Black Friday is a rush – traffic surges, customers scanning for deals, and every broken link, unclear banner or mis-configured coupon can cost you real money. But many of the things you should check before the big day are just good website hygiene. Think of this as your pre-BF checklist, built for peak season but useful every day of the year.

Step 1: Review the user journey – from start to finish

One of the most important things you can do on your website, at any time, is walk through your site as a customer would.

Begin at arrival – are your landing pages clear, welcoming and aligned with your Black Friday messaging? Think about:

Homepage and key landing pages: Make sure your banners, headings and calls-to-action reflect your BF offers.

Navigation: Can visitors quickly find your “Black Friday deals” or “Sale” section? Is the menu intuitive or cluttered? Use prominent, obvious links. Get rid of anything unnecessary.

Product pages: Is pricing up to date? That sounds obvious but might be worth a double check. Are discounts clearly visible (e.g. “was £X, now £Y”)? Are stock levels shown if relevant? Do you have a way for people to ask to be notified when something comes back into stock?

For ecommerce – cart/basket and checkout: Test everything. Add items to your cart, apply a Black Friday coupon (more on coupons later), and check how the checkout flow looks. Can you even apply voucher codes? Against any payment method? Is shipping calculated correctly? Are there any unnecessary distractions? Upsells yes – things that take people off and away from checking out – no.

By going through this flow yourself (or better still, with someone who doesn’t know your site really well), you’ll catch confusing moments, missing links, or anything that could derail a purchase.

Step 2: Test your promotional code setup (for ecommerce)

Promos and vouchers are the heart of Black Friday. But a misconfigured coupon – or one that doesn’t stack correctly with others – can be disastrous.

Coupon settings: Dive into your e-commerce platform settings (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, whatever you use). Check what types of coupons are allowed (percentage, fixed value, free shipping), whether they stack, expiry dates, usage limits per user, etc. If you get on this asap, it’s not too late to sort some offers for Black Friday. But you need to understand what you platform offers and how it works. The reason I’m pushing this point and making it sound complicated is because you need to consider what your shop can do when you’re planning your deals… you can’t offer 10% off orders of over £100 if your shop’s vouchers don’t work like that, or you don’t have the necessary plugin to make it happen.

Coupon stacking: One of our clients has a complicated site with membership and stand alone products – being a member gives you a discount on the stand alone products, but they also offer discounts on the stand alone products for BF to non-members. However they can’t afford to give a member 10% off a course AND have them redeem a 10% off voucher intended for non-members, because 20% off isn’t viable for them. So they need to check how their coupons stack and if they have the facility (especially when this year they’ve switched to a new checkout platform with memberships being handled by Lifter and BuddyBoss) to limit transactions to just giving members the initial 10% off and ignoring any other promo codes they try to redeem.

Run through scenarios with test orders: Carrying on from above, create test products (cheap or dummy items) and apply different coupon combos. For example: Black Friday code + loyalty discount + shipping promo. Does everything apply as expected? Does anything conflict or get blocked?

Edge cases: Try invalid or expired coupons. What error messages do users see? Are they helpful? Will they help people carry on and make the transaction or will they stop them in their tracks? Are you happy to spoon feed a promo code at the checkout by repeating it in an error message (“sorry that code has expired, try xxx instead”) if it means you make the sale, rather than lose it?

Visibility: Make sure your site clearly communicates what discounts apply, both in banners/pop-ups and on product/cart pages, so users don’t feel misled. There’s lots of talk about trust at the moment, and you don’t want people to lose respect and trust for your shop if you announce your “10% off everything” offer, which at the checkout then excludes everything they were tyring to buy.

Set up those test SKUs now, as they’re low risk and massively helpful. Categorise them in a way that they’re discreet or hidden on the site and just draft them when you’re not testing.

Step 3: Banners, pop-ups & messaging

Black Friday is a marketing moment, and your site’s visual communication needs to match.

Banner strategy: Design banners for your homepage, category pages, even blog pages, promoting your BF offers. Make sure they are consistent in tone, colour and message.

