Already started preparing your website for Black Friday? If not, then it’s about time that you do. With less than 2 weeks left till Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), now is the perfect time to analyze, put together, and get your website ready to thrive during the biggest sales season of the year. To help you prepare your business website, we have researched and created a complete checklist of ways to prepare for Black Friday!
20 Tips To Prepare A Black Friday Checklist For Your Website In 2024
Wondering how to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024? There are plenty that you can do to optimize conversion and boost sales on your website for Black Friday. However, there are 12 tasks or ways to prepare for BFCM that you must not overlook. And this ultimate Black Friday checklist holds them all. Using this, you will be able to strategize and keep track of everything that needs to be done on your eCommerce website to get it ready for Black Friday before the rush kicks in.
1. Evaluate The Target Market Beforehand & Set Goals
Before starting your preparation for the big Black Friday sales weekend and the mega Cyber Monday that follows, it’s important to plan what you want to see on your website and how much sales during Black Friday you want to target. For that, we recommend you start by evaluating successful Black Friday marketing strategies and campaigns by your company and other brands in the industry from previous years. Figure out what items and promotions were your biggest winners.
In addition, in the weeks leading up to Black Friday 2024, research how the growing and major brands are updating their websites or deal pages for the Black Friday sales season. If possible, take a look at how they are hyping their customers up for the upcoming sales on their websites, social media channels, and email lists.
Only after a complete analysis of such Black Friday marketing campaigns and sales data, can you ensure that your Black Friday sales strategy for your business includes all the crucial factors needed to convert visitors into paying customers on your eCommerce website. And so, the first in our checklist of ways to prepare your website for Black Friday would be to do a complete competitor analysis.
2. Craft Compelling Black Friday Discounts And Offers
With your competitor analysis prepared, the next step in your checklist for preparing your website is to plan your Black Friday deals, offers and coupons. The BFCM best practice would be to offer multi-tiered discounts and deals on various pricing plans to cater to a wider range of audience. Offering bigger Black Friday discounts on larger packages can highly encourage potential customers to make a direct purchase while also pushing existing customers to upgrade their deals, leading you to larger revenues.
Another common practice for eCommerce businesses is to offer bundled offers with comparatively much bigger discounts. Bundling complementary products – for example, offering 10 WordPress PRO products in a bundle at a significantly lower price than what the combined prices of purchasing each individually would be – can easily grab attention, increase customer satisfaction, and boost sales massively.
This is also the phase where you need to decide whether you want to offer early access to Black Friday sales to existing loyal customers. Such a BFCM offer would likely boost brand loyalty and increase sales even before the Black Friday Cyber Monday season starts!
And with your analysis and pricing plans set in stone, it’s time to dive further into the checklist to prepare your website for Black Friday shopping.
3. Prepare Coupon Codes & Connect With Call-To-Action
Coupon deals are one of the most popular types of deals among eCommerce customers, and they are a proven way to prepare for and increase sales during Black Friday shopping. It is one of the best ways to entice interested customers with attractive sales and intrigue them to make a positive purchasing decision, especially during BFCM.
You have to be careful about setting up deals with the discount coupons on your website and make sure they are functioning seamlessly whenever applied during the checkout process. Your offer’s success will depend on your customers’ smooth experience applying coupons and purchasing your products on sale, especially during BFCM.
4. Plan Product Upsell & Cross-Sell Offers For Black Friday
Following suit of the previous BFCM checklist point, is our tip to plan to upsell and cross-sell related products. Ask yourself: If someone is making a purchase, is there anything else they may need? Along with setting up pre-determined bundle offers, you can promote related products on your eCommerce product pages and allow customers to choose what they need. This will eventually lead to an increase in average order value (AOV), especially during Black Friday.
5. Analyze Inventory Levels & Prepare For BFCM 2024 Rush
Next on our ultimate Black Friday checklist: Take a close look at your inventory levels and get ready for the massive surge in the number of Black Friday shoppers and orders placed shopping, especially during BFCM. Sure, selling out completely sounds like a dream come true, but the last thing you want is to run out of stock and leave eager customers empty-handed, especially during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Check whether your suppliers and dropshippers ready to handle increased sales? Then, ensure there is plenty of stock available to last Black Friday through Cyber Monday and beyond. A good practice for preparing your website for Black Friday would be to analyze which products are best-selling on your site and stock up on it. Check which all related or bundles products are available in abundance before the BFCM rush kicks in.
