Black Friday Website Checklist: Speed, Checkout and Uptime

Black Friday falls on 27 November 2026 and Cyber Monday on 30 November. Those four days bring more visitors to most online stores than any other week of the year, and they also expose every slow page, broken link and fragile checkout step at the worst possible moment. This Black Friday website checklist walks through what to check, in the order that matters, with enough lead time to fix what you find.

When	What to do
3 to 4 weeks before	Full audit: speed, SEO, accessibility, security. Fix the slowest templates first.
2 weeks before	Build and publish sale landing pages so search engines can crawl them.
1 week before	Test checkout end to end on mobile and desktop. Check links, SSL and redirects.
3 to 5 days before	Code freeze. Only fix bugs. Turn on daily monitoring.
Black Friday to Cyber Monday	Watch errors and scores daily. Keep a rollback plan ready.

1. Start your Black Friday website checklist with speed

Speed is the first item on any Black Friday website checklist because it affects every visitor on every page. Shoppers comparing deals open many tabs and close the slow ones. Most holiday traffic is on phones, often over mobile networks, so the mobile score is the one to watch.

• Test your real templates, not just the homepage. Run the homepage, a category page, a product page, the cart and a sale landing page through a website speed test. Product and category templates usually carry the heaviest images and scripts.
• Check Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is usually the hero or product image. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) often comes from promo banners that push content down after load. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) suffers when heavy scripts run on tap. The Core Web Vitals guide explains each metric and its thresholds.
• Compress and resize product images. Serve modern formats and the right size for each screen. See how to serve next-gen image formats and how to fix LCP.
• Audit third-party scripts. Countdown timers, popups, chat widgets, review widgets and extra tracking pixels pile up before a sale. Each one costs load time. Remove what you will not use, and defer the rest. The guide to third-party scripts and performance shows how to measure what each one costs.

A free website audit scores performance on desktop and mobile and writes the fix for the platform it detects, such as Shopify or WooCommerce.

2. Test the checkout like a customer would

A fast store that fails at checkout loses the sale anyway. Walk through the full purchase path on a phone and on a desktop browser: search, product page, add to cart, apply a discount code, enter shipping details, pay, and receive the confirmation email.

• Discount codes: test every code you plan to share, including expiry times and minimum order rules.
• Forms: address fields, validation messages, autofill and the payment step. The web form testing checklist covers what usually breaks.
• JavaScript errors: a single uncaught error in the cart script can stop the checkout button from working. A browser test loads your pages in a real Chromium browser on desktop and at a 375px mobile width, and records console errors, failed requests, broken images and form problems. The guide to debugging JavaScript console errors helps you trace what it finds.
• Payment provider: check your payment provider's status page and limits, and make sure fraud rules will not block a surge of legitimate orders.

3. Fix broken links and redirects

Old sale pages, expired collections and renamed products leave broken links behind. Every one of them is a dead end for a shopper who arrived ready to buy.

• Run the broken link checker on the homepage, navigation and sale pages. It loads the page in a real browser, so links added by JavaScript are found too.
• If you reuse a URL like /black-friday each year, keep it. A page that has existed for years has more authority than a new one.
• Redirect last year's expired deal pages to the current sale page in one hop. Check them with the redirect checker, and read why redirect chains hurt.

4. Check SSL, security headers and cookies

Shoppers will not enter card details on a page that shows a certificate warning. An expired certificate during the busiest week of the year is a very expensive mistake, and it happens more often than you would expect.

• Check the certificate expiry date with the SSL checker. If it expires in December, renew it now, not during the sale.
• Look for mixed content on new landing pages, where an image or script still loads over HTTP. The mixed content checker finds these.
• Run a security scan to grade security headers, cookie flags and TLS settings. Sale periods attract card-testing bots and phishing pages that copy your store, so this is a good time to close the easy gaps.

5. Get sale pages ready for search and social

Search engines need time to find and index new pages. A sale page published on the morning of Black Friday will not rank that day. Publish it two weeks early, even with a "coming soon" message, and update the content when the deals go live.

• Titles and descriptions: include the words people search for, such as your brand plus "Black Friday". Preview how they will look with the SERP snippet preview.
• Product structured data: make sure price and availability in your Product markup match the sale price on the page. Validate it with the schema checker.
• Social previews: sale links get shared in chats and social posts. Check the image and text with the Open Graph checker.
• Internal links: link the sale page from the homepage and main navigation so crawlers and shoppers both find it.

6. Make the site accessible to every shopper

Accessibility problems turn real customers away. Low contrast promo text, buttons without labels and popups that trap the keyboard all block people from buying. Check the sale banner, the cart and the checkout with an accessibility audit, and read the accessibility testing guide for what automated tests can and cannot find.

7. Freeze changes and monitor through Cyber Monday

The last part of a Black Friday website checklist is about not breaking what you just fixed. Agree a code freeze three to five days before the sale. After that, only urgent fixes go live, each with a way to roll it back.

• Monitor scores and errors. Scanverra's scheduled scans re-run audits automatically and send an email when a score drops. The free plan re-checks a site every week, and Pro adds daily scans for every tool, which is the right setting for sale week.
• Monitor uptime separately. Scheduled audits catch slow pages and new errors, but they are not a minute-by-minute uptime monitor. Use a dedicated uptime service for alerts within minutes, and read the website monitoring guide for how the two fit together.
• Know who is on call. Write down who can roll back a deploy, who talks to the hosting provider and who updates customers if something goes wrong.

What this checklist does not cover: load testing

Scanverra tests how fast and how correct your pages are for one visitor at a time. It does not simulate thousands of shoppers at once, so it cannot tell you whether your server will hold up under peak traffic. If you host your own store, run a separate load test against a staging copy, or ask your hosting provider what limits apply during traffic spikes. Hosted platforms such as Shopify handle scaling for you, but your apps and third-party scripts still need checking.

The Black Friday website checklist at a glance

1. Speed test every key template on mobile and fix the slowest first.
2. Remove or defer third-party scripts you added for past sales.
3. Walk through checkout on a phone, with every discount code.
4. Check for broken links and redirect expired deal pages.
5. Confirm SSL expiry, mixed content and security headers.
6. Publish sale pages early with correct titles, structured data and previews.
7. Check banners, cart and checkout for accessibility.
8. Freeze code, schedule daily scans and set up uptime alerts.

Work through this Black Friday website checklist three to four weeks before the sale and you will have time to fix what it finds. For a broader pre-launch list you can reuse all year, see the website launch checklist.