Maximize 2025 Holiday Sales with a Shopify Retainer on Your Team

With the rising dominance of ecommerce sales during the BFCM and the rest of the holiday shopping season, the last quarter of the year brings on a very exciting opportunity for ecommerce brands. However, it also requires careful prep-work and reliable support.

The holiday shopping season, usually heralded by Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales, lasts all the way to New Year's, bringing with it golden opportunities to make bank—but preparing for this surge can be overwhelming at times. Even minor technical issues, slow-loading pages, or mismanaged promotions can lead to lost sales and frustrated customers.

Moreover, if your store doesn’t feature festive updates or holiday promotions, it can feel less relevant to shoppers. Missing out on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday events may discourage visitors from buying, sending their holiday budget straight to competitors.

That’s where a Shopify retainer comes in. With ongoing maintenance and support, your store stays optimized, updates roll out safely, and potential issues are resolved before they impact shoppers.

If you’ve been following our previous articles on Shopify retainers and ongoing Shopify support, you know that consistent upkeep and having a retainer on hand to optimize your store and to roll out the holiday updates on time are critical.

In this article, we talk about the value of Shopify retainer maintenance service and ongoing Shopify support, and how these services can boost your performance, not just day to day, but also during critical business moments for your brand, like the holidays.

BFCM and the holiday shopping season is the ultimate stress test for your store, and preparation is key—but so is reliable ongoing support!

Here’s what a Shopify retainer can do to keep your store optimized, secure, and holiday-ready:

Hire the Experts: Explore Ecommerce Pro’s Shopify Retainer Support Services for ongoing Shopify Support.

Conduct a Full Pre-Holiday Audit

The first step to holiday readiness is a comprehensive audit of your Shopify store. With ongoing maintenance and support, your retainer team can conduct pre-BFCM and holiday shopping season audits for you—identifying weak points, fixing bugs, and optimizing performance to the fullest. You want to ensure that your site can handle the surge in traffic and sales without any stumbles and mishaps that can eventually cost you.

Key areas to review include:

• Website speed and performance – During BFCM or Christmas sales, even a one-second delay can cause shoppers to abandon their carts. Make sure your site loads quickly, even under heavy traffic.
• Mobile responsiveness – This year, most holiday shoppers are going to be browsing on their phones, so it's important to prioritize the mobile experience, ensuring that your store looks and functions seamlessly on mobile devices.
• Checkout process – Payment gateways, shipping calculators, and discount codes must work flawlessly—so it's worth taking the time to audit the entire process. Inconveniences and friction of any kind are a conversion killer.
• Product pages and inventory – Ensure stock counts are accurate, with top-selling products replenished, pricing is up to date, and product descriptions are clear.

A pre-BFCM and holiday shopping season Shopify site audit gives you a clear picture of what’s working, what needs attention, and how to prepare your store to handle the holiday rush with confidence. Even the smallest of improvements in these areas can make a noticeable difference when traffic spikes.

More from the Blog: The Ultimate Shopify BFCM 2025 Guide: Master Your BFCM Sales Prep

Update Features and Apps Safely

Many Shopify store owners rush to add in a new feature or two before a big sale, often opting to introduce new apps. While updates can improve the shoppers' experience, when done improperly, they can introduce bugs or conflicts that will interrupt shoppers or your store’s normal function. Having ongoing Shopify maintenance and support means having Shopify Experts on board that can handle app installs, configurations, and maintenance, so these updates won’t cause any unforeseen issues.

But, it’s not just about apps or code— BFCM and holiday-themed updates often include rolling out new promotional banners, festive product images, or even videos to highlight seasonal campaigns. These assets need to be uploaded and tested carefully so they don’t slow down your store or break layouts on mobile. Discount codes and flash sale timers also need to be checked to ensure they work seamlessly.

A Shopify retainer helps ensure that every update—from updating your banner to backend changes—is tested in a staging environment before going live. Overall, it makes for a more proactive approach, preventing downtime, keeping your holiday promos running smoothly, and ensuring a seamless shopping experience for your customers.

Optimize Shopify Performance for High Traffic

Aspiring to have a lightning-fast and responsive online store will only do wonders for the online shopping experience, while the opposite is true for slow-loading sites that often result in lost revenue, abandoned carts, and decreased customer trust. Your Shopify store needs to perform reliably at its best even under peak traffic, when thousands of visitors may be browsing and buying simultaneously, especially during BFCM. This is why we need to go over and optimize your store’s performance before a big sale.

