As Easter approaches, it's time for Shopify owners to prepare their stores for the seasonal surge in customer traffic. With the growing number of consumers opting to shop online, ensuring your store operates at peak performance is essential.

From optimizing your website's performance to implementing creative themes and marketing campaigns, there’s plenty to do before Easter arrives. In this article, we’ll explore key strategies that will help your store stand out, boost sales, and provide an experience that meets your customers' expectations this Easter.

Holiday Sales Surges and Why Easter is No Exception

Easter, much like other holidays that rally online shoppers, sees a significant spike in retail activity. In 2024, the National Retail Federation reported Easter shopping generated $22.4 billion in revenue, with categories such as food ($7.3 billion), candy ($3.5 billion), gifts ($3.4 billion), and clothing ($3.5 billion) leading the way. Notably, 33% of all shopping occurred online.

Easter provides a prime opportunity for shoppers to take advantage of limited-time offers, making it essential to not only implement effective promotions but also optimize your store’s performance. By utilizing the tips and tools in this guide, such as enhancing mobile performance, streamlining the checkout process, and boosting site speed, you’ll be well-equipped to offer a seamless, engaging shopping experience that maximizes conversions during the Easter rush. 

Tips for Preparing Your Shopify Store for Easter

Optimize for Mobile Users and Choose a High-Performing Theme

With 63% of e-commerce traffic coming from mobile devices, ensuring your Shopify store is mobile-optimized is essential. This includes responsive designs, fast-loading pages, and a user-friendly checkout process. A smooth mobile experience helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

The design theme also plays a crucial role in performance. Choose a lightweight, responsive theme that ensures fast load times on all devices. Shopify’s Dawn Theme is a solid choice with strong performance and Core Web Vitals (CWV) alignment.

Source: GlobalStats

Improve Website Navigations and Speed

A fast-loading site boosts engagement, reduces drop-offs, and improves overall user experience. Optimizing your navigation ensures quick load times, even during peak traffic, while avoiding unnecessary drop-offs that occur during loading periods. Every second of delay can lead to a 7% drop in conversions. 

To achieve peak navigational performance, consider implementing speculative loading, which preloads pages before users click, delivering an instant experience. Ray Ban recently achieved a 101% increase in mobile conversions, 156% on desktop, and a 13% reduction in exit rates by applying speculative loading to their site and reducing delays.

Streamline the Checkout Process and Utilize Exit Intent Tools

A complicated checkout process contributes to cart abandonment, particularly during high-traffic times like Easter. Baymard Institute’s latest research shows that 22% of visitors abandoned due to a complicated or multi-step checkout. Simplifying this process can help reduce friction and boost conversions.

Additionally, exit-intent tools can prompt visitors with targeted offers before they leave, increasing the chance they’ll complete their purchase.

source: Baymard Institute

Get Creative with Easter Promotions

Promotions are key to driving more sales. Craft limited-time promotions to create urgency. Offer discounts, bundle deals, or exclusive items while using countdown timers to encourage quick action. You could also consider gamifying your shopping experience with an Easter egg hunt that provides rewards. This strategy has been shown to increase engagement by 48% and retention by 22%.

An example of effective Easter-themed gamification is Banana Republic’s Easter egg hunt in 2021. 

Essential Tools to Help Your Store Stand Out

Site Performance Optimization:

Uxify's Navigation AI

Showcased twice at Google I/O 2024, Uxify’s Navigation AI enhances site speed by predicting the next page a shopper will visit and preloading it for instant delivery. This cutting-edge technology ensures seamless navigation by reducing load times, even during peak traffic, providing an almost instantaneous experience for users. Uxify’s Navigation AI delivers an average improvement of 68% faster loading, 30% fewer layout shifts, and 16% quicker interactions—all of which contribute to better Core Web Vitals and higher conversion rates.

In addition to boosting user experience, these performance improvements also have a direct impact on your SEO, as Core Web Vitals are critical ranking factors for Google. With Navigation AI, your customers will enjoy smoother, faster browsing, leading to higher engagement, reduced bounce rates, and increased revenue. This tool is designed to provide long-term performance gains while preparing your store for high-traffic events like Easter and beyond.

Discount and Promotion:

Bold's Discounts and Bundles Apps

Bold has over 760,000 merchants using its apps to increase their average order value with just a few clicks. Bold Discounts - Flash Sales and Bold Bundles are essential for creating sales, offering time-sensitive discounts, and building product bundles.

Bold Discounts makes flash sales simple with real-time countdowns, advanced scheduling, easy customization, and more.

Bold Bundles enable store owners to sell kits, sets, and more by promoting offers on product pages so customers can see how much they’ll save. It allows merchants to set custom discounts, increasing average order values.

