I was slightly nervous planning virtual office celebrations for the first time, even though I had WDS’ history to look back on from previous years and a mentor, my manager April Williams. We have an internal site for company info so I started there, researching past activities and searching for some new additions (there are some great ideas on the world wide web). Here’s what I’ve learned.

Virtual Office Celebrations Should Align with Company Culture

You need to have a good pulse on the company culture and the people that work at your company before starting to plan virtual office celebrations. What will draw the most interest? How can you encourage but not require people to participate?

We are a pretty lively bunch here and have an overwhelming amount of people join in for company activities. During Halloween, we do a costume contest, pumpkin carving contest, and watch a scary movie over Zoom.

In December, we have an ugly sweater contest, Secret Santa gift exchange, a Festivus tree decoration contest, and charity challenge. This year, we have formed two teams to compete to see who raises the most funds, and we are using MightyCause.com as our donation platform. You can create team pages, share the links on social media to get people to donate to your team, and Might Cause will handle all the remittance to the charities. Remember to tell your team members it is not required for them to donate themselves. You don’t want to make anyone feel bad if they can’t or don’t want to participate.

Try Something New and Have a Plan

This year for the winter holidays, I wanted to add a new idea to the mix. We will keep the classics that we always do. They are fun, easy, and guaranteed for a good turn out. But you don’t want festivities to get stale. It can lead to lower participation and variety is the spice of life! We try to have an event every week to spread them out with a schedule sent out in the beginning of the month on our internal company board.

We already started with a happy hour on our regular scheduled Friday scrum for the first week. We have also set up the Secret Santa gift exchange, too, giving everyone that wants to participate enough time to add stuff to their wish list. (We use Elfster, which makes it super easy for the Secret Santa and their gift recipient.) Since we do have some international teammates, we like to get the presents out about two weeks before we do the big lunchtime reveal to make sure everyone has something to open live. It really is a joy to see people open presents—makes us all feel like kids again. Just make sure you let everyone know they have to wait till you are all on Zoom together to open them!

The new activity for the WDS virtual celebrations this year will be a holiday scavenger hunt. It’s interactive and fun. This activity gets people out and about while being safe during the pandemic. My plan is to set up a Slack channel for participants to post their findings and even those who don’t play can peek at the funny pics on the list!

Include Everyone

Make sure whatever you plan that you keep it inclusive. Not everyone celebrates a specific holiday, so label things to reflect that and add elements of everyone’s background into your activities. This way, everyone feels included and invited to participated.

Although it isn’t required, having prizes for the events really ups the ante. They don’t have to all be huge. We use Hey Taco! on a regular basis here for recognition (if you don’t know what this is, check it out). We give a bulk amount of tacos for some of the contests, as well as gift cards. Of course, bragging rights go a long way here, too!

Even though this year may be vastly different from your past holiday events, virtual celebrations can still promote unity, bonding, and laughs. It also gives you a chance to think outside the box a little. Yes, some things take more planning or thought because you aren’t physically in the same space, but in no way does that make them less fun. I can honestly say that I laughed so hard during our last ugly sweater contest that I cried. Let’s just say, we had some very creative entries.

The post Tips for Virtual Office Celebrations appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We turned to our expert team of WordPress users, leaders, and engineers to gather up tips and recommendations to help you prepare your WordPress website for a busy holiday season. Act now and reap the rewards later.

Curtail Shopping Cart Abandonment, Create Calls to Action, and Use Social Media

“To best prepare your WordPress site for the holidays, I think you should add abandon cart functionality. Also, think of creative calls to action for users and assure your related products are set up correctly for upsells. Get your social media in line branding-wise with your website and make sure all social media posts point back to the website itself.”
 
 
 
 
 

Focus on Schema, Navigation, and Responsiveness

“Add schema markup to your site to help your search results stand out further. Schema helps search engines understand more about the type of content you have. Also, make performance and user improvements. Ask yourself if your site is easy to navigate. Is it obvious how to do tasks, and does it load quickly? You can test your site with Google Lighthouse to get a good understanding of each page.

Something that can make a big impact in your site traffic is how well your site handles various devices. If your site isn’t responsive, you’ll likely provide a poor overall user experience which will make your site less effective even if you have a lot of traffic. Instead, make sure text is easy to read, avoid complicated sliders, test your forms, and make sure your images are optimized. Just hitting some of the basics can make a huge difference in an experience someone has when using your website.”

