Black Friday can bring some of the biggest traffic and sales spikes of the year for ecommerce businesses. Which is great news when everything works as expected, and much less enjoyable when pages slow down, checkouts start failing, stock levels become unreliable, or a last minute promotion causes something unexpected to break. Prepping for Black Friday should be about more than deciding which products to discount. Your website, hosting, integrations and internal processes, all need to be ready for the extra demand.
Below we go through a practical checklist to work through before the traffic starts arriving.:
Check your hosting can handle the increase in traffic
Your website may perform perfectly well during an average week, but Black Friday traffic can be very different. Speak to your hosting provider or ecommerce agency about expected traffic levels and whether your current infrastructure is capable of handling a significant spike. Things worth checking include:
- Server CPU and memory usage
- Database performance
- Autoscaling capabilities
- CDN configuration
- Full-page caching
- Redis or Varnish configuration
- Traffic limits or hosting restrictions
If you have experienced performance issues during previous sales events, now is the time to investigate them rather than waiting for traffic to expose the same problem again.
Test your website speed
Site speed becomes particularly important when more people are using the website at the same time. Test your key pages, including:
- Homepage
- Category pages
- Product pages
- Basket
- Checkout
Pay particular attention to anything that relies heavily on JavaScript, third-party applications or external services. A page that feels slightly slow during normal traffic could become considerably worse under additional load.
Review your checkout process
Your checkout is one of the most important areas to test. Place several test orders using different devices, browsers, payment methods and delivery options. Check that:
- Products can be added to the basket
- Discount codes work correctly
- Delivery costs are calculated correctly
- Payment gateways are working
- Confirmation pages load
- Confirmation emails are sent
- Orders appear correctly in your ecommerce platform
It is also worth testing what happens when something goes wrong, such as a payment being declined.
Test your promotions before they go live
Black Friday promotions can become complicated very quickly. You might have percentage discounts, fixed discounts, free delivery thresholds, bundle offers, category promotions or discount codes all running at the same time. Test every promotion before launch. Make sure discounts:
- Apply to the correct products
- Exclude the correct products
- Do not stack unexpectedly
- Work at the correct dates and times
- Display consistently across the website
- Are calculated correctly in the basket and checkout
One incorrectly configured promotion can quickly become expensive when thousands of customers are using it.
Check your stock management
High-volume sales can expose problems with inventory management. Make sure stock levels are updating correctly between your ecommerce platform, warehouse, ERP, marketplace integrations and any other systems involved. You should also understand what happens when two customers attempt to purchase the final item at the same time. Overselling popular products can create additional customer service work at exactly the time your team is already busiest.
Review your third-party integrations
Ecommerce websites often depend on a large number of external systems. These might include:
- Payment gateways
- ERP systems
- Warehouse management systems
- Product feeds
- Email platforms
- Reviews platforms
- Search tools
- Personalisation software
- Fraud prevention services
- Shipping integrations
Make sure these services are working correctly and understand whether any of them have usage limits that could become relevant during periods of unusually high traffic.
Check your analytics and conversion tracking
Black Friday is also an important period for marketing teams. Before campaigns go live, confirm that your tracking is working correctly. Check:
- GA4 ecommerce events
- Google Ads conversions
- Meta tracking
- Consent mode
- Server side tracking where applicable
- Revenue values
- Transaction IDs
Missing data during one of the busiest trading periods of the year can make it much harder to understand which campaigns actually delivered revenue.
Review your product feeds
If you are running Google Shopping, Performance Max or other feed-based advertising, review your product feeds before Black Friday. Look for:
- Disapproved products
- Incorrect pricing
- Missing descriptions
- Incorrect availability
- Missing GTINs or product identifiers
- Landing page problems
You should also ensure that promotional pricing shown in ads matches what customers see when they reach your website.
Check your redirects and important landing pages
Marketing teams often create new landing pages, promotional URLs and campaign links for Black Friday. Test every important link before campaigns launch. A typo in a paid advertising URL or an incorrect redirect could result in significant amounts of traffic being sent to the wrong page. It is worth preparing a simple list of your major campaign URLs and checking them manually.
Review your security setup
Increased traffic can also mean increased unwanted traffic. Review your ecommerce security configuration, including:
- Web application firewall rules
- Bot protection
- Admin security
- Two-factor authentication
- User permissions
- Software patches
- Magento or Shopify security updates
- Backup processes
You should also make sure legitimate customers and search engine crawlers are not accidentally being blocked by overly aggressive security rules.
Make sure your backups are working
Backups are easy to ignore until something goes wrong. Before making major Black Friday changes, confirm that backups are running correctly and that they can actually be restored. Ideally, you should have a recent copy of both your website files and database.
Avoid unnecessary website changes
The weeks immediately before Black Friday are usually not the best time to introduce major technical changes. Unless something is essential, avoid:
- Major platform upgrades
- Large theme changes
- New checkout systems
- Significant infrastructure changes
- Untested third-party extensions
Reducing the number of moving parts makes it easier to keep the site stable during the busiest period.
Create a plan for when something goes wrong
Even with good preparation, problems can still happen. Make sure everyone knows:
- Who monitors the website
- Who should be contacted if something fails
- How issues should be escalated
- Who can make emergency website changes
- How customers will be updated if necessary
Having this agreed in advance can save valuable time during an incident.
Monitor the site throughout Black Friday
Preparation should continue once the sale begins. Monitor areas such as:
- Server resources
- Website response times
- Error rates
- Checkout failures
- Payment gateway errors
- Stock levels
- Conversion rate
- Revenue tracking
Unusual changes can often provide an early warning that something is not working properly.
Your Black Friday ecommerce checklist
Before Black Friday arrives, make sure you can confidently tick off the following:
- Hosting capacity reviewed
- Website speed tested
- Checkout tested
- Promotions tested
- Stock synchronisation checked
- Third-party integrations reviewed
- Analytics and advertising tracking verified
- Product feeds checked
- Campaign URLs tested
- Security configuration reviewed
- Backups confirmed
- Unnecessary deployments avoided
- Emergency contacts agreed
- Monitoring in place
Prepare now, not the night before as the best Black Friday preparation happens well before your campaigns go live. Finding a slow database query, broken product feed or checkout problem a few weeks beforehand gives you time to fix it properly. Finding the same problem when thousands of customers are trying to place orders is considerably more stressful.
If you run a Magento, Adobe Commerce or Shopify store and want help preparing your ecommerce site for Black Friday, the Pixie Commerce team can help review your website, infrastructure and integrations before the big day begins.