Getting client sites ready for the holiday rush
A holiday website checklist a one-person AI agency can run for every client: dates to confirm, hours to update, pages to add, what to freeze, closing safely.
A gift shop owner emails on the second Monday of December. She needs a Christmas page, a banner about last posting dates, new hours for the week between Christmas and New Year, and a way to sell gift vouchers. By Friday, please. Her designer also has a café, a bakery and a hairdresser asking for much the same thing that week.
Every item on that list could have been done in October. None of it was hard, and for a one-person AI agency with a few local clients it all lands in the same week. It just arrived all at once, at the worst possible time, from every client together.
The holiday rush is predictable, which means you can get ahead of it. The short version: ask every client for their dates now, update hours in two places, add one clear holiday page or banner, test the things that take money, and finish big changes well before the busy weeks start. The rest of this article is the checklist, and a way to run it for all your clients without it eating December.
Why start holiday website updates in September?
Because the business owner is thinking about stock, staff and rosters, not the website, and they'll think of the website late. You can't make them plan earlier. You can ask the questions early and turn the answers into a small job you schedule.
A good rhythm for a designer with a handful of clients:
| When | What you do | What the client does |
|---|---|---|
| September | Send each client five short questions about their holiday dates and plans | Replies with dates and ideas |
| A few weeks later | Build holiday pages, banners and voucher or ordering changes on a copy of the site | Approves the wording |
| Well before the first busy day | Go live, test everything, update hours on Google | Checks the hours are right |
| The busy weeks | Small fixes only; no redesigns | Sells |
| After the break | Take holiday content down, restore normal hours | Tells you how it went |
If you run care plans, this rhythm belongs in the plan itself. Write it into your service recipe once, so every client on the plan gets the same questions at the same time each year.
Which questions should you ask each client?
Five questions cover most local businesses. Send them in one short email:
- Which days will you be closed, or open different hours? Include the days either side of public holidays.
- What are your last dates? Last order for delivery, last booking, last day to buy a voucher and have it posted.
- Are you running anything special? A holiday menu, a gift range, vouchers, extended hours.
- Who answers enquiries while you're closed? And what should the site say about when they'll get a reply?
- Is anything changing in the new year? New prices, new services, a new address.
The answers become your to-do list for that client. Anything they don't answer, you ask again in two weeks, not in December.
What's on the holiday website checklist?
Work through it per client. Most sites need most of it.
Opening hours, in two places. Update the hours on the website and on the Google Business Profile. Many customers check Google before they visit the site. Google's help page for special hours says they're meant for temporary changes, including holidays and closures of up to six days in a row, and suggests confirming hours for official holidays even when they don't change. If the business closes for longer, that needs a different approach, so check before you set it. Keep a yearly routine for this; a holiday hours routine makes updating business hours on Google a job you repeat, not one you remember.
One clear holiday message. A banner across the top of every page, or a short page linked from the home page, with the dates that matter: closures, last order dates, when enquiries will be answered. Keep it to a few lines that a customer can read on a phone in a queue.
Holiday pages and offers. Gift vouchers, a Christmas menu, a gift guide. Build them on a copy of the site, get the client's approval on the exact wording, then publish.
Forms, bookings and payments. Test every contact form, booking link and checkout with real details. If you change anything to do with money, test it again after the change. The holiday weeks are when a broken checkout costs the most.
Accessibility basics. A new banner or popup is easy to get wrong for people using a keyboard or a screen reader. Run the same checks you'd use for a new page; a website accessibility checklist for small business covers the ones that take minutes.
A backup before the changes. WordPress's own documentation recommends backing up before updating so the site can be restored if something goes wrong. The same rule applies to any holiday changes: backup first, then change.
A check on the phone. Look at every holiday page on a real phone. Most holiday shoppers will.
What should you avoid changing in the busy weeks?
Big things. Pick a date after which you only make small fixes until the new year. Some designers call it a change freeze (a period with no large changes).
Things that belong before that date, or after the new year:
- redesigns and new layouts;
- moving to a new host or a new domain;
- plugin or theme changes that touch the checkout;
- anything that needs the client to approve something while they're flat out.
If a client has been asking to move hosts, do it in the quiet weeks. Moving a website to a new host without downtime is very doable, but not in the week of their biggest sales.
How should a business close its website over a break?
It shouldn't take the site down. Google's guidance on pausing an online business recommends keeping the site online and limiting what it does. For a shop that means switching off the cart or ordering and showing a clear banner with the dates, rather than disabling the whole site. Google describes disabling the whole site as an extreme step for a few days at most, because customers can't find information about the business, and bringing the site back into search afterwards can be harder.
So for a business that closes for a fortnight:
- Leave the site up.
- Add a banner on every page with the closing and reopening dates.
- Switch off ordering or bookings for those dates, or set a clear "ships from" date.
- Set special hours on the Google listing for the closed days.
- Put a reminder in your calendar for the reopening day to take the banner down.
Step five is the one that gets missed. A "closed until 6 January" banner still showing in March tells customers nobody is looking after the site.
How do you run this for every client without losing December?
Treat it as one small project across all your clients, not five emergencies.
- Send the questions to everyone on the same day. Use the same five questions for every client.
- Keep one list of each client's dates, what they asked for, and what's done. A single table, one row per client.
- Batch the work. Build every banner in one sitting, then every hours update, then every test. Keeping building, reviewing and delivering client websites in one place makes it easy to see which client is at which step.
- Get approval on exact wording. "Closed 25 to 27 December, back 28 December" is easy to approve and hard to argue with later.
- Check everything against the website QA checklist before it goes live, the same as a new site.
If the holiday work is part of a care plan, it's included. If it isn't, it's a small quoted job, and September is a much easier time to send that quote than the second Monday of December.
The gift shop owner will still email in December. The difference is that this time the email says "Thanks, it all looks right," and your week stays your own.