Is Your Website Ready for the Holiday Rush? A Pre-Season Checklist for Small Businesses

The holiday season is the biggest opportunity of the year for most small businesses. More people are actively searching, spending, and making decisions than at almost any other time. For businesses that are ready, it can be their most profitable period by a wide margin.

For businesses that aren't ready, it's a different story.

A slow website that frustrates visitors, a contact form that quietly stopped working two months ago, a homepage still promoting last year's offers — these aren't just minor embarrassments. During peak season, when traffic is up and intent to buy is high, a website that isn't performing can cost you thousands in lost sales.

The good news: most of these problems are easy to fix if you catch them in time. This checklist will walk you through everything you need to review before the rush hits. Set aside an hour, work through it systematically, and you'll head into the busy season with confidence.

Why your website matters more during peak season

At quieter times of year, a slow or clunky website is a problem you can get away with. Visitors trickle in, and if some of them leave frustrated, the impact is manageable.

Peak season changes that equation entirely.

Traffic spikes. Ad spend goes up industry-wide, making paid clicks more expensive and organic search results more competitive. Customers are comparing multiple businesses simultaneously and making faster decisions. In that environment, a website that loads slowly, looks unprofessional, or makes it hard to get in touch doesn't just underperform — it actively hands your customers to competitors who made the effort to get it right.

The businesses that win peak season aren't always the ones with the best product or the most compelling offer. They're often the ones whose website made it easiest to say yes.

The pre-season website checklist

Work through each section below. For each item, note whether it's good to go, needs a quick fix, or needs professional attention. By the end, you'll have a clear picture of where to focus your energy.

1. Speed and performance

Check your page load time. Go to Google PageSpeed Insights and run your homepage through it. You're looking for a score above 70 on mobile — ideally above 85. If you're below that, take note of the specific recommendations it gives you.

Compress your images. Large, uncompressed images are the most common cause of slow websites. If you've added photos to your site recently without resizing or compressing them first, they may be significantly slowing your load time. Tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh can compress images without visible quality loss.

Check your hosting. Shared hosting plans can struggle under traffic spikes. If you're on a basic shared plan and you're expecting significantly more visitors than usual, it's worth talking to your host about whether your plan can handle the load — or whether an upgrade makes sense before the season starts.

Clear your cache. If your website uses a caching plugin or your hosting provider offers caching, clear it and ensure it's configured correctly. Cached pages load much faster for repeat visitors.

2. Mobile experience

Pull out your phone and visit your own website as if you were a customer seeing it for the first time.

Can you read everything without zooming? Text that's too small to read on mobile is one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor. Every piece of content should be legible at normal viewing distance without pinching to zoom.

Are buttons and links easy to tap? Tap targets — buttons, navigation links, phone numbers — should be large enough to tap comfortably with a thumb. If you're finding yourself having to be precise with your taps, your customers will too.

Does the layout make sense? Sometimes desktop layouts break in unexpected ways on smaller screens. Multi-column layouts collapse into unreadable single columns, images sit in the wrong place, text overlaps other elements. Walk through every page on your phone — not just the homepage.

Does your phone number tap to call? During peak season, many customers will want to call you directly from their phone. Your phone number should be a clickable link that opens the dialler automatically. If it's just plain text, you're adding unnecessary friction.

3. Contact forms and calls to action

This is the one that catches businesses out most often — a contact form that broke weeks or months ago and nobody noticed because the business owner wasn't the one trying to use it.

Test every form on your website. Fill in and submit every contact form, enquiry form, booking form, and quote request form on your site. Check that you actually receive the submission. Do this from a different device and email address than your own so you're seeing exactly what a customer sees.

Check your spam folder. Form submissions are sometimes filtered into spam, particularly if your email or hosting setup has changed recently. Check your spam folder for any submissions you may have missed.

Review your calls to action. Every page on your website should make it obvious what you want the visitor to do next. Before peak season, review your homepage and your most-visited pages: is the call to action prominent? Is the button easy to find? Does clicking it actually work?