Back Up, Communicate, Plan

“Back up the entire site prior to the holidays (both the application and the database). Consider letting your customers and visitors know you’ll be out of the office either via a post, a mailing list, or both. Don’t launch anything critical during the week leading up to the break. Consider a code freeze of whatever branch of code you’re working on prior to and put together a plan for development after you’re back from the holidays. Depending on the size and scale of your site, consider having someone (or several people) on a rotating schedule for being on call and consider have them set to easily restore data from a backup created prior to the holidays so they aren’t spending time on the holiday ‘at work.'”
 

Testing, Testing…

“A dry run is always useful. Go through your website like a new customer. Read carefully; check for typos. Does your navigation make sense? Are things organized logically? Can you complete an order? It’s always better to find out problems yourself than to wait for a thousand potential customers to find them!”
 
 
 
 
 

“The last thing you want is your site to go down during holiday shopping times. You need to be sure that your WordPress website can handle the traffic. Stress test your site now in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises later on.”
 
 
 
 
 

Novelty Can Serve a Purpose

“When all else fails, turn on Jetpack snow.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Start Now

Take these ideas, write up a to-do list, and tackle those tasks. Getting started now on preparing your WordPress site for the holidays is sure to help you have a smooth season of sales. Need help on readying your website? Contact us and let’s chat.

The post Things You Can Do NOW to Prepare Your WordPress Site for the Holidays appeared first on WebDevStudios.

It’s that kind of growth in eCommerce that puts the same question into the heads of every store owner—will our store be ready for the holidays?

When asking this question, there are three parts to think about—the website itself, your payment processor, and the tools/processes you use for shipping products.

1. Will our website handle the holiday traffic surge?
2. Will our payment processor be able to handle our holiday traffic?
3. Will our fulfillment processes buckle under the increased holiday traffic?

Today we’re going to dig into the first question and make sure you’re doing everything you can to make sure that your online store is ready for a large jump in traffic and transactions.

The Name of the Game is Performance

There are a lot of different statistics that help us understand customers who visit online stores.

When pages within the store take longer than 2 seconds to load, session lengths can drop by 50%. That’s one of my favorites. But we also know Google stops sending you traffic as your store takes longer and longer to load. Their magic number? 2.7 seconds.

But you don’t these statistics to think about your own experiences.

When you think back to the last time you were shopping, if you clicked on a link and it took more than one or two seconds, did you continue to wait? What if it happened a second time?

Most of us don’t need stats to know that when it comes to eCommerce sites, speed is the name of the game.

So here are five things to consider when it comes to optimizing your online store for performance.

Optimize Your Images

The single most important thing you can do to optimize performance of your store is to check out your images and their sizes. If you’re like most people, you didn’t take the photos yourself. But the files you got from your photographer may be larger than you need for your site.

Did you get images larger than you needed?

When you look at a lot of eCommerce themes, the average image size is something like 300 pixels wide. But if you look at the image your photographer sent you, it could be 6,000 pixels across. That’s 20 times bigger than you need.

Don’t get me wrong, you might want it to be 600 pixels wide for greater resolution and Retina screens. But we can all agree that carrying the rest of the pixels will not add more to your customer’s experience except for the slow-down it causes.

Not everyone has tools to resize or compress their images

If you’re thinking to yourself that you don’t have the software to resize or compress images, don’t worry. The good news is that there are a bunch of solutions to help you get the right sized images on your site.

In fact, in some cases you don’t have to do anything at all. Some of the following solutions integrate directly with your site so that any image that’s uploaded is automatically compressed and resized.

Check out these solutions to optimize your images

The fastest way to speed up your site is to shrink the “weight” of your pages. That’s where these image compression tools come in.

• Jetpack Image CDN (formerly Photon) – free
• TinyPNG – Free for the first 500 compressions a month
• Kraken.io – $5/month for up to 500 MB of images
• Imagify – $4.99/month for up to 1GB (10,000) compressed images

Speed up your site with a CDN

If you’ve already done the work of compressing your images, it’s time to look at the rest of the files that make up your site. We’ve talked about page weight already, and while images are the worst offender, JavaScript and other files (uploaded PDFs, etc) can also create a load that slows pages down.

That’s where a CDN comes in. Think of a CDN as a network of servers across the globe, located as close to store visitors as they can be, with a copy of all your site’s files.