And, to further ensure excellent customer experience, especially during BFCM, you can add ‘Avability Status’ option with WooCommerce-compatible tools like Growth Alert from NotificationX, in your eCommerce product pages.
6. Design Attractive Deal Pages & Banners On Your Website
How to make your website stand out in the crowded Black Friday marketplace? The best way to attract potential customers to your website is through stunning designs that instantly grab attention. Because, what better way to promote your holiday sales than with fresh visual creative on your WordPress or eCommerce website?
So, you must keep “updating your WordPress website for Black Friday shopping” in your checklist for BFCM preparation. Not only just an updated landing page according to the theme of BFCM, but you also need interactive, engaging content and banners to highlight the sale offers on your site. This ultimate Black Friday checklist item will help you attract more conversions from organic traffic, generate more revenues and earn the maximum profit.
This is actually the most fun part of the process of preparing your website for Black Friday Shopping and should be one of the very first points on your checklist for BFCM. You can effortlessly make your brand stand out from the competition by styling your deal pages and pricing sections with Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping-themed designs and changing up the website copy to match the motif. You can also add interactive Opt-in Banners that instantly grab attention, enable engaging Exit Intent Banners that no one can miss, and more.
You can personalize the designs yourself by tweaking the codes on your website. Or, as an effortless solution to design landing pages, product pages, and deal pages attractively, you can use ready templates for your WordPress website or WooCommerce. The best platform to source the perfect Black Friday template for your website is Templately, the ultimate templates cloud for WordPress. It holds one of the largest libraries of 5,500+ stunning, ready templates for Elementor website builder & Gutenberg block editor. But more on this amazing software platform / WordPress plugin for website templates later.
7. Create A “Coming Soon” Page To Create Hype Around BFCM
If your focus on your Black Friday marketing efforts is converting organic traffic or potential customers into sure sales, you need to create an inviting ‘Coming Soon’ page too. This landing page can hold a countdown timer to alert visitors of when your BFCM deals and discounts will go live. It can also hold a subscription bar, where eager eCommerce shoppers can place their email addresses to get early notices and access to Black Friday sales.
8. Update Your Product Pages & Descriptions For BFCM
Afterwards, it’s time to update your product pages and descriptions with the correct keywords, SEO content and more to ensure the products appear correctly on search engines when potential customers are searching online. Make sure product descriptions are clear and detailed, and provide all essential information such as features, benefits and discounted prices. Keep in mind that your content needs to be optimized for voice searches, especially during BFCM 2024.
9. Simplify Navigation On Your Product Pages
What’s next on the ultimate Black Friday checklist? Once all products are set on your website, all links are corrected, and all visuals are ready – you need to check your entire website for a simplified navigation process. Your website can have all the information the visitors need but all of that won’t matter if they can’t navigate through your site properly. Or, if they find it confusing.
On the one hand, having a well-organized menu is an essential step in preparing your website for not only the Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping season but all times. It encourages visitors to explore your website more, increases session duration, and improves bounce rates. It also helps boost the overall user experience of your website, leading to increased sales.
On the other hand, having product pages organized to simplify all information with a proper description, carefully selected tags and categories, and well-displayed prices are all important when it comes to easy understanding and navigation, especially during BFCM. So, you might need to take a minute to consider how customers read your product pages and organize them accordingly.
10. Improve Customer Support Procedures For Black Friday
Preparing your customer support team for the upcoming surge in sales and queries is another way to prepare for Black Friday and is the next tip on our ultimate BFCM checklist. Make sure your support team is up-to-date with all the BFCM marketing plans, prices, products, and more. Make sure your customer support pages and relevant links are working seamlessly to ensure customer satisfaction, especially during the biggest shopping season of the year.
Moreover, with the recent trend in the use of AI and chatbots, implementing chatbots that can instantly help customers with answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) can be a great way to prepare your website for BFCM 2024. In fact, by 2025, chatbots are expected to manage up to 80% of customer interactions during busy shopping seasons, like Black Friday Cyber Monday, offering quicker support and helping to lower cart abandonment rates.
