Black Friday marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season and every year stores scramble to get ready for it, often at the last possible moment.
On one hand, it makes sense to wait until the last minute. It ensures you have the latest software updates, freshest popups, and most optimized checkout page. On the other hand, realistically, doing it in the week before Black Friday leaves little time to identify and fix problems before shoppers arrive.
Black Friday always falls on the day after US Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday of November, so it lands somewhere between November 23 and 29. This year, Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30, so the window to get ready is shorter than it looks.
This blog walks through what to check, what to fix, and when to stop changing things altogether, regardless of whether you run a single WooCommerce store or look after several for clients. Along the way you’ll hear from Nathan Ingram, agency coach and livestream host here at hosting.com, who has spent more than three decades in this industry.
If you'd prefer to work through your Black Friday preparations with some guidance, join Nathan on November 10 for our upcoming livestream, The Black Friday checkup: Find what's broken before your customers do. He'll walk through using AI to check your WooCommerce store, identify potential problems, and prioritize fixes before the holiday shopping rush.
Quick takeaways
Finalize your site changes early and freeze them on November 13, two weeks before Black Friday.
Test your cart and checkout, not just your cached pages. Don’t forget to test mobile.
If you are switching hosts, do it before November.
Plan your deals, coupons, and scheduled emails before the freeze.
Give every coupon an end date.
Watch for card testing attacks and turn on the fraud tools your payment gateway offers.
Use AI for tedious prep work but always have an experienced human review it.
Ensure customers can find help, your return policy, and shipping cutoffs easily.
Observe after the sale and redirect or repurpose your pages instead of deleting them.
Is your hosting ready for the traffic spike?
Let’s start with the foundation of your website: your web host.
Black Friday isn’t like your average day of sales. It’s usually your busiest, and the rush can last longer than a single day. With a solid caching setup, your hosting might even seem to be handling it, until shoppers reach the checkout.
We asked Nathan for performance issues that might not appear in testing but hit once real traffic arrives. His answer focused on the most important step of the shopping experience: when a customer decides to buy something.
When people test ecommerce sites, they mostly hit pages that have been cached, like the home page, product pages, and category pages. So everything feels nice and fast. But as soon as a customer adds something to their cart and heads to checkout, those pages have to be built by the server for their checkout process. For a few shoppers at a time, it's not usually a big deal. But a few dozen, and you could be creating a load your server was never tested for.
The best way to judge what your store needs in terms of hosting resources is to look backward, at previous years. Pull up analytics from last year and look at these things specifically:
Average visitors per hour: your baseline on a normal day.
Orders in your busiest hour: the number that tells you how many people were checking out at the same time.
Peak traffic windows: the hours when the pressure was highest, so you know when to watch closely.
Those three numbers will give you much more insight than any guesswork ever will. Once you have your data, check the resource usage in your hosting dashboard for those same busy hours. It will show how much headroom your plan has and whether it was already running tight. If you were close to the limit last year, Black Friday could push your site beyond its available resources.
It also helps to match the type of hosting to the type of site you are running. Shared hosting suits lighter sites, such as brochure-style pages or small catalogs where only a handful of people check out at any one time.
Nathan’s view is that a store with active carts and several shoppers checking out at once is a wholly different workload, and it’s usually better served by hosting built for that particular application; such as hosting for WooCommerce.
Nathan described the plan price versus website stability plainly:
The price difference between the plans is small compared to an hour of a broken checkout on the busiest day of the year.
If you’re switching hosts, do it before November. Nathan’s advice is to have the move finished by the end of October, so a new setup has a few weeks to be tested on a staging environment and to run with real customer activity before the rush. Any performance tuning should be finished about two weeks out.
Moving is the part many people put off, so it helps to know it doesn’t need to be a project on its own. Hosting.com’s free website migration is included on every plan, and the team migrates your site, email, and domains for you. Your current site stays online while the new one is built and tested. You can then preview it and approve the go-live yourself. For stores, the team usually schedules a switchover time with you, so the cutover lands when it's quietest.
If you are weighing your options, shared hosting and hosting for WooCommerce are both worth comparing before Black Friday, while hosting for WordPress is there if you are running something other than a store.
Will your checkout hold up with real shoppers?
Testing your checkout on one device is rarely enough. It might look good on your computer screen, but that’s not the only way your customers will see it, and they won’t always use your website the way you do.
Because of that, here are a few things worth checking on purpose before you consider it done:
Test on your phone: Most site owners test and edit on a large screen, and Nathan has seen where that leads: “Many times I’ve seen problems pop up that only affect phones and are never seen on a laptop.” Run the whole journey, from product page to confirmation, on a phone when testing everything else.
