Black Friday Technical Preparation: a Checklist for the Campaign Season

Black Friday and the Christmas season bring an outsized share of the year's revenue for most webshops — while technically, this is also the most dangerous period of the year. Traffic does not grow evenly but arrives in bursts, and this is when everything hidden during the rest of the year comes to light: the undersized hosting, the slow database query, the fragile integration. This article is a practical checklist to help your webshop face the peak season technically prepared.

Why is campaign traffic different?

1. Burst load: in the minutes after a newsletter goes out or a sale starts, many times the usual traffic can arrive at once.
2. Impatient customers: during sales, visitors know there are deals elsewhere too — they leave a slow or glitchy site immediately.
3. Every fault is magnified: what affects one customer per hour at normal traffic affects dozens per hour at peak.
4. Attackers are seasonal too: the campaign period is also the high season of denial-of-service attacks and fraud attempts — more on this in our cybersecurity article.

1. Capacity and speed: will the system hold?

1. Load testing: find out under controlled conditions, before the campaign, at how many concurrent visitors the system starts slowing down or failing — not in production.
2. Hosting review: if the webshop runs on shared hosting, campaign season is the worst moment to hit its limits. Upgrade to a stronger package or dedicated resources in time — even just for the season.
3. Caching everywhere: page cache, database query caching, static assets (images, CSS, JS) served from a CDN. Caching is the cheapest "capacity upgrade".
4. Images and page weight: campaign landing pages tend to be packed with images — these are exactly the pages that need to be the fastest. We covered the business impact of speed in our article on loading speed.

2. Operational checklist: every process, live

1. A full trial purchase with every payment method and shipping option — from mobile too.
2. Checking campaign prices and coupons: with wrong pricing, a campaign can generate serious losses within minutes; price changes should be verified item by item before launch.
3. Stock synchronisation: warehouse stock and the webshop's stock data must run in sync — overselling (selling non-existent stock) is the post-campaign customer service nightmare.
4. Integration tests: payment provider, invoicing, couriers, newsletter system — all must work under increased load as well.
5. Tracking code check: the campaign cannot be evaluated if conversion measurement is broken. Test before launch that every event is measured exactly once.
6. Error pages and messages: if a hiccup does happen, the customer should see an understandable message, not a raw error code.

3. Standby: who is watching, and who intervenes?

1. Monitoring and alerting: you should learn about downtime and slowdowns from automated alerts, not from customer complaints. A sudden drop in the order count also deserves an alert — it often signals a hidden fault.
2. An on-call schedule: it must be stated explicitly who is available during the campaign, on which channel and with what response time. "Someone will look at it" is not a commitment during campaign season.
3. Campaign-period SLA: with an operations contract, it is worth requesting elevated standby for the critical weeks — in our operations packages this is a separately selectable element, and our price calculator accounts for it.
4. Incident plan: when trouble hits, the answers must be ready in minutes: what to switch off, how to communicate with customers, when to reach for the rollback plan.

4. What NOT to do during the campaign

1. Deployment freeze: in campaign week there are no new features, no plugin updates, no "quick little changes" on the live system — except critical security fixes.
2. Large data operations: launching bulk product imports or repricing at peak time is unnecessary risk — schedule them into early-morning, low-traffic windows.
3. Untested campaign mechanics: coupon logic tried for the first time in production is the most common campaign-day failure.

5. After the campaign: evaluation

After the season closes, record the lessons while they are fresh: where the system slowed down, what errors surfaced, how big the actual peak load was. This is the most valuable input for preparing the next campaign — and a good starting point for a comprehensive webshop audit as well.

Summary

A campaign-season outage is not bad luck — it is almost always foreseeable and preventable technical debt. For those who measure, test and organise standby in time, Black Friday is about what it should be about: record revenue.

If you would like your webshop to enter the season with expert supervision, committed availability and campaign-period standby, fill in our operations takeover form — and for acute problems, there is our SOS webshop help.