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Black Friday ecommerce prep

Watch our expert-led webinar to discover actionable strategies for optimizing speed, security, and handling traffic surges during the busiest shopping season. Don’t miss out on maximizing sales and delivering a seamless customer experience.

Black Friday ecommerce webinar hosted by Liquid Web

Key insights

Simple hygiene tasks ensure your online store is in peak performance and ready for big sales, especially around the holidays — and that is exactly what was covered in the webinar, “Black Friday ecommerce prep,” hosted by Nell Lindquist, Sr. Director of Marketing Operations at Liquid Web.

Inhouse ecommerce expert Tiffany Bridge, Product Manager at Liquid Web, led the session on preparing for Black Friday. She outlined how you can maintain site performance and reliability during the biggest shopping event of the year with a few critical ecommerce website optimization techniques, as well as other considerations in your sales and marketing strategies.

The webinar covered a strategic, step-by-step Black Friday checklist for optimizing ecommerce sites ahead of the holiday shopping season, starting four weeks out at Halloween. After all, doing it ahead of time ensures that you’re avoiding any unpleasant surprises that can cost you during your busy season.

With the four-week countdown starting at Halloween, this period gives you the essential time needed to assess and prepare critical components related to your online store’s performance on the big day. It also gives you time to prepare the promotions you want to offer for the holiday season.

Below we break down a Black Friday ecommerce optimization checklist week by week for getting your online store ready for your biggest sales of the year.

Four weeks out from Black Friday: Focus on site performance

Begin with a performance check, using tools like Google Lighthouse or webpagetest.org to assess loading speeds across pages. Be sure to test more than just your homepage — test key product pages too. Look for large resources that may slow down your site’s performance.

These tools give you a waterfall chart, which shows you all the individual elements loading on your site. They also show how long each element takes to load, and best of all, these resources are free and easy to use.

You’ll also want to keep ecommerce software like WooCommerce or Magento updated, but be sure to do that on a staging site first in order to identify any potential Black Friday ecommerce issues before they go live.

Also of utmost importance is your checkout process. Test your checkout process with real users to ensure a smooth experience. If anything seems harder than expected, or if there are any surprises, now is the time to fix those issues.

Three weeks out: Check your integrations

Review integrations with essential services such as email marketing, payment processing, and fulfillment processing too. Confirm that all settings and subscriber limits are up to date. Be sure to check DNS settings, as well as third-party alerts, testing site forms, and automated alerts you may have missed or overlooked in previous weeks to prevent issues during peak times.

Another smart thing to do at this time is to test your site’s forms, such as contact and newsletter form, and verify integrations, such as an Instagram feed. It is wise to take care of this early, so there’s time to fix any issues that may arise.

Two weeks out: Inventory, promotions, & marketing

At the two-week mark, prepare inventory, plan sales promotions, and activate cross-selling or upselling strategies. Perhaps you’ll implement abandoned cart recovery as part of your strategy, emailing prospective customers that left unpurchased items in their shopping carts. You could even incentivize the purchase by sending them a special discount code.

If you sell both online and in-person, double check that your online inventory reflects actual stock. If you have products with limited availability, such as handmade items, this is an especially important Black Friday tip.

Also be sure to rerun performance tests to ensure that promotional tools like pop-ups or JavaScript from retargeting won’t compromise the loading speed on your site.

One week out: Customer communications & coupon codes

At the one-week mark, focus on finalizing customer communications. Double check your shipping policies, size charts, and transactional emails, such as order confirmations and shipping notifications, and make sure they are accurate and up to date.

You’ll also want to verify coupon settings. Double-check that discount codes aren’t stacking unintentionally and schedule promotions properly to prevent manual intervention.

Bottom line: Preparing for Black Friday ecommerce sales is serious business

It’s the biggest sales day of the year, and the start of the holiday shopping season, so it’s smart to start preparing for Black Friday now. It is also wise to pause non-critical updates one to two weeks before Black Friday to maintain site stability.

Black Friday ecommerce prep can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re balancing a fulltime job with running an online store on the side. But breaking down the essential tasks week-by-week, while prioritizing them by importance, and leveraging support resources from hosting providers should make it more manageable.

We hope that these Black Friday tips serve you well, and that you feel prepared as we enter the holiday selling season. Use this week-by-week Black Friday checklist as a roadmap to manage your site and enjoy a smoother holiday season ahead.

Shop Black Friday web hosting deals

For more insights, check out Liquid Web’s ecommerce articles, and remember to sign up for our next webinar.

In need of a new ecommerce host? Explore Liquid Web’s lightning-fast managed WooCommerce and managed Magento hosting plans today.

Read the transcript

Please note that AI was used to remove filler words for clarity.