11. Plan An Abandoned Cart Recovery Campaign
Naturally, the next on our tips to prepare your ultimate checklist for Black Friday, we have abandoned cart recovery plans. Cart abandonment is a major challenge during high-traffic shopping events, especially Black Friday. To combat this and boost conversions, auditing your checkout process beforehand is crucial.
You need to aim to simplify the entire checkout process so that customers can easily purchase multiple items without much hassle. You will also need to offer multiple payment options to cater to a more diverse audience on your eCommerce website.
12. Update Payment Gateways For Smooth Transactions
So now the question arises: your checkout process may work, but is it efficient and does your payment gateway work seamlessly? So, next on our ultimate Black Friday checklist is the concept of easy payments and transactions during the biggest sales season of the year.
No matter how well you follow the steps mentioned above and how big the discounts you offer are, if the user cannot pay for the products seamlessly, your Black Friday campaign is not going to work. And the worst complaint that can be heard during this much-awaited weekend during November is one that states customers not being able to pay for the products they already have in their shopping carts.
Instead of boosting profits and revenues during mega shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a scenario like this will lead to a negative push towards increased abandoned carts and lost sales.
So another crucial step, and probably one of the most important ones on this checklist, for preparing your website for Black Friday shopping is to check, analyze and ensure the payment gateways on your online store are working smoothly. There are many plugins and solutions that can help you create payment methods that not only allow seamless transactions but also include global billing facilities.
13. Add Transparent Return Policies To Your Website
A clear and simple return policy can significantly boost customer confidence during Black Friday, especially as shoppers take advantage of massive savings and buy in bulk. Knowing they can easily return or exchange items reduces hesitation and helps overcome any doubts about their purchases. Highlight your return policy prominently on your site and consider extending the return window to further reassure customers and encourage more sales.
14. Optimize Your Web Pages For Maximum SEO Scores & Visibility
No matter how well-prepared a website is, users and customers will not come across it if it is not optimized for search engines and that’s the last thing you’d want during the competitive Black Friday shopping season. It should be one of your first priorities when preparing your website for Black Friday shopping because a well-optimized site for SEO can help you rank higher and take you to your right audience base in a short time.
So, once you have adorned your website with stunning designs, set your prices in places, and readied your coupons, it’s time to look carefully into 5 smaller and more detailed types of SEO checklists:
| 🎯 SEO Basics 🎯 Keyword Research 🎯 On-Page SEO | 🎯 Off-Page SEO 🎯 Local SEO 🎯 Technical SEO |
To find out more details, check out our complete SEO guide to rank your stores on top of search engines. Focus on optimizing your website content, XML Sitemaps for Google Indexing, crawl errors, and more – all of these will help you run a successful Black Friday sales campaign with ease.
15. Check, Find & Fix All Broken Or Expired Links
Another optimization step you need to take is to look for all broken links on your Black Friday shopping website. While it can be frightening to see your product images load late, users not finding the products or facing 404 errors on your web pages can be even scarier, especially during BFCM.
Therefore, it is always a good idea to utilize a broken link checker and then fix or remove all ruptured and expired URLs using proper redirection methods. Only then will you be able to ensure a proper user experience and a boost in sales on your website for Black Friday.
16. Make Your Website Responsive For All Devices
What’s your online store’s user experience like on mobile? Is it properly mobile-optimized and checked for responsiveness issues? The recent increase in online shopping means most users like to browse stores from their mobile devices or tablets just as much as their laptops and desktop monitors. You do not want to disappoint potential customers with web pages that do not load properly or get broken when they try to access them through different gadgets. And so, now that you are almost done preparing your website for Black Friday, it’s time to ensure that the site is responsnive for all types of devices and screen sizes.
You can ensure this by adding responsive website templates that cater to all types of devices and image galleries that do not distort the pictures on different screens. It is also important to implement pricing charts that can be viewed from anywhere and payment gateways where users can easily input information as needed.
17. Test Your Server Capacity For Heavy Traffic Flow
Worried about your website crashing under the Black Friday rush? The last thing you would want during the Black Friday weekend is a website that cannot handle the surge of incoming web traffic.
If and when your hosting package or server is not equipped to handle a massive traffic load, it can cause your website to become too slow and unresponsive or worse, crash, especially during BFCM. So the next step in getting your website ready for the biggest sales of the year is to check the server load capacity.
