Is Your Website Ready for the Holidays?

The holidays are about eight weeks away. For a lot of small businesses, those few weeks can make the whole year. A gentle thought before the rush: your website is about to meet a lot of new people, most of them on their phones, most of them in a hurry.

This is not meant to worry you. It is just that a little prep now can save a lot of stress later. Consider what the numbers say. According to SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index, 84% of U.S. consumers use search engines at least monthly to find local businesses. And 63% say they have stopped being a customer of a local business because they could not find a specific answer they needed online. Half of those people were just looking for hours.

That one stayed with me. Hours are the simplest thing on your website, and they are what people look for most. And 49% say they would be unlikely to visit a business again after finding its hours listed wrong online. It is not that people are unforgiving. It is that during the holidays everyone is juggling ten things at once, and the business that makes life easy is the one that wins.

Here are the things I notice most often when I look at small business websites in October. No judgment here. Most of these take an afternoon to fix, and every one of them is fixable.

Five little things worth checking

1. Holiday hours are missing. This is the big one, and happily it is also the easiest fix. If your hours are not on your site and your Google Business Profile, someone might check on their phone, drive over, and find a locked door. Nobody wants that, least of all you.

2. The site feels slow on phones. Most of your holiday visitors will be on a phone, maybe standing in a parking lot deciding where to go next. If the pages drag, they will pick someone else. It is not personal. It is just thumbs.

3. Contact info is hard to find. Phone number, address, hours. If a visitor has to hunt for these, the busy ones will move on. And during the holidays, everyone is busy.

4. Things look a little stale. Last year’s holiday banner. A blog post from 2023. It happens to all of us. But fresh photos and this year’s dates tell people somebody is minding the store.

5. There is no clear next step. Your homepage tells your story beautifully, and then nothing guides the visitor.

The afternoon checklist

None of this needs a rebuild. It is a checklist, and most of it fits in an afternoon.

• Set your holiday hours on your Google Business Profile today, then match them on your website.
• Pull up your site on your phone and try the three things a customer would do: find your hours, find your phone number, get in touch. Wherever you stumble, start there.
• Compress your images, or ask someone to. It is the single biggest speed win on most small business sites.
• Update or remove anything with last year’s date on it.
• Put one clear button on your homepage that says what to do next.

One more thing worth knowing. Over half of consumers have used an AI tool to find a local business in the last month. Those tools read your business profile and your site’s structured data. If your hours say different things in different places, the AI will simply recommend someone else. When your hours disagree with each other, the tools quietly send people elsewhere. Matching them up costs nothing.

The holidays will come whether your website is ready or not. A calm October makes for a calm December, and you deserve the calm version.

If you would like a hand with any of this, that is exactly what my Year-End Website Tune-Up is for. I work through the whole checklist plus the technical bits underneath, and hand your site back ready for the season. I am taking 8 of them, and booking closes October 31. You can reach me here.