Having reliable, ongoing Shopify support is critical here. Here’s what can be done to ensure a better, faster online store shopping experience:

• Minimize image file sizes: Done without sacrificing quality, an image compression app is used that ensures your visuals stay crisp while reducing load time.
• Remove unnecessary scripts, apps, or code: Bloated code slows down your site and can be left over from things like downloading and removing apps. Each extra script adds load time, and during high-traffic periods, that can be the difference between a sale and a bounce.
• Enable caching and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks): This is for faster page delivery, especially for international shoppers, distributing content across servers worldwide, reducing bottlenecks.

With a Shopify retainer, your team can monitor performance month after month, troubleshooting issues before they affect customers, and scale resources to handle heavier traffic during peak seasons. This proactive approach keeps your store stable and reliable throughout the holiday season.

The less friction shoppers experience, the more likely they are to complete their purchase, even during the busiest holiday sales rush. 

More from the Blog: Shopify Retainers: Complete Guide to Ongoing Shopify Support (2025)

Plan for Customer Service and Backend Support

Even the best-prepared stores can run into unexpected challenges during peak periods—and you do not want to be caught off guard and with nothing in your hands to offset the damage. No brand is immune. Orders can fail, shipping delays can frustrate customers, and questions or complaints may flood in faster than your team can handle.

This is where having a Shopify retainer makes all the difference in demanding times such as BFCM and the holidays. With experts on standby to administer priority support, technical glitches can be resolved quickly, order management stays on track, and your customer service remains smooth even under holiday pressure.

The value here lies in the fact that, instead of scrambling last-minute, you have a support team that’s already familiar with your store and ready to jump in. You won’t have to find a freelancer last minute.

Backend support through a retainer often includes:

• Shopify content and product support
• Managing promotional campaigns, discount codes, apps, and features support
• Ensuring integrations and tools run without disruption.

Rather than putting out fires during the busiest time of year, your store stays stable, customers stay satisfied, and you stay focused on driving sales during the peak holiday rush.

Backup and Security Measures

The holiday season can, unfortunately, be a prime time for cyber threats and technical mishaps. From hacking attempts to data loss and payment errors, even one overlooked vulnerability can disrupt sales and damage customer trust.

With regular security checks, monitoring, and priority support, a Shopify retainer can spot issues and have them resolved before they escalate. A Shopify retainer offering monthly theme backups and product data protection ensures that even if something goes wrong, your store can be restored quickly without major downtime.

Typical retainer coverage includes:

• Monthly theme and product data backups.
• Updating passwords and access controls.
• Continuous monitoring for suspicious activity or vulnerabilities.
• Security audits to keep your store safe and compliant.

Instead of scrambling to recover after a breach or data loss, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your store is secured and your data is safe. With a retainer in place providing ongoing Shopify support, your focus stays on BFCM and holiday sales.

Conclusion: Why Ongoing Support Makes the Holidays Less Stressful

All the preparation in the world can’t guarantee a flawless BFCM and holiday shopping season—but with ongoing Shopify support, you can significantly reduce risk and maximize results. When things go wrong, they often do so unexpectedly, and having reliable ongoing Shopify support ensures your team stays focused on sales and marketing, while experts handle and resolve the technical issues, performance optimization, and backend management.

The benefits are clear:

• Reduced downtime and fewer errors during peak moments
• Faster response to technical issues
• Proactive resolutions to potential issues before they happen
• Improved user experience and higher conversion rates
• Peace of mind for store owners and managers during the busy holidays
  

The BFCM and the holiday shopping season can make or break your Shopify store’s annual revenue. While investing in Shopify maintenance services isn’t just about avoiding problems—it’s about unlocking your store’s full potential and peak performance during holiday sales. Don’t wait until the first big holiday sale to find out your store isn’t ready. Start planning now with a Shopify retainer and ensure a smoother, more profitable holiday season.

Ecommerce Pro’s Shopify Retainer Support Services gives you access to a team of Shopify Experts dedicated to optimization, ongoing support, and more. Contact Ecommerce Pro today.