As many current advertisements like to say, we’re living in uncertain times. The times are changing for businesses, as well, with more and more people buying goods and services online than ever before. As such, you might already have a website, but is it ready to deal with the swell of online customers we’ve been seeing over the past few months? Here are a few steps you can take to ensure that you’re prepared.

Security is your number one concern

As people are relying a lot more on the internet to do their shopping and take care of pretty much every need, they are also becoming a lot more cognizant of the threats that could be lurking online. Even if your website isn’t a threat, if it isn’t clear that it’s totally safe, you may find that people will take steps to avoid it.

Secure your website, ensuring you get the security certificate that gives you an HTTPS address. Not only are general users much more aware of this sign of site security, but it can affect your marketing, too. For instance, search engines aren’t likely to host your website in the top results if it hasn’t been secured.

Make sure it can take the heat

As mentioned, a lot more people are relying on online shopping and web businesses, in general, to take care of their day-to-day needs. As such, if you start getting a lot more traffic, then you should make sure that your website is able to take that traffic.

You may need to, for instance, look at upgrading your website hosting from purely shared servers to a VPS server. If you’re on a shared hosting plan with dozens or hundreds of other users, you can be affected by performance problems affecting them.

Similarly, you need to make sure your web hosting service has the flexibility to scale the website’s ability to handle traffic based on the amount of traffic that you’re getting. Virtual private servers offer that ability while shared servers often do not.

Create a website that creates customers

Aside from ensuring that it works as it’s expected, you also want to make sure that your website is working as a marketing tool. Whether it’s an eCommerce storefront or simply provides information that allows customers to get in touch and learn about your products, it’s a marketing tool first and foremost. As well as creating a professional-looking website, you should look at the steps of conversion rate optimization. This is effectively taking a detailed look at how effectively your website turns visitors into customers, and what can aid or hinder this transformation. For instance, a good user experience aided by sensible navigation and valuable content will help.

Your website must be functional, it must be secure, and it must do what it can to enable your visitors to go through the customer journey with ease and without interruption. Online shopping is only likely to become more prevalent even when the current crisis is totally behind us, so it’s worth learning these tips at any time.