Pop-ups: Consider a timed pop-up (e.g. after 10 seconds), or exit-intent pop-up, to catch visitors and capture email sign-ups, or even drop a coupon code. But don’t go overboard: overly aggressive pop-ups can annoy users and be bad for SEO – ideally add pop ups if someone hasn’t come from Google, or on a 3rd page view.

Urgency cues: Use countdown timers (“Black Friday deals end in …”), limited stock indicators (“Only 3 left!”) and similar techniques – but only if they’re true! Those landing pages with a count down that’s always at 3 hours, no matter what day you visit, are just the biggest turn-off.

Mobile-first: You probably work on your website on a desktop, but many (indeed probably most) users on BF will be on mobile. Check that banners and pop-ups render well on smaller screens.

Last postage dates: Customer service will surge when orders surge, but at least do yourself a favour and make it clear when your last postage dates are for Christmas, so people can’t (easily) complain when their purchase arrives on the 27th December.

Step 4: Navigation and site structure

Your navigation should act as a roadmap, especially during a sale. Make sure:

Sale/Deals page is prominent: If you’ve got a page with all of your offers on (which is where most people will want to head on BF), whether it’s “Black Friday Deals”, “Offers”, or “Shop the Sale”, make this link very visible in the main nav.

Filter and sort options: Help shoppers filter by discount, price, popularity, or categories, to help reduce decision fatigue.

Search works for deals: Test your site’s search box. If a customer searches “Black Friday”, “sale”, or “deal”, will relevant products show up? If not, you might need to tweak your site search indexing or tagging.

Product categorisation: This is my bug bear on shopping websites – when things aren’t categorised well. It’s lazy, and all too common. One Christmas I spent AGES looking on Superdrug for red nail varnish. I filtered by the colour “red” – you’d think that was a safe bet? Ends up it wasn’t. When I finally found the red I wanted, it wasn’t in the “red” filter. I don’t know why I persevered really – I should have gone somewhere else. But I was really sure they’d have a bold Christmassy red! And maybe I had other things in my basket and was trying to make a minimum order total for a better deliver price. But I did really nearly leave. My point is, make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for, and if you offer search filters, make sure your products are set up correctly to fully utilise them. If you can’t be bothered – or don’t have time – to categorise things by colour, don’t offer a colour filter, as it’s just frustrating.

Step 5: Performance & speed

A slow site during Black Friday is a killer. But a slow site at any time of year leads to a bad UX and bad visibility in Google and AI searches (read my guide on how to get found by AI here). Make sure you check the following – which admittedly might need the help of a developer. A lot of this stuff can call for Load Testing. Now, the last time – or rather the first time (it’s actually both) – I got a quote for a client from a load testing company, the prices started from £6,000. So that’s obviously not viable for most businesses. So that’s when our Technical Director, Tom Freeman, did it himself instead and discovered a joy of spinning up servers and hurtling traffic at a site (at a safe time to do so! Or ideally at an identically set up staging server) and documenting how far he could push it. He also then provides recommendations on what you could do to make your site withstand more traffic. For existing clients, this starts from around £300+VAT (which is considerably better than £6k). It costs more for a new client, because there’s a bit more to set up, but it’s not a lot more. So if load testing is something you’ve been considering, do drop us an email.

Page speed: Run Lighthouse or similar audits on your homepage, product pages and checkout. Look for render-blocking scripts, unoptimized images, or heavy third-party widgets. Yes some of those words are a little scary, so this might be one for your developer. Or leave your email to hear when SiteVitals launches, as it will break these terms down into easy to understand to-do lists for you.

Server capacity: Can your hosting handle a spike in traffic? If you run on a shared or small VPS, double-check your bandwidth, CPU usage, and potential scaling options.

Caching: Make sure you have page caching, and possibly a CDN enabled to speed up delivery. On something like WordPress, you can install plugins to help with this. If you want to know more about CDNs, make sure you’re on my TalkingWeb mailing list as I explain all this sort of stuff in easy to understand weekly emails.