[00:00:01] Host (Nell):
Hi, everyone! Welcome to today’s webinar, “Getting Your Ecommerce Site Ready for Black Friday Success.” My name is Nell, and I’m the Director of Marketing Operations at Liquid Web. I’m really excited to learn with you today about preparing your store for the busiest shopping weekend of the year.

To give you a quick background, Liquid Web provides premium hosting solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our products are backed by a 24/7 support team to ensure your site stays up and running during peak times, like Black Friday. Today, we’re fortunate to have Tiffany Bridge with us to guide us through this mini boot camp. Tiffany is a Product Manager here at Liquid Web with deep experience in ecommerce infrastructure, so she knows how to help businesses thrive during high-traffic periods.

Alright, Tiffany, before we get started, I have to address the question on everyone’s mind: yes, that is a picture of The Rock over your shoulder! It’s a beautiful piece of art, and we appreciate you sharing it with us today.

[00:01:10] Tiffany (Presenter):
It’s my favorite icebreaker!

[00:01:13] Host (Nell):
It’s working! Alright, let me pull up your presentation so you can kick us off.

[00:01:20] Tiffany (Presenter):
Thank you! Today, we’ll talk about optimizing your ecommerce site for Black Friday. When I prepared this checklist, I focused on common issues that can affect an ecommerce site — things you might not notice during slower times of the year but that could make a big impact during the holiday shopping season. This checklist includes basic site hygiene and steps to prevent issues from cropping up.

Let’s start with the more technical items first. These are tasks you’ll want to tackle early, about four weeks out from Black Friday, because if you need a developer to resolve anything, you’ll want to allow enough time to address it.

So, four weeks out — which is basically Halloween this year — let’s start with a performance check. Is your hosting optimized, and is your site performance where it needs to be? Start by running performance tests using tools like webpagetest.org or Google Lighthouse in Chrome. These tools are free and easy to use; just paste in your site’s URL and run the test. Make sure to test more than just your homepage — try key product pages as well.

One of the great things about these tools is that they produce a “waterfall” chart, showing all the individual elements loading on your site and how long each one takes. For example, I ran a test on one of our Liquid Web product pages, and we could see most items like CSS loading quickly. But we also spotted one larger item — a video background. Since most of the page loads before the video, it doesn’t affect performance much. But if an image or resource took too long to load, you’d know to resize it or take other steps to reduce its impact.

Remember, performance tests simulate conditions that aren’t ideal, like a 4G cellular connection, so you get a realistic picture of what some users might experience. Also, if you’re using ecommerce software like WooCommerce or Magento, make sure your updates are current. Apply these updates on a staging site first to identify any issues before they go live. If you’re on a managed hosting plan, like the ones we offer at Liquid Web, you’ll have access to a free staging site, so take advantage of it.

Most importantly, test your checkout process with real users to ensure a smooth experience. Get someone to buy an item and observe the process. Ask yourself if anything seems harder than expected, or if there are any surprises. Now is the time to fix those issues, rather than on Black Friday.

[00:06:12] Host (Nell):
Great tips! For the plugins, if we do this check four weeks out, would you recommend another check, say two weeks before, and then again a week out? At what point do we pause on updates?

[00:06:25] Tiffany (Presenter):
Getting regular updates done consistently is essential, especially in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. I’d suggest pausing updates about one to two weeks before Black Friday, unless it’s for critical security needs. This way, if an update creates any issues, there’s time to address them. At Liquid Web, for instance, our managed WordPress platform has a plugin updater that tests visually to see if an update might break something on your site before applying it. But around Black Friday, we actually turn off updates from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday or even that Tuesday. We keep an eye on potential security issues, but we avoid changes during this high-traffic period to manage risk.

Keeping plugins updated is critical to protect against malware and hacking, but changing code too close to a big event introduces risk. It’s all about balancing safety with stability.

[00:08:00] Host (Nell):
Awesome. Thank you.

[00:08:03] Tiffany (Presenter):
So, assuming you’ve done the updates, let’s focus on what to do now, three weeks out. Review and test all your integrations. Your site likely connects with various services, like an email marketing tool or payment processor. If you’re not handling fulfillment yourself, you may have a partner for that too. Log into each tool and check your limits, like subscriber caps in your email service or your DNS setup for spam protection.

[00:09:24] Host (Nell):
DNS setup can be pretty overwhelming. Can I just contact support for help with that?

[00:09:34] Tiffany (Presenter):
Absolutely. Reach out to your hosting support team or whoever manages your DNS settings, whether that’s your registrar, hosting provider, or ecommerce platform. Even for those of us in this field, DNS can be complex. It’s smart to do this early, so there’s time to resolve anything that comes up.

Similarly, check in with any third-party services you use. For example, log into your fulfillment partner’s portal to ensure there aren’t any important alerts. Review any account notifications, especially ones that you might have ignored, and ensure everything’s in place.

