The silly season is fast approaching. For many Australian businesses, this is the peak time for busyness and revenue. More customers, more enquiries, more traffic to your website. What usually happens: most business owners don’t think about their website until something breaks.
I’ve seen many businesses lose significant revenue during this peak trading time because their sites weren’t prepared. One lost online days of online orders because their hosting couldn’t handle the traffic spike. Another discovered their contact form was broken after wondering why enquiries had dried up in the busiest time of the year.
These problems are easily preventable.
The five checks below take about 20 minutes total. Do them now, before you’re busy serving customers and can’t afford the distraction of a website crisis.
The absolute worst time for your site to go offline is during Christmas or holidays! It could mean missing out on valuable sales or enquiries from your website, or worse yet pulling you away from prawns and pavlova at your Christmas lunch.
Check 1: Test your contact form
Your contact form might be broken right now and you’d have no idea. Forms can fail silently. They look fine on your website, but nothing happens when someone submits them.
Here’s how to test properly:
Use a different email address. Don’t test with your usual business email because you need to see what customers see. Use temp-mail.org if you don’t want to use a personal email.
Fill out every field in your form. Include your phone number, write a realistic message. Submit it exactly as a customer would.
Check three things:
- Did the form submit OK on your website?
- Did the enquiry land in your business email where it should?
- If you have an auto reply setup- does it make sense and include current information?
Common problems to watch for: emails going to spam, wrong inbox configured, plugin conflicts after updates, or server email settings that changed without warning.
If your form isn’t working, you need to fix it before the silly season hits. Check your spam folder first. Then verify the email address in your form settings. If you’re still stuck, your hosting might not support email sending properly — you’ll need to set up an external service to handle email to improve deliverability.
Testing takes two minutes. Finding out your form is broken during peak season is much more expensive.
Check 2: Update your opening hours
Customers trust what they see on your website. If your hours are wrong, they’ll show up when you’re closed, or not bother because they think you’re unavailable.
Check these places:
- Website footer and header
- Contact page
- About page
- Any location pages
- Google Business Profile
- Social media profiles
Common mistakes: old holiday hours still showing from last year, inconsistent hours across different platforms, special summer hours not added yet.
This is especially important if you change your hours seasonally. If you’re open longer during summer, or closed on different days, update everything now. Don’t wait until December to remember.
Five minutes now saves customer frustration later. And frustrated customers don’t become repeat customers.
Check 3: Review and update pricing
Nothing damages trust faster than wrong prices on your website. If your service page says one thing and you quote something different, customers feel deceived even if it’s an honest mistake.
Review these areas:
- Service pages
- Product pages
- Price lists or menus
- Package descriptions
- Any seasonal pricing that needs updating
Don’t forget about some of the tricky locations that could contain old prices – think downloadable PDFs, pricing embedded in images, or old pages or blog articles that mention pricing.
If your prices changed recently, search your whole site for the old amounts. You’d be surprised where old pricing hides.
Keep a simple log of when you change prices. Note the date, what changed, and where you updated it. Next time you need to update pricing, you’ll know exactly which pages to check.
Wrong pricing doesn’t just cost you money. It costs you credibility.
Check 4: Remove outdated content
Stale content makes your business look unprofessional. If your homepage still promotes a winter special, or your blog’s latest post is from 2023, customers wonder if you’re still operating.
Quick scan these areas:
- Homepage banners and hero sections
- Sidebar widgets with promotions
- Footer announcements
- Pop-ups offering expired deals
- Event information that’s passed
- Any content that says “current” or “this year”
Old seasonal promotions are the biggest culprit. That “Christmas special” should have been removed in January. That “new summer range” from last year needs updating or removing.
Blog posts can be updated rather than deleted. If you have useful content from previous years, update the information and republish it with a current date. Fresh content signals an active business.
This isn’t about constantly creating new content. It’s about removing or updating what’s already there so your site looks current and trustworthy.
Check 5: Test your site speed
Peak season traffic plus a slow website equals lost sales. Customers don’t wait for slow sites to load. They click back to Google and choose your competitor instead.
Use Google Page Speed Insights to test your site. Look at the score for both mobile and desktop. Test your homepage, your main service pages, and any pages customers use to make purchases or enquiries.
What the scores mean:
- Under 50 on mobile: Fix this immediately
- 50-80: Could be better, should be improved
- 80+: You’re in good shape
Most Australian business websites get 60-80% mobile traffic. Your mobile score matters more than desktop. If you only fix one thing, fix mobile performance.
Quick wins for better speed:
- Optimise your images. Compress them before uploading. Large image files are the number one cause of slow websites. Use a free site like tinypng.com before adding images to your site.
- Clear your caching plugins and make sure they’re actually working. A caching plugin that’s not configured properly can make things worse.
- Update WordPress, your theme, and all plugins. Outdated software often runs slower than current versions.
- Check for broken or abandoned plugins. Deactivate anything you’re not actually using.
If your scores are consistently under 50 and you can’t fix it yourself, get performance help before the silly season. Slow sites during peak trading cost you real money.
What happens if you skip these checks
These aren’t theoretical problems. They’re real issues I’ve seen cost businesses thousands in lost revenue.
The cost isn’t just immediate sales. Reputation damage lasts well beyond summer. Customers remember broken websites and poor experiences. They tell their friends. They leave reviews.
Twenty minutes of prevention beats days of emergency fixes and months of reputation recovery.
Your silly season prep checklist
Here’s your checklist. Work through it now, not when the silly season arrives:
- Test your contact form with a different email address
- Update opening hours everywhere they appear
- Review all pricing information on your site
- Remove old seasonal content and outdated promotions
- Run PageSpeed test on your key pages
Do this at least four weeks before your peak season starts. That gives you time to fix any problems you find without the pressure of peak trading.
Set a calendar reminder for next year. Make this an annual routine, like checking your car before a long drive. Prevention is always cheaper than emergency repairs.
Need help getting ready?
If you’ve worked through this checklist and found problems you can’t fix yourself, get help now. If your PageSpeed scores are consistently low and you don’t know why, that’s something to address before the busy period hits.
If you want a professional review of your website before peak season, now is the time to get in touch. I can spot the problems you might miss and fix them before they cost you business.
Don’t wait until you’re losing sales to fix your website. Get it sorted while you have time.
