Must do holiday task beyond sales and marketing

By Ilana Davis

I took a step back and for the first time in a long time, felt like I could breathe. Only to be reminded, not that I forgot, that the holidays are already here.

Over the summer, we discussed buying our gifts early. 2020 has brought a lot of shipping issues and it made sense at the time to avoid the crunch. Leading up to the election though, we’ve been holding back on a lot of things.

Discretionary spending was paused.

Like most people, we didn’t know what to expect. This had nothing to do with whether our candidate would be elected. That’s how it is every election year. Compound that with the pandemic, there were and still are a lot of unknowns.

If I could make a prediction though, those who can afford the holidays will spend big. Brick and mortar stores are still not fully open and online spending remains up.

Our economy has been hungry for normalcy in a time when there is so much uncertainty. I don’t have a crystal ball. So I’m choosing to be prepared for a good holiday season across many Shopify stores.

Preparation for Black Friday, Cyber Monday isn’t just about sales and marketing. Anyone who has gone through a few big seasons knows that development on their store pauses before the big sale. Pausing development is a great thing to do, but there’s more!

Shopify store owners may forget to backup their Shopify website.

Why backup your store?

The leading cause of issues on a Shopify store is user error! We’ve all done it.

Another reason to back up your site is the second leading cause of issues. Apps. You may have added an app for your promotions and likely won’t know it broke something until it’s too late. As a rule of thumb, backup your site before and after every app!

There are a few ways to do this.

Manually

To manually back up your site, I recommend exporting the following. These are the only exports available to you as the store owner.

  • Theme
  • Orders
  • Products
  • Customers
  • Discount codes
  • Gift card codes
  • Financial data

Are these enough to get you back up and running?

Using an App

I know, I just told you that apps are often the cause of issues. This app is the only one I recommend for all stores no matter who you are or what you’re selling.

If you don’t currently have Rewind installed, do it now. Rewind backs up everything you need. Their backups include items above, blogs, pages, policies, shipping zones, menu navigation, and more. Think of the time you’d save if all this was recoverable with the click of a button!

The biggest complaint I hear is the cost. Depending on the size of your store, yes it can get costly.

You have health insurance in case you get sick so that your bill is lower than if you didn’t have health insurance. Think of Rewind as insurance for your Shopify site.

How much would it cost you if every one of your product pages got deleted? How much would it cost you to recreate all the content on your site? What would you pay to ensure there is always a backup just-in-case? It’s a small price to pay now to save you from what could be.

If you don’t already have Rewind and decide to get it, let me know and I’ll get you the first month free.

JSON-LD for SEO

Get more organic search traffic from Google without having to fight for better rankings by utilizing search enhancements called Rich Results.

Linking Llama

Link discontinued products to their best substitute. Keep discontinued products published on your website and continue to benefit from traffic to these pages.