What to expect from Halloween and Black Friday deals?

“Life was so beautiful
Then we all got locked down
Feel like a ghost
Living in a ghost town“

Nope, the Rolling Stones new song is not announcing the next Halloween Sales! ?
But it resonates a lot with this pandemic period. 

Whether you run an eCommerce store or are looking for good WordPress deals, the last quarter of the year is a highly strategic time. Halloween sales, Black Friday deals and Cyber Monday bring many opportunities to increase sales and/or snag deals online.

But the past 6 months changed a lot of things. And Halloween will be the 1st major sales event since the pandemic started. 

In this article, we’ll go through what we learned for the past few months at WP Rocket and how we are getting prepared for Halloween and Black Friday sales.

Interested? Let’s start!

The pandemic accelerated the shift to eCommerce

Back in March, many businesses had to rapidly strengthen their online activities and expedite their digital transformation. If you were able to switch your business to 100% online or if you already had an eCommerce store, chances are that you had a Black Friday-like time in March.

As many other websites described it, at WP Rocket we experienced a surge in interest and a decent growth in traffic from the end of March 2020.

As Alex Denning puts it in his post about Covid and WordPress:

It’s reasonable to assume this increase is driven by the pandemic and, most likely, businesses suddenly needing a web presence.

We were first surprised and then pleased to see that, like other tools, WP Rocket is considered as essential to build a website.

From June 2020 the good trend started to slow down a little but is still way better than what we could expect when starting 2020.

And numerous sources report ecommerce trending far better as consumers turn to online shopping. 

Common Thread Collective assesses that in the United States, eCommerce has had 5 years of growth in the last 6 months!

This eCommerce shift has changed the way we buy and there is no doubt that the last quarter’s sales of 2020 will happen online.

Web Performance is more crucial than ever 

With that shift to online business, all website owners need to strengthen their technological platforms. They need to make sure their website is fully optimized for SEO, traffic and conversion.

With the increase of online activities, many of us experienced performance issues, especially if you live in a country or a region with weaker internet infrastructures. 

As networks became slower, performance issues became more visible. Put another way, if your website already had poor or medium range scores, the rise in internet pressure only increased your audience’s frustration and loss of trust and revenue.

This pandemic highlighted the importance of web performance, at a worldwide level.

But people also need a service they can trust.

At WP Rocket we all work remotely from the start. So even if it was in a different climate, the pandemic has not stopped us in our constant efforts to improve our service.

That’s how we released 2 major versions in the past months: 

• 3.6 in June 2020: the main enhancement was to have specific critical path CSS for each page as needed, to remove once and for all the render-blocking warning in PageSpeed. 
• 3.7 in September 2020: with this version we added the delay of JS execution and the link preloading. Thanks to these features  we obtained an amazing 65% reduction in loading time and a 87% improvement in the mobile PageSpeed score!

With the increase of online activities our team is dedicated, more than ever, to improving web performance for your website and keep working on awesome new features for the next releases.

If you’re interested in web performance too and would like to suggest a new WP Rocket feature, you can share your ideas in our Suggestion Box.

Coupons and discounts came early this year

With the increase of online shopping, the search for coupons and discounts emerged way before Black Friday. 

Apart from a few specific companies who experienced an explosive increase in demand (such as medical supplies, audio headsets, video conferencing, home entertainment…), many other businesses struggled with decreased demand. As many customers were and still are uncertain about their personal finances, many businesses offered discounts to support and retain their customers.

At WP Rocket we saw a rise of prospects asking for a coupon since March. But now that we’re approaching the end of the year, you surely know that Halloween and Black Friday are great occasions to get WP Rocket at a discounted price. If you are concerned about prices these days, we can only encourage you to go for these discounts and to resist the siren calls of nulled versions.
Indeed with the pandemic, we also saw many pirate websites flourish in the past months, selling a nulled version of WP Rocket and of other WordPress plugins and services for a few dollars. 

As we understand people trying to save money at that time, we feel it’s important to keep in mind that downloading a nulled version of WP Rocket means installing pirated software and that could damage your website.
Malicious code can spread over several files and put your website at risk of hacker attacks.

It can also steal information from your website. Personal data—usernames, passwords, banking info—may be used illegally. Any copy of WP Rocket that is not sold through our official website should be considered nulled.
Moreover, if anything happens you can’t receive support or new versions of WP Rocket.

Everyone is looking for a good deal but you don’t want to ruin all the efforts you are putting into your website, right?

That being said, in mid October, Amazon Prime day event whistled the start of the holiday season and retailers followed, announcing massive sales in October. Let’s see what we can expect from the coming weeks.

Should you wait Black Friday to buy WP Rocket (or other WordPress service)?

Halloween and Black Friday are just around the corner and you may be wondering whether you should spend or save…

Even though Halloween is not a big event in all countries across the world, it is actually an excellent way to get your website ready for Black Friday. With the high season coming, you don’t want to scare your visitors with a slow website!

Some may ask if Halloween is cancelled this year, but here at WP Rocket we can confirm that we will throw a party and you are all invited! This year, the party starts on October 27th, 2020 and we’re going to offer a 20% discount on all licenses until November 3rd. RocketCDN, our customized Content Delivery Network, will be invited too, and you will be able to subscribe for $6.99/month and per domain (instead of $7.99).

Of course we also have deals for Black Friday. This is, as many other WordPress businesses, the time of the year where you can grab the biggest discount of the year on WP Rocket. 

Our advice? Focus on value, not on discounts. 

A study “Milliseconds Make Millions” from Deloitte’s highlights the importance of site speed on consumers’ willingness to spend money.

The price difference between Halloween and Black Friday sales on a single license will be around $5 for 1 year. So, if your business happens online and your website needs speed, you shouldn’t wait any longer!

On the other hand, if you already have a WP Rocket license, no need to wait for any specific time of the year to renew. You get the best possible discount all year long, no matter when you need to renew your license! 

Wrapping up

Halloween and Black Friday deals always bring a lot of excitement and buying frenzy. And this year will make no exception with the huge shift to eCommerce and the need for many businesses to boost their activity after months of difficulties.

But web performance is and will remain essential. If until now web performance wasn’t something you or your teams were focusing on, the Halloween and Black Friday deals may provide you the trigger to start saving milliseconds… and maybe making millions?