Black Friday Checklist for Online Stores
Most Black Friday checklists focus on discounts and campaigns. But advertising only works if it sends people to a store that is up, loads quickly and can take a payment. This article covers that other half: the technical preparation customers never notice until something stops working.
The stakes are high. In the Czech Republic, where we are based, shoppers spent around CZK 8.5 billion online during Black Friday week 2025, roughly 8% more than a year earlier, according to the Czech ecommerce association APEK. Czech e-commerce turnover for the whole of 2025 reached CZK 206 billion. An outage during the strongest week of the year costs more than at any other time.
This checklist is written for store owners and ecommerce managers, not developers. It tells you what to check, what to ask your development partner and what to have ready in case something does go down. A copy-ready checklist is at the end.
Black Friday 2026 is on 27 November: you have about three weeks to prepare
Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November and Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November. Many stores, however, start their offers a week earlier, so the rush begins before the Friday itself. Christmas follows straight after; last year Czech carriers saw their peak around 15 December.
That leaves about three weeks for technical preparation. It is enough if you split the work into clear deadlines and stick to one rule: nothing major changes on the store in the final week before the sale.
Timeline: what to finish and what to leave alone
| Deadline | What to do |
|---|---|
| By 13 Nov | Load test, security updates, test restore from backup |
| By 20 Nov | Test orders, GA4 check, sale prices set up, incident plan ready |
| From 20 Nov | Change freeze: only critical fixes are deployed |
| 27 to 30 Nov | Black Friday and Cyber Monday: monitoring, no experiments |
| December | Christmas delivery date on the website, ongoing checks of stock and payments |
A change freeze is a period when no new features or changes go live on the store, only fixes for critical bugs. Any change made just before the peak is a risk that cannot be tested properly. Agree with your development partner when the freeze starts and who may approve an exception.
Test peak traffic with a load test rather than guessing
Load testing: what to have measured
A load test simulates a large number of customers at once and shows how many the store can handle before it slows down or starts returning errors. A PageSpeed Insights score measures a single visit and says nothing about behaviour under load.
Ask your development partner for three things:
- a scenario that mirrors a real purchase: home page, category, product page, basket and checkout,
- a target load based on last year's peak in your analytics, with headroom above it,
- a clear result: at what load response times got worse and what the bottleneck was (database, server, stock system or carrier integration).
Agree the test with your hosting provider in advance and run it outside peak hours, otherwise the test itself can cause an outage. If the result is poor, there is still time to add server capacity, tune caching or set up a CDN, a network of servers that delivers images and files from locations closer to the customer.
Bots and AI crawlers take capacity away from customers
Not every visit to your store comes from a person. Search engines, price comparison sites and, increasingly, AI crawlers all send bots. In a normal week that is fine, but at peak times they use capacity your customers need. How to tell which bots are loading your site and how to limit them without losing search visibility is covered in our article on how AI bots impact website performance.
Running your store on a hosted platform such as Shopify or Shoptet? Then the platform provider looks after performance and servers. Checkout, payments, shipping, tracking and the incident plan are still yours.
Security and backups: patch before the freeze, test the restore
Updates and patches before the change freeze
Install security updates for your platform, modules and server by mid-November so there is time to check them. Critical flaws can appear at any time, including just before peak season, as the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities in PHP showed in October 2026. Agree who monitors security advisories and how quickly a critical patch will be applied, even during the freeze.
Backups with a tested restore
"We have backups" is not enough. A backup is only worth something if the store can be restored from it, and the only way to know is to try. Before the season, get confirmation of:
- where backups are stored (somewhere other than the same server),
- how often the order database is backed up and how many orders you could lose in the worst case,
- how long a restore takes, measured on a test environment rather than estimated.
Who has access to the admin
Review accounts in your store admin, hosting and payment gateway. Remove access for former employees and agencies and turn on two-factor authentication wherever possible. Our article on business access management walks through the process.
Payments and shipping: have a fallback ready
A backup payment method and payment confirmations
When a payment gateway goes down, customers who cannot pay usually go elsewhere. Have a second option ready that you can switch on within minutes: another gateway, bank transfer or cash on delivery.
Also check gateway notifications, the messages a payment gateway sends to confirm that a payment went through. If they fail, the order stays marked as unpaid even though the money has left the customer's account, and customer service has to sort it out by hand. Ask your gateway about any transaction limits as well.
Pickup points and Christmas delivery
Parcel lockers and pickup points are now standard. 72% of Czech online shoppers used a parcel locker at least once in December 2025. The pickup point selector in the basket usually loads from the carrier's service. Make sure that if it goes down, checkout still works and customers can choose another delivery option.
Show the last date for Christmas delivery next to the shipping options and in the basket, and update it once it has passed. For Christmas 2025, Czech carriers advised posting parcels by 19 December. Check the 2026 dates with your own carrier; they usually publish them in November.
Stock and sale prices: syncing and the rules for discounts
If your store takes stock levels from an ERP or other business system, find out how often the data syncs and what happens when a sync fails. Stock sells out quickly at peak times, and the store may then sell items that are no longer available.
Set up and test sale prices in advance, including automatic start and end times. A common source of errors is the cache, a temporarily stored version of pages that can keep showing the old price for a while after a change. Keep the discount rules in mind too: under EU rules (the Omnibus Directive), a price reduction announcement must also state the lowest price at which the product was offered in the 30 days before the discount, with specific rules for cases such as progressively increasing discounts or products sold for a shorter period. Make sure your system keeps a price history before the sale starts.
Basket, checkout and mobile: go through a purchase as a customer
Before the freeze, place test orders with every combination of shipping and payment, with and without a discount code, on desktop and on mobile. Check that confirmation emails arrive and that the order flows correctly into your stock and accounting systems.
