discounts are scheduled;
- keep your hosting provider’s support contact at hand;
- write down every problem, even a small one, for the review after the season.
Holiday website checklist mistakes we see every year
- Discount codes that don’t work because the code in the ad is spelled differently from the one in the store.
- An empty offers page because products were never tagged correctly.
- Unclear delivery costs that customers only discover at the very end.
- Forms that silently stopped sending emails weeks earlier, unnoticed.
- Last year’s banner still live with last year’s dates.
Prepare your messages in advance
A good holiday website checklist covers people as well as pages.
The volume of questions grows with sales. Write short, friendly answers in advance for the questions that come up every year: when will my order arrive, can I return a gift in January, do you sell gift cards, are you open on the 24th, can I pay on delivery. Save them as templates in your email or messaging app so anyone on the team can reply in seconds.
Do the same for automated emails. Order confirmations, booking reminders and shipping notifications should mention the holiday schedule if it affects delivery or response times. A one-line note such as “We reply to all messages within 24 hours, except December 25–26” prevents a lot of frustration and a lot of repeated messages.
Finally, decide in advance who does what. Who answers the phone, who processes orders, who checks the site if something breaks. Writing it down takes ten minutes and saves hours of confusion when the busy days arrive.
A simple timeline
- Three weeks before: hosting check, backups, major updates, speed fixes.
- Two weeks before: offers page, banners, deadlines, opening hours, FAQ.
- One week before: test orders, test forms, test on several phones. No more changes.
- During: monitor, respond, note problems.
- After: review what worked and what didn’t.
After the season: what to review
The holiday website checklist does not end on the last busy day. In the following week, look at conversion rates by device, the products or services people searched for but couldn’t find, abandoned carts, the questions customers asked most often and how your site performed at peak times. These notes become next year’s checklist, and they are worth more than any generic advice.
For a neutral reference on how Google measures page experience during these peaks, see the Web Vitals overview on web.dev.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start the holiday website checklist?
Ideally three weeks before your busiest period. In the final week you should only test, not change.
Do service businesses really need this?
Yes. Restaurants, salons, gyms and consultants all get more visits and more questions at the end of the year. Correct hours, clear booking options and working forms matter as much as a store’s checkout.
Can I go through the holiday website checklist myself?
Most of it, yes. For hosting, caching and performance issues, it is worth having someone who looks after the site regularly.
Conclusion
A successful season is the result of boring preparation done early: backups, speed, correct information, working forms and tested payments. Go through this holiday website checklist and you’ll enter the busiest weeks calm instead of firefighting. If you’d like us to review your site before the rush, get in touch through our contact page or see our maintenance and support plans.
