Does Your Website Work Weekends?

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you’re out doing other things. It will, assuming you have a good website, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here’s the Visitors Overview report for our lab site. The blue line shows the traffic.

If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day is being shown, and which day of the week each is.

This site has peaks and valleys. Most weeks, Monday through Thursday has steady traffic. Friday sees a drop in traffic, and Saturday is the lowest day of all. Sunday moves back up. There’s some traffic every day, but weekend traffic is much lower than weekday traffic. Our visitors come to our website as part of their workday.

Essentially, this site doesn’t work on weekends.

Here’s another example. This website sees fairly steady traffic all the time. Traffic isn’t larger or smaller on different days of the week. This website works weekends as well as weekdays.

What difference does it make?

In general, if your site doesn’t work on weekends, your customers probably don’t either, and they’re only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers’ bosses can walk by and see they’re working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they’re working or not — or they work weekends, too. You’re probably a B2C company rather than a B2B outift. You probably sell something fun — and your website should show that.

Or, if you’re in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don’t.

It’s just another useful piece of information about your clients.