Black Friday: how to get your website ready for the rush

This year Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November and Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November. That leaves just over three weeks: enough time to get your website ready without rushing.

Around Black Friday, your website gets far more visitors than usual in a short space of time. Often all at once: right after your newsletter goes out or your ad goes live. A slow or stuttering site costs you sales immediately, because people hunting for a discount don’t wait. With the right preparation you can handle that peak with ease. Here’s how.

1. Start now, not the week before

The biggest mistake is making major changes just before the rush. Plan it like this:

From now until mid-November: update WordPress, your theme and plugins, clean up, improve speed and test.
From around 20 November: a freeze. No new plugins, no theme updates, no experiments. Only prepare content.
Black Friday week: only security updates that are truly urgent.

Make a backup before every major step, and ideally test changes on a copy of your site rather than on the live version.

2. Caching: your best weapon against the rush

Without caching, your server rebuilds every page on every visit: PHP runs, the database is queried, and only then does the visitor see anything. With a hundred visitors at once, the server does that a hundred times. With caching, a page is built once and then served as a ready-made file. That is many times faster and lighter.

Our servers run on LiteSpeed. If you use WordPress, the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin is the logical choice, as it works directly with the web server. Pay attention to these points:

Turn on page caching. Check that the cache actually works. Your page headers should show x-litespeed-cache: hit.
Never cache the cart, checkout or account pages. These pages are personal. LiteSpeed Cache excludes them automatically for well-known shop plugins, but do check, especially with a less common shop solution.
Warm up the cache. An empty cache means the first visitors do the slow work. Once your offers are in place, visit the most important pages yourself, or let the LiteSpeed Cache crawler do it.
Think about when your offer starts. Does the discount begin at midnight? Then the cache may keep showing the old prices until it is refreshed. Purge the cache when the offer starts, or set up a scheduled purge for the pages concerned in LiteSpeed Cache.
Countdown timers in JavaScript. A timer calculated in the HTML itself “freezes” in the cache. Choose a timer that runs in the browser.
Object cache for dynamic pages. Pages that cannot be cached, such as the checkout, benefit from an object cache like Redis, which temporarily stores database queries. If you would like to use it, get in touch with us.
Browser caching. Images, CSS and JavaScript don’t need to be downloaded again on a second visit, so returning visitors browse noticeably faster.

3. Make your pages lighter

Caching hides a lot, but a heavy page stays heavy on a smartphone with a weak signal. And that is where most Black Friday traffic comes from.

Images: resize them to the size they are displayed at and use WebP or AVIF. A 4 MB banner is not unusual, and completely unnecessary.
Lazy loading for images below the fold, but not for the large banner at the top.
Take a critical look at external scripts: chat widgets, tracking pixels, pop-ups, sliders. Every extra script slows things down. Switch off what you don’t really need.
Measure the result with PageSpeed Insights, and look at the mobile score in particular.

4. Clean up behind the scenes

Delete plugins and themes you don’t use. Deactivated is not the same as deleted.
Clean up the database: old revisions, expired temporary data and spam comments.
Check that scheduled tasks (cron) aren’t getting stuck. A shop with thousands of overdue tasks slows down exactly when it shouldn’t.

5. Test the whole purchase

A fast homepage is worthless if the checkout falters. Go through the entire path yourself, on a computer and a smartphone:

Find a product, add it to the cart, apply a discount code, check out.
Make a real payment of a small amount with every payment method you offer.
Does the confirmation email arrive, and does it stay out of spam? With a surge in orders, your email delivery needs to be reliable too.
Are stock levels, shipping costs and the end date of your discount rules correct?

6. Know the limits of your hosting plan

Every hosting plan comes with a certain amount of computing power and memory. That is plenty for an ordinary day, but a big campaign can hit the limit. Two tips:

Send your newsletter in batches. Ten thousand emails at once means ten thousand potential clicks within a few minutes. Sending in blocks spreads that wave.
Expecting an exceptional peak? Let us know in advance. We’ll look together at whether your plan can handle it or should be scaled up temporarily. And don’t run a load test on your own without checking with us first: to our security systems it looks like an attack.

7. Security: bots go shopping too

Around Black Friday, unwanted traffic increases as well: bots that copy prices, try to take over accounts or place fake orders. Our server security stops much of this, but you can help too:

Strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication for every administrator.
Spam protection on forms and the registration form.
Keep an eye on suspicious orders: many failed payments in quick succession often point to the misuse of stolen card details.

8. On the day and afterwards

Agree who is available and who is allowed to change what.
Keep a simple plan B ready, such as a lightweight offer page you can switch to quickly.
Unsure whether the servers are OK? Check our server status page first.
Afterwards: reset the prices, purge the cache and don’t just delete your offer pages. Use the same URL every year, such as /black-friday/. That way it builds up visibility in Google for next year.

In short

Updates and major changes now, freeze from around 20 November.
Page caching on, personal pages excluded, cache warmed up and purged when the offer starts.
Light images, as few external scripts as possible.
Whole purchase tested, including payment and confirmation email.
Planning a big campaign? Let us know in advance.

Not sure whether your website can handle the rush? Request a WordPress website check or get in touch. We’re happy to look at your site with you, well before 27 November.

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