Step 6: Just to push the point – MOBILE

Much of your Black Friday traffic will be mobile:

Test your entire customer journey on mobile: arrival, navigation, product pages, adding-to-cart, applying coupons, checkout.

Look for layout issues: buttons too close together, pop-ups breaking, forms misaligned.

Test touch interactions: swiping, tapping, navigating back and forth.

Different phones and operating systems: Get your mate with an Android to look for you, and that friend with the shiny new iPhone with the screen that’s almost twice the size of your iPhone 13. I started a bit of a device lab from our offices a few years back, so people could test things on all manner of screen sizes and operating systems… but the pandemic kinda halted that.

Step 7: Shop settings deep dive

If you’re running an online shop/store, now is the ideal moment to really get under the bonnet of your e-commerce settings.

Payment methods: Ensure all payment gateways work seamlessly. Test them in sandbox or live mode with small orders.

Shipping settings: Do you have free shipping thresholds? Are they configured to reflect your BF promotions? If not, users may get surprised by high shipping costs at checkout.

Tax/VAT: Make sure your tax rules are correct for your geographic selling regions, especially since a lot of BF shoppers will be from different areas.

Inventory: Double-check stock levels for BF-specific items. Do you want to “oversell” or hide products when stock is low?

Order confirmation flows: Make sure the emails customers get (order confirmation, shipping confirmation) correctly reflect the discounts applied.

Currency: Are you expecting sales from your followers on Instagram, many of whom are in the US? Do you let people pay in USD/$? If not, can you? If you can’t, and they check out in £s, do you want to add a message to your checkout telling people that what they actually pay will be dependent on their bank’s currency conversion rate? We’ve done this this year for a client with a lot of US customers, who can’t accept $s. We’ve hooked up the Stripe API so that we can show people roughly what products will cost in $s, but then make it clear that ultimately they’ll be charged in GBP/£s so the actual $ amount may vary. This just avoids disgruntled customers taking up customer service time when that £15 item comes out at $22 instead of the $21 they were expecting.

Step 8: Analytics and tracking

If you’re promoting Black Friday, you’ll want a clear picture of how it’s performing. Make sure:

Analytics is set up: Check Google Analytics 4, or whatever tool you use, is tracking your traffic, conversion funnels, and key events (cart abandon, purchases, coupon redemptions).

Goals and events: Define BF-specific goals (e.g. “used coupon code,” “signed up for newsletter”) so you can measure the true impact.

Monitor real-time: During the sale, keep an eye on live traffic, server response times, and conversion rates. That way, you can respond quickly if there’s a drop-off or technical issue. If suddenly everyone stops orders, jump in with a test checkout to make sure your payment provider isn’t having a blip – if they are, take off that option and stick to one other that works (this is why it can be handy to have more than one payment merchant option at checkout).

Step 9: Content and copy checks

Black Friday isn’t just about discounts – the way you talk about them matters.

Clear language: Make sure your banners, pop-ups and product pages clearly explain the offer. Avoid ambiguous phrases (“special offer”) and state exactly what the deal is.

Legal or terms & conditions: Especially for coupons, make sure your T&Cs are clear (expiry date, usage limits, return policy).

SEO considerations: You may want to create a “Black Friday” landing page. But think carefully about SEO – avoid creating content that might cannibalise your long-term SEO if you don’t plan to keep those URLs. So don’t work on link backs to a temporary page – keep those going to your all-year round pages. And when you do take down a temporary page, make sure you 302 redirect it to a main page until you want to resurrect the URL again next year. I’ve taught SEO for almost 20 years and I’ve finally put my day long SEO course online in an e-book/downloadable PDF so you can buy it here. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on SEO here – I’ll save that for another day – as it’s a bit short notice now for anything to make a difference ahead of Black Friday. Maybe check your title tags and meta descriptions are enticing for people to click on incase Google updates it’s index in time – but at the same time, if you’re soaring high in the serps (search results), maybe don’t rock any boats right now.

