When should I start a holiday survey on my website?

Work back from your last delivery date, or from the busiest week of your season:

• Late October: write the questions and choose the pages
• Early November: start on gift guides, product pages and holiday articles as they go live
• Late November to mid-December: read the answers each week and fix what you can before the last delivery dates
• Early January: pause the holiday questions, or switch to January ones
• Next October: bring back the same questions

Answers are only useful while you can still act on them. A gift guide that readers say is missing a budget can gain three new picks in November. In late December, the same answer can only go into next year's notes.

Starting early also gives you a baseline. Answers from early November show how a page does before the rush, so you can tell whether a drop in December comes from the page or from the kind of visitor December brings.

Use the same questions and options each season. Next November you can compare this year with last year, page by page. Change the options halfway and the weeks before and after no longer compare.

In Asklet, you can pause a page or a whole website when the season ends and resume it next year. If you edit a live survey, each version keeps its own results.

Wait for a few dozen answers on a page before you change it. A quiet page may need the whole season, so group similar pages and read them together.