Hextom’s Free Shipping Bar

Hextom's Free Shipping Bar motivates shoppers to increase their order size by showing how much more they need to spend to qualify for free shipping. Free shipping is a major driver of conversions. An Amazon study revealed that a staggering 88% of shoppers said the promise of free shipping is what compels them to use their service. Hextom’s Shopify app displays a customizable bar that shows customers how much more they need to spend to qualify for free shipping. With over 12,000 downloads in the Shopify App Store, it's a popular tool that's easy to use and implement, with features like detailed targeting filters and one-click installation.

Smart Popups:

OptiMonk's Shopify Popup, CRO, A/B Test App

OptiMonk is an all-in-one popup tool that helps Shopify merchants recover abandoned carts, boost conversions, and build customer loyalty. With its easy drag-and-drop editor, you can create personalized popups for various goals, such as email and SMS list building, product recommendations, gamification, countdown timers, and free shipping offers. 

OptiMonk also provides A/B testing and detailed revenue analytics, so you can fine-tune your popups to see exactly what drives sales. Whether you’re trying to recover abandoned carts (which averages at 66.5%) or increase email subscribers, OptiMonk’s personalized and automated popups are a powerful tool to capture more sales and engage your visitors before they leave.

Qikify’s Sales Pop Up & Proof

Qikify's Sales Pop Up & Proof uses social proof to increase trust and drive conversions by displaying recent purchases, visitor counts, and countdown timers. This Shopify app leverages the psychological principal that 80% of US shoppers seek recommendations before buying, helping to build trust and increase the likelihood of conversions. With additional features like email popups and promotional bars, it's a valuable tool for Shopify merchants looking to increase sales. Qikify is trusted by over 14,800 Shopify stores.

Product Recommendations:

Luigi’s Box Product Recommender

Luigi’s Box Product Recommender offers an AI-driven solution to personalize product recommendations and search results on your Shopify store. With advanced features like autocomplete, typo correction, and synonyms management, Luigi’s Box ensures customers find the products they want quickly. It tracks customer intent, improving product relevance and reducing shopping time, and can recommend products even for sold-out items.

Logbase’s Upsell & Cross Sell – Selleasy

Logbase’s Upsell & Cross Sell – Selleasy is a one-click upsell and cross-sell app designed to increase your average order value (AOV). It displays high-conversion upsell offers, encouraging customers to bundle frequently bought-together products or add related accessories. Offers can be created manually or through automatic product recommendations based on customer behavior.

Cross-selling with personalized product recommendations has been shown to increase conversions, with 43% of visitors more likely to purchase when recommended complementary products. By simplifying the shopping experience and reducing the need for customers to search for additional items, Selleasy creates a smoother, more efficient path to higher sales.

Post-Purchase Engagement:

Zigpoll

Zigpoll’s Post-Purchase Engagement is a fast-loading, multilingual, and fully customizable survey app that helps you tap into valuable customer insights at key moments. You can easily conduct post-purchase, abandoned checkout, and on-site surveys, delivering them via email and SMS with a no-code setup. Zigpoll integrates seamlessly with Shopify, enabling you to connect survey responses to your customer and order dashboards. With AI analytics, Zigpoll helps optimize your marketing strategy, conversion rates, and business roadmap, uncovering pain points like cart abandonment and offering actionable insights for improvement.

Aftersell by Rokt

Aftersell’s Post-Purchase Upsell Shopify app boosts AOV with one-click post-purchase upsells. It simplifies the upsell process by removing the need for customers to re-enter payment information. Merchants can customize their Thank You page with reviews, FAQs, and cross-sells, enhancing customer trust and driving additional revenue. Through leveraging Aftersell’s post-purchase upsells, Sand Cloud added $4.50/ order.

Shopify Site Theme:

Clean Canvas's Symmetry Theme

Clean Canvas’s Symmetry Theme offers a professional and performance-driven theme designed for high-transaction volumes and brand-building through visual storytelling. 

Use Theme Vitals to regularly assess and optimize your theme’s speed and mobile performance to ensure a smooth experience during peak times like Easter.

Pixel Union’s Atlantic Theme

Pixel Union’s Atlantic theme, with its classic, elegant, and streamlined design, is optimized for brand storytelling and high-volume traffic. Its longer-form text sections and support for large product catalogs make it a versatile choice for online stores. Built with performance in mind, nearly 85% of stores using Atlantic themes pass Core Web Vitals.

Final Thoughts

As Easter approaches, ensure your Shopify store is fully optimized for the surge in traffic. By improving site speed, optimizing for mobile, streamlining the checkout process, and running creative promotions, you’ll provide a seamless shopping experience that maximizes your sales potential. Preparing your store ahead of time will ensure you capture the attention of Easter shoppers.

For more tips on how to audit and prepare your site, including a detailed checklist, check out Uxify's article on increasing holiday season sales with instant page speed.

Here’s to an egg-celent Easter for your sales!