On mobile, focus on forms: address autocomplete, a numeric keypad for phone numbers and postcodes, and buttons that are easy to tap. Every extra step increases basket abandonment, purchases a customer starts but does not finish. If you are not sure where customers drop out of checkout, a UX audit will show you.
Check GA4 tracking before the sale, not after it
If tracking fails over Black Friday, you will not know which campaigns made money and which only cost it. The data cannot be filled in afterwards. Before the sale, check in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
- that a test order records a purchase event with the correct value, currency and order number,
- that consent mode, which passes the visitor's cookie consent to Google, works and tracking actually starts after consent,
- that the number of purchases in GA4 over a few days roughly matches the orders in your admin.
Note sale dates and major changes in GA4 so you can compare them next year.
Incident plan: what to do if your store goes down
An incident plan is a one-page document that says who does what when the store stops working. Under stress, nobody has to improvise; they follow the plan. Keep it somewhere other than the store and its server; a printed copy works well.
| Role | Usually | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | owner or ecommerce manager | decides on pausing campaigns and on communication |
| Fix | developer or development partner | finds the cause and restores service under the SLA |
| Hosting | server provider | handles server and network outages |
| Communication | customer service, marketing | updates customers on social media and by email |
| Payments and shipping | gateway and carrier contacts | handle outages of their services |
Each role needs a name, a phone number and a deputy. Check your development partner's response time: how quickly they start working on a problem, including at weekends. What a good support agreement should cover is explained in our article on application support SLAs.
Prepare a maintenance page that appears instead of an error message and tells customers when to try again. After the sale, go through what happened and write down what to do differently next time.
What if your development partner does not respond
If your partner is slow to respond, or nobody has looked after the store since the original developer left, deal with it now, not on Friday morning. Our article on application handover when switching vendors explains how to move an application to a new team safely.
Store down and your developer not answering the phone? Use our urgent programmer help.
Copy-ready checklist
Deadlines
- ✓Change freeze applies from 20 November 2026 at the latest.
- ✓One named person approves exceptions to the freeze.
- ✓Christmas delivery cut-off for 2026 confirmed with the carrier.
Speed and performance
- ✓Load test run on a real purchase scenario.
- ✓Target load based on last year's peak, with headroom.
- ✓Bottlenecks found in the load test fixed.
- ✓Bot traffic reviewed and unnecessary load limited.
Security and backups
- ✓Security updates installed by 13 November.
- ✓Agreed who applies a critical patch during the freeze.
- ✓Backups stored away from the store's server.
- ✓Restore from backup tested and timed.
- ✓Old accounts removed, two-factor authentication on.
Payments and shipping
- ✓Backup payment method can be switched on within minutes.
- ✓Payment gateway notifications work.
- ✓Another delivery option is available if pickup points fail.
- ✓Christmas delivery date shown with shipping options and in the basket.
Stock and pricing
- ✓Stock sync with the ERP works and alerts on failure.
- ✓Sale prices start and end automatically, confirmed by a test.
- ✓Discounts show the lowest price of the 30 days before the reduction.
Basket, checkout and mobile
- ✓Test order completed for every shipping and payment combination.
- ✓Confirmation emails arrive.
- ✓Checkout tested on mobile.
Tracking
- ✓GA4 purchase event has the correct value, currency and order number.
- ✓Consent mode works.
- ✓GA4 purchases match orders in the admin.
Incident plan
- ✓Every role has a name, a phone number and a deputy.
- ✓Development partner's response time also covers weekends.
- ✓Maintenance page ready.
Not sure how much of this checklist your store already covers? Send us your store's address and tell us what it runs on and who maintains it today. We will reply within one working day and agree what we can check before Black Friday. Get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
When is Black Friday 2026?
Black Friday 2026 is on Friday 27 November 2026, and Cyber Monday is on Monday 30 November 2026. Many stores start their offers a full week earlier. Aim to have the technical preparation finished at least a week before Black Friday.
How do I prepare an online store for Black Friday technically?
Run a load test based on a real purchase scenario, install security updates and test a restore from backup. Then place test orders for every shipping and payment combination, check GA4 tracking and write an incident plan. Avoid major changes in the final week before the sale.
What should I do if my store goes down during Black Friday?
Follow your incident plan. Contact your development partner under the agreed response time, show a maintenance page and update customers on social media. Pause paid campaigns so you are not paying for visits to a broken site, and once the store is back, check orders and payments from the time of the outage.
When should I stop deploying changes before Black Friday?
We recommend finishing major changes a week to ten days before the sale, which for Black Friday 2026 means around 20 November. After that, deploy only fixes for critical bugs. This is a recommendation from practice, not a fixed rule.
When do parcels need to be sent to arrive before Christmas?
For Christmas 2025, Czech carriers advised posting parcels by 19 December, with the busiest period around 15 December. Check the 2026 dates directly with your carrier; they usually publish them in November. Then show the final date next to the shipping options on your website.
How can I check that GA4 tracks purchases correctly before a sale?
Place a test order and confirm that GA4 records a purchase event with the correct value, currency and order number. Check that consent mode works after a visitor accepts cookies. Finally, compare the number of purchases in GA4 over a few days with the orders in your admin.
1. Web IT, with offices in Prague and Brno, builds and maintains online stores and web applications, including on PrestaShop. For Botanicus, we moved the online store from WooCommerce to PrestaShop to improve speed, security and stability, as described in the Botanicus case study. Want to be sure your store can handle the rush? As part of our application support, we will go through load, backups and your incident plan with you. Get in touch and we will reply within one working day.
