Can Your Website Handle Black Friday?

With Black Friday quickly approaching, eCommerce retailers are brainstorming how to make this year their most successful yet.

Since Black Friday is the most popular day for online shopping and the UK is expected to spend £3.9 billion this year, there is no room for error.

As jaw-dropping as your upcoming Black Friday deals may be, if your website is not prepared for the increase in traffic, it can cause havoc on the day. Since eCommerce stores see a surge of up to 65% in website traffic on Black Friday in comparison to any other Friday, you need to ensure that your site is optimised and able to handle what is to come.

8 Website Performance Checks You Should Be Carrying Out

To ensure you can maximise your Black Friday potential and avoid potential disaster, making sure your website is prepared for the spike in traffic is essential. Let’s discuss eight of the checks that you should be carrying out in advance to prevent disasters on the day…

Optimise the checkout process

When customers are ready to make their purchase, a quick and easy checkout process is essential. If they are faced with added costs, limited payment options, or an overly long process, it can leave them clicking straight off your website and looking elsewhere. In fact, around 70% of shoppers abandon their carts – an alarming statistic that shows just how much weight the checkout process carries.

One of the biggest deterrents for shoppers is having to create an account in order to make a purchase. There should be a guest checkout option which consists of a quick and easy form containing only essential information. The fewer steps that are required, the less likelihood of a customer getting frustrated and abandoning their cart at the last minute.

To ensure your website is ready for Black Friday shoppers, consider how easy the checkout would be from the eyes of a shopper and assess whether it needs to be optimised to streamline the process.

Switch to scalable web hosting

Since your website is likely to see a spike in traffic when Black Friday comes around, you need to be sure that your web hosting is able to manage the surge. If not, it can result in your site crashing and cause you to lose a huge number of potential customers.

Black Friday website crashes are a common issue faced by smaller eCommerce businesses that use cheaper web hosting deals. Many of these businesses are in desperate need of relaunching their site and switching their hosting provider since their package doesn’t offer the bandwidth necessary to grow alongside the website.

If this is the case for your website, make sure you maximise the potential of your launch by using a domain name generator to secure a strong web address and find a hosting plan that offers scalable solutions. This means that your domain will be memorable for consumers, and if there is a sudden influx of site visitors, your provider will automatically adjust resources to meet the increase in demand.

Check page load speeds

If a customer is browsing a website and is facing lag every time they enter a new page, it can quickly make them leave. As page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 32%.

To ensure your website is well-equipped to deal with the rise in customers, you should be carrying out tests to identify any pages that need optimising. To do this, tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights can be used to run a free analysis, scoring different elements of the page and providing recommendations on how to improve the scores.

By testing all key pages of your website before the big day comes around, you have the opportunity to make improvements that will help your site prepare for the added pressure.

Make sure that discount codes work

Black Friday is all about offering some of your best deals yet, so make sure you give your customers something to talk about!

Whether you’re offering exclusive discounts for your email subscribers, running flash sales throughout the day, or advertising one-time offers in particular product categories, it is important to ensure that your discount codes have been set up correctly.

In the lead-up to Black Friday, give yourself plenty of time to schedule the different codes and double-check that they are set to activate at particular times. You should test these at the checkout to ensure they are accepted and produce the right discounts.

Implement website caching

Website caching stores data that is frequently accessed, such as images and stylesheets, to reduce the amount of time it takes for the page to load next time the user visits your site.

This is worth implementing before Black Friday to help reduce the pressure on the server when faced with a sudden increase in site traffic. It means that any users who have visited your site in the past will already have the website’s resources saved on their device, causing the pages to load much faster than they would otherwise.

As well as helping your server manage Black Friday traffic, implementing website caching offers benefits from the user perspective. When customers arrive at your site and are instantly presented with unmissable deals and smooth navigation, it’ll improve their overall user experience.

Ensure images are optimised

Images are crucial when it comes to eCommerce websites. High-quality photography and enticing lifestyle imagery can be the deciding factor when a shopper is considering whether or not to make a purchase.

Even if you have great photos at the ready, if they are not optimised, this can cause havoc when it comes to your page load times. If the large files are causing the page to load more slowly, it can cause you to lose the attention of shoppers before they’ve even had a chance to see your products. Using tools such as TinyPNG and ShortPixel will help you reduce the file size of images without sacrificing their quality.

You can also implement lazy loading in the backend of your site – this reduces load time as it means images are only loaded once the user scrolls down the page.

Carry out load testing

When you are expecting a surge in website traffic, load testing can be carried out to see how your website is likely to respond. It simulates high traffic volumes so you can browse your own website as a customer would during peak seasons and identify any performance issues.

Tools like Apache JMeter and Loadster are examples of tools which offer free load testing. They allow you to test out key actions such as searching for an item, adding it to your basket, and going through the checkout process so you can make sure that they can be carried out as expected.

Carrying out load testing before Black Friday means you can spot any potential bottlenecks before it’s too late.

Put a contingency plan in place

Black Friday is a huge opportunity for eCommerce retailers, but the lead-up can feel like a stressful time. Since you never know what to expect, it can be hard to predict the issues that may arise on your site.

To be as prepared as possible, having a contingency plan on hand will help your team quickly act on any issues that arise. Whether this be a broken discount code, a problem with the checkout process, or a website crash, pre-preparing a course of action will help reduce stress levels in the moment.

While your team manages these issues, it’s important to maintain customer communication. Providing real-time responses through live chats, social media, or phone calls will minimise frustrations and prevent lost customers.

Preparing for Your Best Black Friday Yet

As an eCommerce store, Black Friday is one of the biggest calendar dates of the year. With more shoppers scouring the web for bargains than on any other day, it is your time to shine!

To ensure your Black Friday focus can be on providing customers with unmissable discounts and fulfilling an influx of orders, you need to make sure your website is ready to take on the challenge.

Carrying out these eight website checks in advance will ensure you’ve got plenty of time to optimise your product pages and get any bottlenecks sorted so your customers can enjoy a seamless online shopping experience.

About the author

Ricardo Meneses Flores is a data journalist at Hostinger, specialising in visualization and geospatial analysis. Hostinger empowers businesses with fast web hosting, an AI-powered Website Builder, and an intuitive control panel. With 24/7 support and cutting-edge technology, it ensures seamless website management for users of all skill levels.