Set up an auto-reply. If your forms don't already send an automatic confirmation email to the person who submitted them, set one up. During busy periods, response times can slow — an auto-reply reassures the customer that their enquiry was received and sets expectations for when they'll hear from you.

4. Update your key pages

Review your homepage. Is everything current? Offers, pricing, seasonal messaging, featured services — all of it should reflect what you're actually selling right now, not what you were selling six months ago. If you're running a holiday promotion, your homepage should reflect it prominently.

Check your services or products pages. Are your prices accurate? Are all your services listed? If you're adding seasonal services or products, now is the time to get those pages live — not after the rush has started.

Update your about page and team information. New team members, changed roles, updated photos — your about page should be current. It's one of the most visited pages on most small business websites and plays an important role in building trust.

Review your opening hours. If your hours are changing over the holiday period — extended hours, closure dates, reduced days — make sure these are clearly communicated on your website, not just on social media. Add a banner or announcement to your homepage if significant changes are coming.

5. Add seasonal promotions and offers

If you're running a special offer, promotion, or seasonal campaign, your website needs to reflect it before you start promoting it anywhere else.

Create a dedicated landing page for your offer. A specific page for a specific offer — rather than adding it to an existing page — performs better for both SEO and conversions. It gives you a focused URL you can share in ads, emails, and social posts, and it keeps visitors' attention on one thing.

Add a banner or announcement bar. Most website platforms and themes allow you to add a slim announcement bar at the top of every page. This is perfect for a time-sensitive offer — visible sitewide without disrupting your main content.

Check your promotional imagery. If you're using images on promotional pages or banners, make sure they're compressed, correctly sized, and don't slow down your page load. A beautiful banner that takes four seconds to load will do more harm than good.

6. SEO quick wins before peak season

You won't dramatically change your Google ranking in the weeks before peak season — SEO takes time. But there are a few things that can make a real difference at the margin.

Update your page titles and meta descriptions. The text that appears in Google search results — your page title and the short description below it — should be compelling and current. If your homepage title is just your business name, you're missing an opportunity. Add your main service and location: "Handmade Gifts & Hampers | [City] | [Business Name]."

Check your Google Business Profile. Your Google Business Profile — the listing that appears in Maps and local search results — should have current hours, updated photos, and a link to your website. Add a post about your holiday offerings directly to your profile. This is free and often underused.

Fix any broken links. Use a free tool like Broken Link Checker to scan your site for 404 errors — pages that no longer exist. Broken links frustrate visitors and signal to Google that your site isn't well-maintained. Fix or redirect them before the season starts.

7. Three things that will make you stand out

Most of your competitors will do none of the above. If you complete this checklist, you're already ahead. Here are three additional things that will put real distance between you and the competition:

Add fresh customer reviews to your homepage. If you've received great reviews recently — on Google, Facebook, or anywhere else — add them to your website before peak season. Fresh social proof is one of the most powerful conversion tools available to small businesses, and it costs nothing to add.

Create a simple FAQ for your busiest season. What are the most common questions customers ask you in the weeks before your peak season? Turn those into a short FAQ page or section. It saves you time answering the same questions repeatedly, and it gives Google more relevant content to surface in search results.

Set up a basic live chat or chatbot. Even a simple chat widget — many are free — lets visitors ask quick questions without picking up the phone. During busy periods when your team is stretched, a chat tool can capture enquiries that might otherwise be lost. Tools like Tidio or Crisp offer free plans that are easy to install on most websites.

Already feeling overwhelmed?

If you've worked through this checklist and realised there's more to fix than you have time to handle yourself — or if some of it is over your head technically — that's exactly what we're here for.

At WebFriend, we offer a pre-season website tune-up service for small businesses. We'll run through everything on this checklist (and more), fix what needs fixing, and make sure your website is performing at its best before your busiest period of the year.

Don't let a fixable website problem cost you sales this season.

→ Book a pre-season website tune-up with WebFriend

Not sure if your website needs attention? Start with our free website audit — we'll tell you honestly what's working and what isn't.