Every year, online retailers see their traffic and sales skyrocket over the holidays. Many of them, to avoid technical issues with their website, will enact a code freeze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brands often see this freeze as preventing potential problems. Yet, if they are thinking ahead, they will recognize it is an opportunity. A time to leapfrog the competition while everyone else is sitting still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A code freeze is a development term that means that no code can be edited or modified during the freeze period. It’s designed to prevent the addition of more bugs before code goes live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the ecommerce industry, a code freeze means a brand stops making changes to their website for a time, usually during a high traffic period such as holiday shopping season<\/a>. This helps prevent new browsing or checkout bugs which could disrupt consumers from converting and making a purchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n High traffic time is your greatest learning opportunity, even under a code freeze. It’s the perfect opportunity to gain insight on your user experience. Don’t let a code freeze stop your brand’s ecommerce site from improving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, focus on the following low-risk areas that don’t need code updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a code freeze, instead of focusing on functionality that requires a code change, you can work with refining your content. As long you base new content on consumer feedback and research, you can’t go wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the easiest places to start is by promoting top selling content to the homepage. A brand’s marketing or ecommerce manager should ask themselves a few simple questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you use high traffic periods to test content, you get quick feedback. You learn what content is working and what’s not.<\/p>\n\n\nWhen you use high traffic periods to test content, you get quick feedback. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n Continue content refinement by utilizing multivariate testing tools to test which content performs best. You can set these tools to automatically display the winning content. That ensures your site content can only get better, and the decision on what content to show is backed by data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why use multivariate testing? Multivariate testing allows you to iterate fast. With greater traffic, your tests take less time to reach statistical significance. This means it takes less time to learn from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Test content and small usability changes with external tools like Optimizely<\/a> and VWO<\/a>. These tool sets don’t need a permanent code change or even your development or IT team to implement.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow to grow during a code freeze<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Refine your content<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
More on multivariate testing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n