Is your eCommerce site ready for Black Friday?
Web Hosting Blog
Black Friday marks the start of the busiest online shopping period of the year. Originating in American as the day after Thanksgiving, the sale has become increasingly popular in the UK over the past five years. And it’s not just Black Friday Cyber Monday has quickly become the largest online-only sale of the year.
Google found that users are 32% more likely to abandon their cart if it takes three seconds or more to load. So your eCommerce site must provide them with a seamless shopping experience.
Get your sales items ready in time.
As Black Friday approaches, you need to start getting your site ready for sales.
Create a Black Friday shopping category in the back end of your website, with all the items you want to discount ahead of time. Which will make the process run smoother.
You may also want to set up your site to maximise sales by offering upselling and cross-selling deals and displaying related products.
Work on your SEO
People will click straight on the sites which rank well. To help build your ranking, it’s a good idea to create landing pages for Black Friday optimised with relevant keywords and quality content.
The landing pages that link to them need to be live on your site well before Black Friday so they can be indexed by Google, although you don’t publish the sale page until the day. You can add the links to the products when the sale goes live. In the meantime, use the Black Friday landing page as a teaser, perhaps even include a lead capture form so you can email reminders to interested shoppers on the day itself.
Not all your efforts should go into gaining traffic from search engine results. You can also use PPC to promote your sale, but be aware that the cost increases.
Don’t forget to promote your Black Friday sale on social media. The earlier you can start doing this, the better – and remember to link to your landing pages.
Can your website handle the traffic?
According to the 2021 Ecommerce Stats Report, November is one of the busiest retail months for eCommerce sites. That means that the bandwidth and technology that you usually rely on might not be enough to handle the increased traffic. You can do a few tests to see if you need to upgrade:
- Run site simulations
Running your site through load testing simulations will help you predict how your site will respond to the increased demand. Helping you to iron out any performance issues.
- Optimise website performance
There are lots of steps you can take to optimise your website performance. Here are a few:
- Reduce your HTTP requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Optimise your images
- Leverage preloading techniques like prerendering, TCP Preconnect
- Minimise and combine your CSS, HTML and JavaScript Files.
- Select the right hosting plan.
- Check your bandwidth
Your IT team or hosting provider can advise you on scaling up your bandwidth if a spike in traffic hits your site.
Is your site secure?
Black Friday is a popular target for hackers and cyber attackers. Malware and ransomware attacks spike by roughly 63% on Black Friday so, it’s vital that your website is safe and secure.
- DDoS Protection
eCommerce sites are often targets for DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. DDoS attacks cause your website to crash, which is not ideal for the busiest shopping day of the year. To prevent this, it is advisable to make sure you have DDoS protection for your domain. Speak to your hosting provider to discuss what upstream protection is already in place, and to discuss if any further protection is required.
- Antivirus and Anti-malware
Viruses and ransomware are prevalent and, without the proper protection, your crucial data is at risk. Bitdefender advanced threat control suite extracts known patterns of viruses and intelligently looks for similar patterns.
- Check you SSL certificate
An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection.
It also increases your customers trust in your site. Their trust in a website increases when there is a green lock symbol in the address bar.
If you are unsure if you have a valid SSL, use our SSL Checker.
Audit your site:
A thorough security audit is the best way to ensure your site is safe from attacks this Black Friday.
If you need any help making sure your site is ready for Black Friday, get in touch with our team and, we will be happy to help.