Code Freeze: Is Your Website Ready for the Holiday Season?

The Holiday season is upon us with the looming promise of gift shopping sprees, meal planning and back to back traveling. Though it can be rewarding to spend time with our loved ones and eat tons of food, the holiday season can be stressful as there are so many things to prepare for.

I’m here to add another thing to the list. Code freeze is a website optimization strategy that involves refraining from making any big changes to your website during high traffic periods.

This strategy allows eCommerce retailers to prepare for their busiest time of the year in advance, as it can be difficult to implement big changes to your site when it’s busy, and you wouldn’t want to lose potential customers if a big project is impacting your site’s performance.

Code freezes can run from late October throughout the holiday season, so it’s almost time! Here are a few things to consider as you prepare for this year’s code freeze. 

Checkout Flow 

Checkout flow is especially important as the checkout screen is where the majority of prospective shoppers abandon their carts. Each step in the flow can make or break a sale, so it’s imperative that checkout runs smoothly.

To optimize checkout flow, offer multiple shipping options, if possible, and establish trust with ratings and security certifications. Offer multiple forms of payment and consider adding smart recommendations to increase revenue during this period of high traffic. 

Performance 

Images often take the longest to load, consider compressing your images or reducing their size and resolution to help your site load faster. Limit the number of HTTP requests, it can help if you use caching to reduce the time it takes to reroute users to your site. Make sure you remove any unnecessary code that could be making your website run slower.  

Inventory 

It’s important to have awareness of your stock as it will be moving a lot faster than usual. Forecasting demand will help you manage inventory, it can be helpful to have buffer stock as well to ensure you don’t run out of any products during peak times.

Implementing real-time analytics will help you manage your inventory simultaneously, this is a big project however and will require lots of time and manpower, which is why it’s important to consider finishing these types of projects before it gets busy. 

There are a few arguments against . Some developers find it to be risky as it can be time consuming, it can derail your development roadmap, and it can fail if you uncover major problems with your site during the freeze.

It also involves pausing large projects if you can’t finish them in time, which can be difficult to pick back up again when the freeze is over. Luckily, there are a few different flavors of code freeze to choose from, so if you’re weighing the risks and wondering how to proceed, consider the following options. 

Hard Code Freeze 

A hard freeze is the most extreme type as it restricts developers from implementing any changes to your website’s code during the freeze.  

Soft Code Freeze 

A soft freeze allows for exceptions, meaning that some aspects of your site’s code are off-limits, while others may be fair game.  

Code Frost 

This is the most lenient version, which is basically just an agreement between project managers and developers to make as few changes as possible during the period.  

Now that you’re familiar with the options and have a well-rounded perspective on what code freeze can entail for your business, consider the positive and negative impacts it may have before making your decision. There are still other ways to improve your digital experience that are based in code.

Consider conducting consumer research to analyze customer behavior for future projects. You can also feel free to run A/B tests, which may yield results faster as your site will likely have more visitors than ever.

Either way, consider how you’ll prepare for the most critical time of the year and look to the experts if you still feel lost. Virid has decades worth of experience in eCommerce web development, so we know a thing or two when it comes to code. Good luck out there, and happy holidays!