Marketing · 1 August 2026 · 9 min read
How to get your store ready for Black Friday, starting in summer
What to check three months out, what to check in the final week, and what to do on the day itself. Infrastructure, speed, campaigns and stock.
Black Friday isn't lost in November. It's lost in August, when nobody is looking at infrastructure, and in October, when it turns out the server can't carry the traffic but it's too late to change anything major.
What follows is the order we work in, split by how much time you have left.
Three months out: infrastructure
The only window in which you can still make structural changes. After September, any major intervention becomes a risk rather than an improvement.
- Load-test it, don't eyeball it. Simulate ten times your normal traffic and see what gives way first: the database, PHP-FPM or the cache.
- Check that Varnish is actually serving from cache. Installed doesn't mean working — one wrong rule can send every request through to origin.
- Clear out unused extensions. Every extension is code running on every request. You'll find them with a code audit.
- Pay down the performance debt now. If the store needs a Hyvä migration, August is the last month it still fits.
One month out: speed and conversion
Black Friday traffic is mostly mobile and mostly cold — people who don't know you and who leave at the first wasted second.
- Measure Core Web Vitals on field data, not lab data. See what happens on real phones, on real connections.
- Optimise the category pages, not just the homepage. Campaign traffic lands on categories and products.
- Check the mobile checkout, step by step, on an actual phone. Not in an emulator.
- Prepare the campaign pages early, so they have time to get indexed.
If you don't know where you stand, the free audit gives you the current state within 48 hours. There's more on what full optimisation involves on the performance and CRO page.
Two weeks out: campaigns
Cost per click rises significantly in this period. Going in unprepared means paying a premium in exactly the week when volume peaks.
- A clean product feed, with correct stock and prices. A feed with errors pulls your products out of Google Shopping exactly when you need them there.
- Remarketing audiences populated in advance — you need accumulated volume beforehand, not on the day.
- Budgets set with headroom. A campaign that runs out of budget at 11am is a lost day.
- Creatives approved early — Meta and Google review takes longer in busy periods.
The campaign structure we use and how we report are described on the PPC campaigns page. You can also see projects where we ran campaigns.
The final week: operations
| What to check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Stock synced with the ERP | You sell what you don't have, then cancel orders. The reputational cost outweighs the sale. |
| The courier integration | A tracking number that won't generate blocks every shipment, not just one. |
| Transactional emails | An order confirmation that doesn't go out produces a wave of support tickets. |
| Price rules and vouchers | Test every voucher on a real cart. One wrong rule can hand out a 100% discount. |
| A verified backup | Not a backup that exists — a backup you have actually restored from, at least once. |
| Someone on call | Somebody who can intervene technically, with their phone on. Agreed in advance, not on the day. |
On the day
- Watch server response time, not visitor count. High traffic isn't the problem; latency is.
- Keep conversion rate per hour open. A sudden drop means something broke, not that shoppers changed their minds.
- Periodically check the checkout, as an ordinary customer would. Automated monitoring doesn't catch everything.
- Don't fix anything on production unless it's critical. Write it down and deal with it on Monday.
The best Black Friday is the one that's technically boring.
Afterwards
The following week is the best learning window of the whole year: you finally have enough volume for the data to mean something. Look at where orders were lost in the funnel, which pages had the worst speed under load, and which campaigns produced a good cost per acquisition.
If you want the technical side watched continuously rather than only in November, the maintenance retainer includes uptime and Core Web Vitals monitoring. If you want an assessment before the season, request an estimate.