Exclude cart and checkout from every cache: Nathan’s rule is that these pages should be excluded from your server cache, any optimization plugins, and your CDN. When one of them caches these pages, you can end up with stale carts, coupons that won’t apply, and “session expired” errors. Those are precisely the things you don’t want during the biggest sales season of the year.
Try every payment method you offer: Make sure your gateway plugin is up to date and that options like Apple Pay and Google Pay are capable of completing orders.
Check your inventory: If stock levels sync from another system, confirm it keeps up when orders arrive faster than usual. Also set low-stock alerts so you are notified about problems early.
Confirm your shipping details: Make delivery cutoffs and expected timelines clear before customers have to ask.
The goal here is to ensure that a full run from first click to confirmation email encounters no hurdles. The site loads, coupons apply and work, payments go through, the email arrives, and the shipping is right: those are all separate things and any one of them can fail on its own.
When to stop making changes
Many site owners try to polish their site and user experience at the last possible moment, to ensure the freshest results. However, doing that gives you no time to troubleshoot if something does go awry.
This is why, at some point, the best thing you can do for your store is to stop improving it. Nathan recommends setting a firm cutoff:
I recommend a code freeze a couple of weeks before Black Friday. Make all your changes before that date and test them thoroughly. Then only update a plugin if there is a vulnerability.
This year, that means November 13. Before then it’s worth getting through:
Updates: WordPress core, themes, and plugins, so you go into the sale on current versions.
New features: Popups, banners, and any new plugin you were thinking of adding.
Performance tuning: Caching settings, image optimization, and CDN configuration.
Checkout tweaks: Anything that changes how customers pay or how orders are processed.
Once the code freeze begins, the only exception is a security fix for a known vulnerability. Keep a recent backup and a rollback plan on hand, just in case. Put your freeze date on your calendar today, before you do anything else.
Is your deal ready to go live?
You should also finalize your promotions before the code freeze begins, making sure everything built, tested, and scheduled in advance rather than waiting to be finished.
These few decisions are worth making early:
Deal structure: Site-wide discounts are simple to explain, category deals protect your margins, and flash sales create urgency. Pick the approach that fits your catalog and your margins and keep it easy to understand.
Coupon rules: Test every code, including how it behaves with other discounts and with different cart contents. On WooCommerce, check usage limits and minimum spend rules, too.
Campaign scheduling: Line up your email and SMS sends in advance so nothing depends on someone remembering to hit “Send.”
Landing pages: Build a dedicated page for Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers, ideally from a template your page builder already supports, so it’s quick to update and easy to repeat next year.
Abandoned cart recovery: Switch it on and give it a test. On a day with this much traffic, even a modest recovery rate adds up.
Last year’s analytics can help here too. They can give you a realistic idea of how many orders to expect, which makes it easier to set stock levels and decide how aggressive your discounts can afford to be.
Are you ready for fraud and bot traffic?
Busy days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday attract plenty of customers, but also plenty of unwanted attention. In this case, Nathan points to one threat in particular:
Card testing attacks are the ones to watch for. Bots place fake orders using stolen cards to see which ones actually work. On a normal day, these attacks might stand out. But on a busy day like Black Friday, the noise might be easier to hide.
The good news is it doesn’t take much effort to make your store a harder target for such attacks. Here are the basics:
Turn on your gateway’s fraud tools: Most payment providers include such tools, but they aren’t always enabled by default.
Add bot protection to checkout: A CAPTCHA or a bot-filtering rule at the point of payment can stop automated testing in its tracks.
Use a firewall: A web application firewall (WAF) or a reputable security plugin helps absorb the extra bot traffic that comes with a high-profile sale.
Have someone watching failed orders: Over the long weekend, a spike in failed or declined payments is often the first sign of such an attack.
As you can see, none of this is complicated, and some of it may already be handled for you. On hosting.com's shared hosting plans, for example, a Web Application Firewall is included and blocks hacks, malware, and suspicious bots, so it's worth checking what your own host offers.
But, like everything else in this blog, it all works best when it’s set up early and tested before the freeze rather than during the rush.
Where does AI help?
It’s undeniable that AI tools have become more prevalent in recent years, so it’s fair to wonder which ones are worth using to help with your Black Friday preparation.
Nathan’s view on AI tools is a practical one:
It's great at handling tedious work. Letting AI build a prep checklist, draft product descriptions and emails for someone to edit, dig through last year's analytics, and read error logs can be a real win. Just make sure there's still an experienced human in the loop to watch over its shoulder.
