The Week Before Black Friday: A Website Stress Test
Seven Days Out
Black Friday is next Friday. Whatever your website is now is very nearly what it will be on the day, because from here the correct posture is verification rather than improvement.
This is a checklist for the final week. It assumes you have done the preparation covered in our Black Friday countdown — if you have not, do the technical items below and skip the rest, because a broken checkout costs more than a missing campaign.
The Golden Rule
Do not deploy anything.
Not a plugin update. Not a theme tweak. Not a "quick fix" to the header. Not a new tracking pixel because the agency asked. Not a WordPress core update, however urgent the notification looks.
In our experience of peak season incidents, the overwhelming majority are caused by a change someone made in the preceding fortnight, not by traffic. The site that survives Black Friday is almost always the one nobody touched.
The only exceptions: a genuine security patch for an actively exploited vulnerability, and fixing something that is already broken. Both should be deployed early in the week, tested, and then followed by silence.
Monday: Verify the Order Path
Place a real order. Real card, real address, all the way through.
- Add to basket from a product page
- Basket shows correct prices, quantities and delivery cost
- Discount code field works, and the code you plan to use actually applies
- Guest checkout available and functional
- Postcode lookup works with a BT address
- Express payment options appear and work — Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal
- Payment completes
- Confirmation email arrives, and is not in spam
- Order appears in your admin correctly
- Dispatch email works
- Refund processes, and the refund email arrives
Then do it again on a phone. Then do it once with a deliberately invalid card to see what a failure looks like — specifically, whether the basket survives it.
Every year we find a business whose confirmation emails have been silently failing for weeks.
Tuesday: Performance and Capacity
- Run PageSpeed Insights on homepage, a category page, a product page and your Black Friday page
- Check field data in Search Console, not just lab scores. Our speed benchmarks set the targets
- Confirm caching is active, and confirm your campaign page is actually being cached
- Check your hosting plan's concurrency limit, and know how to upgrade
- Confirm you have the hosting login, and that it is not only on someone's laptop who is off next week
- Audit third-party scripts. Remove anything you cannot justify
- Turn off non-essential scheduled tasks for peak hours — imports, bulk emails, large backups
If you have not load tested, our load testing guide covers a quick version. There is still time to run one this week.
Wednesday: Content, Stock and Pricing
- Black Friday page content final, proofread twice by two people
- Every product on it is in stock and correctly priced
- Discount rules tested against edge cases — sale items, bundles, gift cards, minimum spends
- Delivery cut-off dates published on product pages, basket, checkout and homepage
- Returns policy updated for the festive extension and visible at checkout
- Terms and exclusions clearly stated on the offer page
- Stock levels accurate, and low-stock behaviour decided — what does the page say when something sells out?
Our Black Friday landing page guide covers page structure, and our checkout optimisation guide covers friction.
Thursday: Monitoring and Communications
Set up monitoring you will actually notice
- Uptime monitoring, checking every minute, alerting to a phone — not an email nobody reads at 10pm
- Know your payment provider's status page URL
- Have your host's emergency contact route to hand
- Someone nominated to watch the site on the day, with the authority to act
Prepare the communications
- Emails scheduled and previewed on a phone, in dark mode
- Ad creative approved and scheduled — approval queues get slow this week
- Social posts drafted
- Support macros written for the ten questions you know are coming
- A holding page or status message ready, in case you need it
Brief the people
- Who publishes the offer, and at exactly what time
- Who is on support, and for what hours
- Who to ring if the site goes down
- What the decision is if you sell out of a headline product
- What nobody is permitted to change
Friday: The Dress Rehearsal
A week out, this weekend is your best available rehearsal. It is genuinely busy — the Christmas Market period is in full swing, early Black Friday offers are running — without being the main event.
- Watch response times over the weekend
- Watch checkout completion rate against a normal weekend
- Note any errors in your logs
- Confirm alerts actually fired if anything wobbled
If something struggles this weekend, it will fail next Friday. You have five days to fix it.
The Weekend: Rest, and Freeze
Nothing changes from Friday evening. If you find something imperfect on Sunday that is not actually broken, write it down for January.
On the Day: What to Watch
Four numbers, in priority order:
- Checkout completion rate. The one that matters. If it falls, something is wrong even if the site looks fine
- Page response time. Rising response times are the early warning before errors appear
- Error rate. Any 5xx errors need immediate attention
- Payment gateway status. Check the provider's status page before assuming the problem is yours
And what not to watch: the revenue figure, refreshed every ninety seconds. It tells you nothing you can act on and it makes people do foolish things.
If Something Breaks
- Establish what is actually broken. Is the site down, slow, or is checkout failing? These have different causes and different fixes
- Check whether it is you. Payment provider status page, hosting status page, third-party script status. A surprising proportion of Black Friday incidents are somebody else's
- Roll back rather than fix forward. If something you changed caused it, revert. Do not debug live under load
- Communicate. A holding message saying "we're busier than expected, back in a few minutes" is far better than a raw error page or silence
- Do not panic-discount. Adding a bigger offer to compensate for an outage compounds the problem
Our Black Friday live monitoring checklist covers the day itself in more detail.
After the Weekend
Write down what happened while it is fresh: what broke, what was slow, what customers asked, what sold out, what the support inbox filled up with.
That list is your January work programme, and it is far more valuable than anything you could guess at in the abstract.
Our November marketing calendar covers the rest of the month, and our Cyber Monday guide covers the Monday that follows.
If you would like your site checked over before the weekend, get in touch with Amigo Studios. We build and support e-commerce sites across Northern Ireland.
Senior Developer