The result is that every time someone makes a request, the servers closest to them can get them files quickly. This takes the burden away from your main server because the CDN does some of the work it would normally do. That’s the nature of a distributed cache.

You can get started for free with CloudFlare simply by signing up. You’ll get three page rules that will allow you to turn off their caching for your cart, checkout and my-account pages. And if you want more, you can jump to their Pro plan.

Many stores can get 80-90% of their pages cached, which means you’ll get greater capacity to scale from the infrastructure you already have.

The next step is harder—ruthless selectivity

The first two steps aren’t super hard to do. Yes, there’s work—you’ll have to get an image optimization solution in place, but after that, it takes care of itself. The same is true for CDNs after you get them configured.

Step three is harder because it’s a judgement game. This is a problem you know well.

You’ve lived through this dilemma before

Imagine you want to buy a car. Or a house. You have some dollar figure in your head—in terms of what you’re willing to spend. Now you see a car that has everything you want. But also a few more features. And it’s 20% more expensive. Or a house that has some extra rooms you love but hadn’t needed. And it’s 15% more expensive.

The question you ask in your head sounds like this: “I really, really like that. And it could be so useful. And I love it. I’ve always wanted it. But is it worth the extra cost?”

The question is almost never, “Can I afford it?” but instead is almost always, “Is it worth it?”

Ruthless selectivity is a choice that requires testing

And that’s what this step is all about. Every cool feature you have on your site increases the cost of performance in some way. Maybe it’s a great feature. Maybe it looks great. Maybe it makes you proud.

But the question is, does it deliver enough value to warrant its cost?

Unfortunately, the only way to know is to test it. Test your store with it, and without it.

There are load testing tools like Load Impact that can simulate multiple users hitting your site concurrently. They tell you how your site will perform under that load. And your job now is to run those tests while turning on and off features and/or designs.

• How many queries does that pop-up plugin take?
• How much slower is the site when you add that banner announcement?
• How much larger is the page when you add those sliders?
• How much slower is your checkout page when it has those dynamic coupons added?

As you gather this information, you have to determine if the feature is worth the performance impact. Without that information, you’re only judging things by how well they look or how well they make you feel.

There are some plugins that can also help

Additionally, this is when you start looking for tools that will help you optimize performance even more.

One premium plugin I recommend is perfmatters. You pay for the features, but it helps you optimize your site and even does some advanced work, in terms of pre-fetching and pre-connecting. You can read more about it in this KeyCDN article.

If you don’t want to purchase that plugin for optimization, you can take a look at a free plugin that can do some similar things: WP Disable.

Not all optimizations happen on the server

One of the most common mistakes made by store owners is to only focus on the things which they control directly. Clearly you should optimize your images, use a CDN, turn off features you don’t need, and more. But all of that is focused on your server and your code.

What about what happens after people have left your store, particularly without buying anything?

A Monetate study last year on eCommerce and retention discovered that the magic number was seven. That’s the length of time that can pass where you can expect a customer to come back to your site unassisted. After seven days, you’ll never see them again.

That’s if you don’t do anything about it.

Cart Abandonment & Life Cycle Emails are Critical

That’s why cart abandonment (and other life cycle) emails are critical and worth optimizing, even if it happens away from your store.

Seventy percent of your prospects will visit the store and leave something in a cart. That’s revenue that’s recoverable if you know what to do. But if you do nothing, you can count it as lost revenue, and no one likes that.

I regularly recommend a SaaS called Jilt—which integrates with the most common eCommerce platforms out there—to help you with this.

Personalization is the key to connecting and building trust and that’s what Jilt helps with. You can use their SaaS for onboarding, post-purchase surveys, coupon delivery, and, of course, abandoned cart emails.

Final Step: Don’t forget Search

Everyone who has made an online purchase has likely done it at Amazon.com. That’s just the nature of the beast. And all those interactions have done is pre-train your customers to do the same.

I’m guessing, however, that you haven’t spent the time or money to create the extensive feature set and performance that people have enjoyed at Amazon.com.

So what do you do?

Check out Algolia: a modern solution for search

Check out the solution from Algolia. This is another SaaS solution that takes work off your server and does it remotely on theirs. After the configuration, your entire content and products will be indexed.

The best part for your customers is that they’ll get quick type-ahead features which will make your site feel lightning fast to them.