Nathan’s advice points to a useful pattern: AI is a good first draft and a good assistant, and a poor autopilot. These are a few places to be careful:
Customer-facing copy: Have a person read every product description and email before it goes out, especially if you’re producing them in volume.
Dynamic pricing: Keep a human watching any tool that changes prices automatically, so a mistake doesn’t turn into a very expensive afternoon.
Support chatbots: They can take pressure off your team during a surge but be upfront with customers that they’re talking to an automated assistant.
Another thing worth keeping in mind is that a growing number of shoppers use AI assistants to research and compare products before buying. Clear product titles, accurate descriptions, and well-structured product data can make your store easier for both people and these tools to understand.
Can customers get help when they need it?
Even a well-prepared store gets questions on Black Friday. The volume also tends to be higher than usual, so having a plan in place keeps inquiries from piling up.
Plan your support coverage: Decide who is answering messages and when, including over the weekend, and ensure they know about every active deal.
Make your return and refund policies easy to find: Link them from product pages and checkout, since holiday shoppers often check them before buying.
Publish answers to the obvious questions: A short FAQ covering shipping cutoffs, delivery times, and how discounts work can head off a lot of repetitive messages.
This way, your customers will hopefully be asking fewer questions, leaving your team time to focus on the ones that really need their attention.
What should you do after the sale ends?
Once Black Friday is over, the temptation to relax will become real. After all, the busiest time of the year is behind you, surely, you can take a breather. Almost, yes. Nathan’s advice is to hold off:
Relaxing too soon. Cyber Monday is still coming and the shopping traffic usually stays higher through the holidays.
Once Black Friday is over, there are still a few important steps to take to keep your store and sales running seamlessly for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Firstly, ensure the sale ends. A coupon without an end date will keep discounting long after you’ve moved on, and you don’t need us to tell you how costly that can get.
Then, keep an eye on failed and pending orders because problems don’t have a cut-off date like the sale does. Next, hold off on any ecommerce plugin updates. If you can avoid it, wait until January to update the plugins your site depends on (unless it’s for a crucial security fix). That way, you reduce the risk of any plugin conflicts or bugs stalling your website.
The last step is to run a postmortem. Once the rush is over, note down everything that broke or didn’t perform as well as you expected. The postmortem is particularly easy to skip, yet it’s the most valuable. This year’s surprises are next year’s preparations.
What about SEO after the event?
By the time the sale ends, your Black Friday pages will likely have built up some search value and reputation. It’s easy to waste that value without realizing it.
Don’t let your sales pages turn into 404 errors and instead redirect them to a relevant page or repurpose them for next year. Also, update or unpublish outdated deal content so that visitors and search engines don’t see information that’s no longer true.
Finally, watch for pages that overlap (duplicate content) and consider keeping an evergreen version live. A high-performing sale page, for example, can stay up year-round without active pricing, so it keeps ranking and is ready to bring back next November.
What all of this means is that a little bit of cleanup now will save you from starting your content from scratch next year.
One last thing
Nathan’s parting advice is simple and should ensure your preparations, shopping season, and after-season evaluations all go smoothly:
Make a checklist and use it. Repeatable processes are the foundation of profitable businesses.
Pick your freeze date, test everything on your phone, and work through the list while there’s still time to fix whatever fails. Getting your hosting sorted early gives you one less thing to worry about when traffic hits. Shared hosting and hosting for WooCommerce are good places to start.
FAQ
Should I load test my store before Black Friday?
Yes, especially if your store has active carts or you expect a noticeable jump in orders.
A load test simulates many shoppers at once, so you can see where your site slows down before real customers do.
Make sure it follows the full journey of adding to cart and checking out, not just loading the home page, and run it on a staging copy rather than your live store. Let your host know beforehand, since heavy test traffic can look like an attack, and finish before your code freeze so you have time to act on what you find.
What should I do if my store goes down during the sale?
Contact your host’s support right away and tell them what you’re seeing.
While they investigate, think about what changed recently, such as a plugin update, a new popup, or a coupon rule, because a recent change is a common culprit. If one stands out, rolling it back from your latest backup is usually faster than debugging on a live store.
A short banner on your site or a message on your social channels also keeps customers informed and cuts down on repeat support messages.
Should I start my sale early to spread out the traffic?
It can help.
Starting early, or giving your email subscribers early access, spreads orders across several days instead of packing them into a few hours, which takes pressure off both your server and your support team.
The trade-off is a longer period to protect. Your code freeze needs to start earlier and cover the whole sale, and every offer needs a clear end date.
