Seasonal Site Spruce-Ups: Take a Lesson from Food Bloggers

In the U.S., Thanksgiving is upon us, with the other December holidays on its heels. It’s a good time to add some festive cheer to your site (and if you’re running a business, to encourage holiday sales)! Visual changes like a seasonal header image or a new color palette are nice, but you can also use holiday-specific content and design to drive engagement.

Food blogs are great at adapting for holidays and seasonal shifts: unsurprising, since both events frequently have food traditions associated with them. But anyone can take a cue from food bloggers and adapt their tactics to increase traffic — here are three to try.

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The Holiday Roundup

If you have a collection of posts perfect for the season, gather them the way David Lebovitz does — his yearly roundup of Thanksgiving recipes highlights 28 great posts from his archives. (I’ll take the pecan pie with bourbon and ginger, thanks.)

Roundups are great for products, too. At The Vintage Kitchen, Katherine blogs about antique kitchen designs and techniques. She also sells vintage kitchen items, so for Thanksgiving, she offers a roundup of antique platters perfect for presenting the meal’s centerpiece bird.

The Savvy Sidebar (and Fantastic Footer)

A seasonal makeover doesn’t require radically revamping your entire homepage. Sidebars and footers are perfect for adding holiday touches — they’re quick to change and don’t take up central real estate on your site, but give you a chance to offer a few nibbles of holiday content.

Jessica of How Sweet Eats uses her footer to suggest seasonal recipes; you could do the same to drive readers to products that make great gifts, posts with autumnal advice, or anything else that’s end-of-year appropriate.And if you know that your site visitors will be looking for particular kinds of seasonal information, make it easy for them to find with menu items. Deb at Smitten Kitchen adds a “Thanksgiving” category page to her menu; Inspired By Charm’s Michael has a static page collecting all his best holiday advice, also accessible via his main menu.

The Long-Term Thinker

Adding a Thanksgiving widget or publishing a gift guide will boost engagement right around the holidays. What if there were a way to give your holiday content a long tail? We love What to Cook Today’s leftovers guide, which capitalizes on the post-Thanksgiving turkey glut to keep readers coming back for more.

Maybe you don’t have a collection of sweet potato recipes, but you have helpful advice on where to donate extra food, or offer mulching services to help people get rid of Christmas trees, or have end-of-year tax prep tips. You can feature those now, and set yourself up for engagement and sales down the line.

Are you making any seasonal tweaks to your site? Share your plans!

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