Digital Workspace

Make Sure to Optimize and Secure Your Online Presence for the Holidays

Retailers may focus on the digital customer experience during the holiday shopping season, but it’s critical for business all year long.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

The year is winding down, and just like that, the holiday rush is upon us. The urgent need to acquire everything from a free-range Thanksgiving turkey to a handcrafted fishing fly for grandpa drives millions of customers to the web with their debit and credit card numbers in hand, ready to close those retail deals.

This prompts the question: Is your internet storefront ready? At this fall’s Shop.org, a National Retail Federation conference on the digital marketplace, experts discussed how online shoppers can become frustrated, often resorting to “rage clicks” at any delay in moving from one retail web page to another or when processing orders.

Focus groups have revealed that a slow website can create a lasting negative impression of an entire company, according to Tammy Everts, chief experience officer of SpeedCurve, a web traffic adviser. That is a perception most small to medium-sized retailers, striving to grow their businesses, can’t afford.

Further complicating retailers’ holiday sales is another potential problem: a lack of mobile optimization. This year, more shoppers than ever will make purchases from a mobile device. Online retailers will lose at least half of those customers if their virtual storefronts take more than a few seconds to load. In this environment, milliseconds matter.

Deliver an Easy and Secure Online Experience

But it isn’t just retailers that connect with the public through desktop and mobile devices. Most organizations now engage customers, constituents and stakeholders online. Basically, all businesses should make their site experience compelling, easy to navigate and speedy.

Plus, in this time of constant cyberthreats, it’s also critical to protect your online presence — particularly from ransomware. Aping URLs is a common tactic used to lure victims and give malware the foothold it needs to begin encrypting files. But with a layered secruity approach, you can keep your site and business safe from cyberextortion.

To gain insights from other SMBs that have dealt with or successfully thwarted ransomware attacks, check out our feature “Inside the Real-World Fight Against Ransomware.”

November and December may be the festive peak of hyperactivity for retail, but year-round, most businesses interact with their customers daily, so make sure your business is ready.

Here’s to a happy, profitable and secure holiday season!

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