Old pages: Google your site. Dig around in your footer. Click on every internal link in your T&Cs and policies. Check the pages that are live in the admin of your CMS. Basically check that you haven’t still got a page out there that’s out of date and that someone could stumble across and have grounds for a complaint because you used to offer a 60 day return window and now it’s only 30.

Step 10: Customer support readiness

When sales spike, so will customer questions:

Support channels: Make sure your chat, email, or phone support is ready for increased queries. Ahead of time check if your team are available to work more hours – or if it’s just you, maybe cancel that spa day… (or postpone it – you’ll need it when the rush is over).

FAQ updates: Add or update FAQs for Black Friday (e.g. “How to apply coupon code,” “When will my order ship?”).

Returns policy: Be very clear about returns and refunds for BF purchases. If returns will be busier than usual, make sure your logistics team is looped in.

Step 11: Email communications

Too often people focus on the website, and not the emails that it sends out. Check that:

Email copy is relevant: Too often I see out of date emails being fired around (even sometimes still in late 2025 saying to please wear a face mask and stay 2m apart – unless you’re a delicate ward in a hospital, I don’t think anyone’s doing that any more). People proof read their website but just check that emails are coming in. Don’t just look in your inbox, see the order confirmation email and tick that off your test list – actually read it. Read each and every email your site sends and check it’s correct, relevant and typo-free.

Abandoned basket emails are sending: If you can turn these on, then now is the time. If someone doesn’t check out for some reason, but you have their email, drop them an email back – perhaps with an added incentive – to bring them back and finish their purchase. These are great people to speak to too in your post-sale plan (see below) – a little bonus for taking part in a survey as to why they didn’t finish their purchase could unveil something really useful.

Stock updates are sending: If you offer people the option to be sent an email when an out of stock item becomes available again, check it works and links people back easily to the product. Incase they asked a while ago, you might want to update these emails with some text about your BF offers – but remember to remove this again after the sale.

Mailing list hook ups are working: If you capture customer data on a mailing list, check that the integration is working ahead of a busy period. If an API has gotten disconnected or a connection has expired, you don’t want to find that out in January, and then have the job of manually adding loads of customers to your list.

Step 12: Security updates

When your site is busy, security vulnerabilities can be exploited – and that’s not what you need at a busy time of year. Don’t let the hackers get in the way of you doing business. These things here really should be looked at every month, but if November focuses the mind, then so be it.

Server security updates: If relevant, check with your hosting company that any security updates that need doing are done. Is your version of PHP still in it’s security support window?

Plugin updates: Especially relevant if you’re using WordPress (just because WordPress sites can use a lot of 3rd party code). Make sure any plugins are updated, as well as WordPress core – but do the updates with plenty of time to test, test, test. If something has knock on effects, you need to know about it with time to sort it.

Step 13: Post-sale plan

Your work doesn’t end once Black Friday is over. Think ahead:

Thank-you messages: Send emails to everyone who bought, with suggestions for related products, or a “What’s next?” guide.

Feedback loop: Ask customers for feedback on their BF experience – what worked, what didn’t.

Review performance: Within a week, run your analytics on conversion, coupon usage, and traffic sources. Use that data to improve your Cyber Monday promotions or future campaigns.

Step 14: Final final checks

Before Black Friday, set up test products (dummy SKUs) in your shop and use them one final time to run through:

  • Adding to cart
  • Applying coupon codes
  • Going through different shipping options
  • Completing checkout with payment
  • Confirming emails get sent correctly

This isn’t just testing tech – it’ll help you feel confident that, when the real customers come, everything works.

Why all this matters (even outside Black Friday)

Even if you take everything here and apply it to your site every month (not just in November), you’ll run a cleaner, faster, more trustworthy, more profitable site. The key elements – clear messaging, robust testing, smooth navigation, proper coupon setup – are foundational.

Black Friday just accelerates the consequences (good and bad). If you get it right now, you’re not just ready for the rush, you’re building a stronger, more customer-friendly shop for the long haul.

If you’ve got any questions about anything here, or want further info on any of these topics, please comment on this Black Friday post on my Instagram.