Business Roundup Week Ending September 13

Do You Do Woo? Are Your Stores Ready for the Holidays?

WooCommerce merchants are gearing up for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), with 66% of stores seeing a sales spike from October to December.
For 46% of merchants, BFCM and the holiday season contribute up to 30% of their annual sales volume.
34% of merchants are changing their approach this year, focusing on adding new products, increasing marketing efforts, and upgrading website performance.
Stores are starting BFCM preparations earlier, with 27% beginning 1-3 months in advance and 17% starting more than 3 months ahead.
Over half of the stores plan to increase inventory before the holiday season to avoid stockouts.
37% of stores are working on improving site performance, including load testing and database optimization.
Email marketing remains the most effective tool for reaching customers during BFCM.67% of merchants are adopting multichannel strategies, selling across physical stores and online marketplaces.
Are you helping your eCommerce clients gear up for BFCM as a paid service? If not, you might be leaving revenue on the table.
The WooCommerce blog highlights ways to gear up for the most successful BFCM ever.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures unexpected content movement during page load and is a Core Web Vitals metric. A good CLS score is 0.1 or less.
Tools like PageSpeed Insights, DebugBear, and WebPageTest can help measure and diagnose CLS issues.
Minimal CLS is important for website performance and potentially search engine rankings.
It also negatively impacts user experience because it leads to accidental clicks or difficulty in reading content as elements move unexpectedly during page load.
Common CLS sources include theme code, dynamic JavaScript, optimization plugins, late-loading web fonts, and missing image dimensions.
Do you develop sites for your clients with CLS in mind? It’s worth taking a closer look.
The Admin Bar gives some easy-to-implement suggestions for minimizing CLS. Take a look and think about adding this to your development processes.

Strong security focus: Features like Web Application Firewall, malware scanning, and automated server processes when malicious attacks are suspected.
Top-notch performance: Optimized server setup and delivery specifically for WordPress, with features like high-performance storage and routing.
Scalability: Ability to handle sites of various sizes and unexpected traffic spikes without downtime.
WordPress expertise: Understanding of WordPress-specific needs and potential issues.
Convenience and time-saving features: Tools that make managing multiple sites easier and more efficient.
Look beyond pricing: While cost is a factor, your agency should prioritize features that save time and provide value in the long run.
You may not need a host now, but this article from The WP Minute is a good one to archive for the next time you are evaluating your hosting needs.

Automattic has an experimental project on Github, called “Create Content Model” that creates and manages Custom Post Types. It will be tested on .com, but it’s a glimpse at how Core CPT management may work in the future. Download it and use it with the Gutenberg plugin, or try it on WordPress Playground.
Stephen Wolfram celebrates 60th birthday with a look back at his last five years. TLDR; It was a very productive five years!
Did you know WooCommerce has hooks all over the checkout page where you can add pretty much anything you can dream up? I knew there were some, but I was surprised how many there actually are. This visual list and explanation of how to use them is definitely worth your time.