The best part for you is that you’ll get deep insights into what they were searching for.

You can also check out FacetWP

If you’re not looking for a new monthly expense or SaaS like Algolia, you could also take a look at FacetWP—a solution for eCommerce sites that gives you that attribute-based filtering that everyone uses at Amazon.com.

Either solution will help you get closer to what people expect, and what they want. Because unless your store sells one or two items, they’re bound to use your search or filters and they have been trained to expect speed and performance.

As you can see, there’s no silver bullet

Preparing for a holiday rush is no small matter. The time to do it is now, not weeks from now when you’re rushed and have to make trade-offs based on your schedule. These five tips can help you get focused on the critical areas to improve for customers who visit.

Here’s a quick visual summary of the five things to focus on when it comes to preparing your online store for the holiday rush.

About the Author

Who better to talk to you about your eCommerce store than the Vice President of Product at Liquid Web? Chris Lema is a product strategist, public speaker, blogger, and a devoted member of the WordPress community. Read his blog at ChrisLema.com and follow him on Twitter @chrislema. You can also follow Liquid Web on Twitter @liquidweb.

The post Preparing Your eCommerce Store for the Holidays appeared first on WebDevStudios.

• $2,390 donated to Code for Progress
• $1,160 donated to Open Sourcing Mental Illness
• $435 donated to Able Gamers
• $3,246 donated to Freedom Projectz
• $3,375 donated to CodeStarter
• $1,616 donated to Electronics Frontier Foundation
• $1,400 donated to Girl Develop It

That means that in total, WDS has raised $13,622 for nonprofit charities during the holidays. But we’re not done. This year, WDS has once again opted for a charity challenge (we’re a rather competitive group of folks), splitting the company into two teams. What’s different about this year’s charity challenge, though, is that the two charities we’ve chosen to raise money for are our very own clients: Integrity House and Loveisrespect. Now that you know our chosen charities, let’s talk team names. (Drum roll, please.)

Raising money for Integrity House is… Team Festivus!

And introducing Team Humble Bumble, who will be collecting funds for Loveisrespect!

The WDS holiday charity challenge officially began December 1st and ends at 11:59 p.m. on December 31st. You can participate, too! Just visit the You Caring page for your favorite team to donate. (Or, heck! Donate to both teams. Why not?)

To donate funds to Integrity House via Team Festivus, click here.

To donate funds to Loveisrespect via Team Humble Bumble, click here.

WDS loves to give back. Thank you for joining us in our cause. We wish you a spectacular holiday season.

The post ‘Tis the Season for Holiday Charity Fundraising! appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We divided into three teams, each named after one of Santa’s reindeer. Selecting a tech-based beneficiary, our challenge is to raise the most money for our chosen charity. While there is no prize involved for the winning team, there are bragging rights to be had and satisfaction in knowing we accomplished something altruistic. Even the teams who fall short in the competition have something to be proud about, because win or lose, all money collected will go to each team’s nonprofit.

Below, listed in alphabetical order are the charity fundraising teams and their selected organizations. All are varied. So, if you spot a cause you support, we implore you to get involved with our efforts and make a donation! You can even give anonymously, but know that anything given is deeply appreciated by everyone at WDS.

So explore the list, find a charity you like, and click to donate. It’s a win-win situation for WDS, the selected charities, and you. Happy holidays!

via GIPHY

Team Blitzen for The Able Gamers Charity
The AbleGamers Foundation, also known as AbleGamers Charity, is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit public charity that aims to improve the overall quality of life for those with disabilities through the power of video games. Video games allow individuals with disabilities to experience situations that may be difficult or limited in the real world, provide social networking opportunities to maintain mental and emotional health, and participate in one of the world’s largest pastimes.

Team Comet for Code for Progress
Code for Progress brings women and people of color into the coding workforce through holistic investment in their technical training. The organization offers a yearlong web development fellowship that includes an intensive five-month instructor-led classroom training followed by a six-month internship with one of our internship host partner organizations.

Team Rudolph for Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI)
An amazing man by the name of Ed Finkler started bringing awareness to mental illness by speaking out about his personal experiences. The response was overwhelming. OSMI works directly in making supportive environments for those impacted by mental health disorders within the tech community and educate employers. For every dollar ($) raised, OSMI can directly help expand education and awareness in the tech community and help our fellow peers.

The post Holiday Charity Challenge appeared first on WebDevStudios.