A seasonal website refresh you can switch on and roll back
Seasons sell: a florist before Mother's Day, a café in summer, a gift shop in December. A refresh means changing a handful of things for a few weeks and then, the part people forget, changing them back. Plan both trips at once: note the everyday version, make the seasonal one with a few change requests, and restore the everyday version the morning the season ends.
What usually changes, and what shouldn't
| Change for the season | Leave alone |
|---|---|
| The hero photo and headline | The site's name, design system and navigation |
| One section about the seasonal offer or menu | The service and pricing pages, unless prices really change |
| Opening hours and last order dates | The legal pages and contact details |
| The FAQ: delivery cut-offs, closures | The structure of the site |
Keeping the change small makes it quick to make, quick to check and quick to undo. If you find yourself redesigning, that's a separate project for a quieter month.
Prepare three weeks out
- Photos: two or three seasonal shots of your own work or premises. On a designed site, add them as entries in a CMS collection (a seasonal menu or offers) whose image field holds hosted addresses; uploaded photos are used by app builds.
- Copy: a new headline, one paragraph on the offer, the key dates.
- The offer's mechanics. If it's bookable, the booking calendar takes slots up to 120 days ahead. If it's paid, decide whether your existing payment link still fits, since the account has one link and every buy button uses it.
- Two dates: when it goes up and when it comes down. Put both in your diary now.
Switching the season on
- Write down the current version number from the version history panel. This is the everyday site you'll come back to.
- Make the changes in a few sentences: "replace the hero photo with the uploaded wreath photo and change the headline to 'Wreaths to order until 20 December'", then "add a section about the wreath workshop with dates and a booking button".
- Adjust wording in place in the visual editor where a sentence needs polish.
- Update hours and the FAQ with cut-off and closure dates.
- If the checkout changes for the season, update the payment link in Connectors and publish again, then click a buy button on the live site to make sure it opens the right page. Remember every site in the account shares it.
- Run the release checklist, read the site on a phone, and publish. Write down this version's number too: next year's starting point.
Switching it off
On the end date, open version history, preview the everyday version you noted, restore it and publish. Restoring adds a new version on top, so the seasonal one stays in history and can be restored next year, as long as it's still within your plan's number of kept versions. If you made unrelated fixes during the season (a new phone number, a corrected price), restoring the old version undoes those too, so either reapply them after the restore or roll back the seasonal changes by change request instead.
Put the payment link back if you changed it, since a seasonal checkout left in place is the most common leftover.
What goes wrong
- The Christmas banner is still up in February
- No end-date reminder. Put the switch-off date in a shared diary, not your memory.
- A restore wipes a mid-season fix
- Keep a short list of anything you change during the season and reapply it.
- The seasonal version is no longer in history next year
- Plans keep a limited number of recent versions. Keep your seasonal copy and photos in a folder so you can rebuild the change in minutes.
- Buy buttons on another site open the seasonal checkout
- The payment link is shared across the account. Use a provider page that lists both everyday and seasonal products.
How you know it worked
The seasonal version went up on the planned day, the offer's enquiries, bookings or payments arrived through the paths you set, and the everyday site was back the morning after the season ended. Compare views by source in the dashboard for the season against the weeks before to see which channels the offer drew.
Limits
No scheduled publishing or automatic switch-back: someone presses publish both times. No banners that appear by date, no countdowns, no second payment link per site. See version history, rolling back to a previous version and updating opening hours.
Questions people ask
How far ahead should I do a holiday website update?
Two to four weeks before the season's first buying day, so search engines and regulars see it in time.
Can the seasonal version go live and come down automatically?
No. Anticode has no scheduled publishing. Restore and publish on each date yourself.
Can I reuse this year's seasonal website refresh next year?
If that version is still in your history, preview and restore it. Otherwise keep the copy and photos and repeat the change requests.