The Christmas Shopping Season of 2019 is expected to break sales records over Christmas 2018 online sales of US$765 Billion in the US and up to 12% according to the US National Retail Federation. In the US and the UK, the Christmas shopping season is the busiest shopping time of the year and accounts for as much as 30% of the total sales in the year for many retailers.
In a Google Webmaster Central Hangout last week (18th October 2019), a question was put to Google’s John Mueller. “Wondering if Google checks status codes before anything else, like before rendering content?” This is a great question to John – in very simple terms do Google care about the status code on your website? The answer is categorically yes. Google does indeed check the status code of a website page before indexing it, or rendering content.
What is Black Friday? The name originated in the US and it was given to the shopping day after Thanksgiving Day, which is the fourth Thursday in November with many Americans on holiday the following day. As most people are off work on the Friday following Thanksgiving, shops started cutting prices to entice customers just for one day and get the Christmas shopping season underway.
US retailer Target faced issues with its online presence yesterday, Tuesday 24th September 2019, when its website experienced an outage. The downtime not only impacted Target’s sales website but also its mobile application as well as payment processing in store.
SaaS Affiliate Programs have become very popular in 2019 with both online publishers and bloggers. Today freelancers working online can sign up to a variety of SaaS affiliate programs on offer and start sending their traffic via their affiliate links to your online store and if these users buy one of your products or services, the affiliate website gets paid a commission for the sales driven by them.
Are you in the process of migrating your content to a new website? If so, you’ll already know that this is one of the most taxing and demanding experiences a webmaster or business owner can undergo. Unfortunately, the process known as content migration is a necessary part of a website redesign. This is where content elements such as text, images and videos, are migrated from your old website to the new design.
In the field of website optimisation a term which often crops up more than any other is that of ‘bounce rate’. When discussions about your website take place, you may have heard in passing that ‘your bounce rate is too high’, or that ‘we need to reduce the bounce rate to increase rankings’. But what do you do if your bounce rate is too high, and how would you go about reducing a high bounce rate?
It’s never been easier to create your own website, or to start selling your products online. There is a wide range of Content Management Systems (CMS) for you to choose from, each offering its own unique set of features and functionality. You have probably already heard of many of the most well-known CMS, such as WordPress and Squarespace, but there are other less well-known platforms that may be more suited to your needs.
Every year, more and more website traffic is mobile-driven. Statistically speaking, you’re far more likely to be reading this article now on a mobile device rather than on desktop. Indeed, mobile usage goes far beyond website traffic, as virtually every action we take in modern life, from ordering a takeaway to sharing a photo with friends, takes place on a mobile device.
Would you know if your website went down? What would a potential customer think if they tried to access your website and found that it was offline? Would they return for a second time? Almost all businesses maintain some sort of online presence, and even for companies with large IT teams, it is simply infeasible for an individual or team to manually monitor the status of a particular website.
