Once a purely American phenomenon, Black Friday is now one of the most important days for businesses worldwide, large and small. Last year, shoppers in the UK spent over £1.1 billion online.
Your website is your shop window, and it needs to be ready for Black Friday. An effective marketing campaign can lead to increased website traffic, but if your site is unprepared, slow, and you have unclear offers or checkout problems, all that interest will not result in sales.
Below is a Black Friday website checklist, giving you 7 tips you can keep in mind when preparing your pages for a critical date in the ecommerce calendar.
1. Check Your Website’s Black Friday Performance Baseline
When looking to prepare your website for Black Friday, it’s helpful to consider past performance.
You should start by looking at last year’s traffic, the sales completed and the number of enquiries that were made. It’s important to also look at the device split: how many were browsing on desktops, phones or other devices. Also analyse your landing pages and, if you can, numbers around checkout drop-offs.
If you can figure out what your baseline is, you can see what pages may need some improvement. Anticipate that pages such as your homepage, offer landing page, key product or service pages, and checkout/contact forms are likely to receive the most traffic and run tests to ensure they can handle the demand.
Also set out clearly what you want to achieve from a campaign before you launch, as a goal like “increase sales” is too vague. Goals such as wanting increased revenue, more qualified enquiries, higher conversion rate or better average order value can help you more clearly define your strategy to match goals.
Establishing a baseline performance is also important as it can make it easier to measure your campaign’s impact afterwards, rather than relying on total website visits alone.
2. Test Mobile Speed and the Full Customer Journey
Around 70% of online orders are placed on mobile devices. Your website should be mobile-friendly, designed to look good on a small screen, easily navigable and fast-loading.
Test the whole customer journey. Start from clicking a Black Friday advert or email to viewing offers, selecting products, adding items to the basket, completing checkout and receiving confirmation.
Potential friction points that could worsen the mobile experience include:
- Oversized images slowing load times
- Slow scripts
- Confusing navigation
- Layout shifts
- Hard-to-tap controls
- Unnecessary form fields
You should check Google’s three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). You can use Google Search Console to check these using real-user data.
Don’t rely on these scores to determine how prepared you are. Strong Black Friday SEO requires more than your website being optimised for mobile.
3. Make the Offer and Its Terms Easy to Understand
People want clarity. They want the offer to be in front of them, not have to work it out.
Key information any shoppers should be able to see is what items are discounted, the original and current price, the offer period and any exclusions that may apply.
Transparency builds trust, and you can do this more by including clear delivery, stock, returns and eligibility information near the offer so that there is no confusion. This lessens the risk of carts being abandoned or people changing their mind after ordering and getting a refund.
If you are offering services rather than products, explain clearly the promotion’s scope, booking window and any conditions.
You want people to jump on offers, but do not be misleading about urgency, have any hidden costs or make claims that could undermine trust.
4. Prepare for Traffic Spikes and Third-Party Dependencies
You should expect a sharp increase in traffic, so speak to your website hosting or platform provider about expected visitor numbers, caching, resource limits and available scaling options.
Also, you don’t control everything on your website. External tools, platforms and services like payment providers or booking tools exist on your website and could interrupt the customer journey.
Check these and other dependencies like analytics tags, chat widgets and stock feeds to ensure they are reliable and understand how any disruption could affect your customers. Before you begin any marketing campaign, test any backup and recovery procedures to ensure you are prepared.
Not every site will need a load test or a particular hosting upgrade. Any scaling changes you make should be informed by your expected traffic and current platform capabilities.
5. Build a Dedicated Black Friday Landing Page
Effective web design is about being easy to navigate and structuring your site in a way that makes sense. Having a dedicated Black Friday landing page can be a hub for your offers that matches the campaign message and gives users a direct route to them, aligning the marketing material and the destination.
Your landing page should include:
- A concise headline
- Offer details
- Product or service benefits
- Trust signals (reviews, star ratings, money-back guarantees)
- Clear call to action
- FAQs
Make it easy to find from anywhere on your site by linking to it from relevant site pages, using clear internal anchor text.
You can keep a year-round Black Friday URL and update it annually to build SEO value or create a separate dated page for each campaign. Decide the best way for you based on ongoing campaign strategy and existing SEO value and authority of the page URL.
6. Check Tracking Before Campaign Traffic Arrives
You’ll want to know how your campaign does after the fact, so check that your analytics and ad conversion tracking work across key actions such as purchase, lead submission, phone click or booking.
Test your privacy consent settings, cross-domain journeys, and confirmation pages to ensure tracking works correctly, is privacy-compliant, and that actions like purchases or form submissions are correctly recorded as conversions.
Rather than casting a wide net and tracking every metric, pick a few relevant KPIs in advance to monitor.
If customers switch devices or channels before converting, attribution may be incomplete. To get a clearer picture, compare analytics data with your actual sales figures or CRM data where possible.
7. Plan What Happens After Black Friday
Black Friday website preparation also involves getting ready for what comes afterwards.
You could set up a post-campaign follow-up for visitors who did not convert. You can use email marketing to great effect, sending a short email about offers still available that includes a discount code. Also, don’t forget customers who made a purchase; sending out follow-up thank-you emails helps with building brand loyalty.
The landing page doesn’t have to be abandoned either. Keep up useful content and clearly show the updating of expired offers and new ones.
You should also review the campaign performance, looking at areas such as traffic sources, mobile conversions, best-performing landing pages, stock or enquiry bottlenecks and technical issues. This can help you see where you did well and what improvements are needed.
Black Friday Website Preparation Checklist:
- Proofread all offers, prices and promotional terms
- Test all website links and landing pages
- Check that enquiry and contact forms work correctly
- Test the checkout and payment process
- Verify analytics and conversion tracking
- Confirm contact details are accurate and up to date
Make Sure Your Website is Black Friday Ready
If you wish to enact these changes and want expert strategies and implementation, talk to Maxweb Solutions today about how our web design and digital marketing services can help your business attract more visitors and turn them into customers.
Posted on Friday, November 13th, 2026 in Digital Marketing.