Also, test your site’s forms — like contact and newsletter forms — and verify integrations, like your Instagram feed if you have one. At Nexcess, our managed apps hosting brand, we use Sales Performance Monitor to alert you if there’s a sudden sales drop. This tool won’t diagnose the problem but will prompt you to investigate further. We also offer WooCommerce automated testing, which checks your checkout process daily.

[00:12:29] Host (Nell):
That sounds very reassuring.

[00:12:31] Tiffany (Presenter):
Now that we’re two weeks out, you can focus on inventory and sales promotions. If you sell both online and in-person, make sure your online inventory reflects actual stock. This is especially relevant for products with limited availability, like handmade items.

Decide if you want to allow backorders on certain items. Look into cross-selling and upselling tools, which are usually available in platforms like WooCommerce. For example, if a customer adds a handmade bowl to their cart, suggest a matching mug.

Be familiar with your promotional tools, like site-wide banners or pop-ups for email capture. Plan for retargeting and abandoned cart recovery if those are part of your strategy. Abandoned cart recovery, for instance, can send a follow-up email to customers who left items in their cart. Sometimes these emails include an extra discount as an incentive to complete the purchase.

Lastly, if you’re adding new promotional tools, rerun performance checks on your website. Retargeting, for example, often involves JavaScript that can impact loading speeds. Be aware of any performance trade-offs and balance them with your site goals.

[00:16:35] Host (Nell):
You’ll want to check your checkout process again, just in case.

[00:16:38] Tiffany (Presenter):
Absolutely. Go through it one more time to make sure no recent additions are slowing things down. If something new is creating a bug, or causing a longer load time, you’ll want to catch it and turn it off. This way, you can ensure your site’s performance is optimized.

So, now we’re two weeks out and everything’s in place. Fast forward to one week before Black Friday. Are your customer communications and sales plans ready? Review all customer service content. Often, we set this up once and forget it, but now’s a good time to check that your shipping policies, size charts, and transactional emails (like order confirmations and shipping notifications) are up-to-date.

Also, review your coupon settings. Make sure that you’re not unintentionally allowing discounts to stack. Verify last year’s coupon codes have expired and this year’s promotions are active only for their intended dates. Most modern systems let you schedule sales and set expiration times so you’re not manually updating prices at midnight.

To recap:

Four weeks out: Start with site performance, testing plugins, and checkout functionality.
Three weeks out: Check integrations.
Two weeks out: Set up inventory and promotions, along with marketing messages.
One week out: Finalize customer communications and coupon settings.

By following this timeline, you’ll be well-prepared for Black Friday. And remember to enjoy your holiday — maybe even help with the dishes.

[00:20:20] Host (Nell):
The most important tip! Thanks, Tiffany. This is so helpful. I run a small hobby site without dedicated dev support, so having a clear roadmap is amazing. It’s easy to know you should do these things but hard to prioritize them.

[00:20:46] Tiffany (Presenter):
Exactly. Most of us are balancing regular jobs with managing an online store. Breaking tasks down week-by-week makes it easier and more manageable. You don’t have to tackle everything at once; start with the critical tasks and move on as it makes sense.

[00:21:18] Host (Nell):
For my hobby store, I built the site with our sister brand Kadence without a developer. They have a great plugin for that. Do you think, at this four-week mark, I should reach out to my hosting provider? Nexcess has been great, but would other hosts also provide a baseline of support?

[00:21:44] Tiffany (Presenter):
Yes, it’s definitely worth asking. Nexcess offers more support for specific applications than some other hosts, but it’s always good to check. They may be able to help with some elements, and if not, at least you’ll know. Nexcess, for example, partners with a team that can help with specific tasks on an hourly basis. But if your host doesn’t offer that, sites like Upwork or referrals through your professional network can be great resources for finding reliable developers.

[00:23:10] Host (Nell):
And remember to use staging sites.

[00:23:12] Tiffany (Presenter):
Absolutely. Always test on a staging site first. The last thing you want is a PHP error on your live site with no clear solution.

[00:23:26] Host (Nell):
And, let’s face it — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is practically a lost day.

[00:23:33] Tiffany (Presenter):
Developers are likely not working the day before Thanksgiving. That’s why it’s essential to handle the technical tasks early on. You don’t want to find yourself calling for help at the last minute, only to find it costs extra — or the help isn’t even available.

[00:23:51] Host (Nell):
Exactly, if they’re even available.

[00:23:52] Tiffany (Presenter):
Right.

[00:23:54] Host (Nell):
Thank you, Tiffany. This was incredibly helpful. I feel much more confident heading into the holiday season.

[00:24:02] Tiffany (Presenter):
Glad to hear that! It was my pleasure.

[00:24:04] Host (Nell):
Thanks, everyone.