According to research on website stats for 2024, the average number of visitors a website might receive during a month is 1,000+ to 10,000. But with the Black Friday sales in motion, what if the number of visitors increases significantly? What if it goes up to 10,000 on Black Friday, the day of?
To ensure your website can handle a surge in traffic, you need to check how much traffic is allowed from your host and carry out website performance tests. Determine where most of your traffic is coming from and optimize the experience for that platform. Also, find out which of your website landing pages or product pages get the most traffic.
18. Analyze & Boost Loading Times For Faster Website Performance
Afterward, you must test website performance to ensure your site (home page, Black Friday deal pages, product pages, etc) loads immediately as visitors click on their links.. You must also test and analyze how long it takes for the new designs, banners, and product images to load. To optimize web page load speeds using the easiest steps, you can check out our complete guide here which also includes a list of the top tools you can use to do so.
90% of shoppers will leave a website if it loads too slowly and according to Google, almost 53% of visitors will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds. And when there is a general sense of urgency and shoppers have a high level of buy intent, the losses of having a slow or unresponsive website can be staggering. So you need to determine “Is your WordPress or eCommerce website running as fast as it could be?”
For rich and high-quality product images on your WordPress website specifically, you can give lazy loading tools a try. When you use this performance optimization technique for your images and videos, you can delay the rendering and loading of content that appears below the fold while the visible content is being loaded. In this way, only the top few photos that are visible to the visitor will load instantly while the remaining visual media will load later when the user scrolls down to the section that holds them – not all at once – significantly boosting load times.
19. Create Urgency & Add Credibility With Social Proof
Want to go the extra mile in promoting your deals and add a tried and tested but innovative strategy as part of your ultimate Black Friday checklist? We have the perfect solution for you. To create a big impact in the market with massive sales, you will need to organize Black Friday marketing campaigns and strategies that will be sure winners. And ones that you can create while preparing your website for Black Friday are the Social Proof marketing and FOMO marketing techniques.
You can effortlessly use tools like NotificationX to create stunning popup alerts that display real-time conversions and transactions on your website. That way, for eCommerce businesses, interested buyers will be able to see which products are more popular and then, trust your company or brand more.
On top of that, you can create a fear of missing out (FOMO) among your customers with the right techniques, such as countdown timers, visible deadlines on notification bars, and much more. It works perfectly during this big sales season because no one wants to lose a special offer that others are investing in – they are sure to become interested and make a positive purchasing decision. And you can surely use these techniques to grow your brand credibility, sales, and revenues while also boosting your customer engagement rates.
20. Go LIVE With A Successful Black Friday Campaign
So, Have you done everything on this Black Friday checklist? Then, that’s it – we are at the end. The last step on this checklist for preparing your website for Black Friday shopping is simply to go live with all the offers and campaigns. If you have followed this checklist properly and carried out all the necessary tests and fixes, your website is sure to be ready to hold massive traffic, ensure perfect performance, allow smooth transactions, and boost sales.
What Are the Most Common Mistakes to Avoid When Preparing A Website for Black Friday?
With millions of Black Friday shoppers browsing through the many Black Friday eCommerce sites, ensuring your eCommerce website is ready to handle the Black Friday rush is essential if you want to stay ahead of the game. Let’s dive into the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them by using the ultimate Black Friday checklist.
1. Ignoring Website Performance Testing
As mentioned earlier – a slow website, especially during Black Friday, is one of the biggest reasons potential buyers leave without purchasing. Test your website performance weeks ahead. Many eCommerce business owners fail to test and prepare for increased traffic.
Tips to prepare include:
- Use web performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights (or Shopify App Store for Shopify merchants) to optimize your site.
- Regularly check for bugs using a BFCM checklist.
- Run stress tests in the weeks leading up to Black Friday to anticipate issues.
2. Overlooking Mobile Responsiveness
Nearly more than half of Black Friday shoppers use mobile devices. An unresponsive eCommerce website can deter purchases. Ensure that your design works flawlessly across all devices to capitalize on the Black Friday rush.
3. Poor Marketing Strategy Execution
Effective Black Friday marketing efforts ensure your store gets noticed. However, many fail because their Black Friday promotions are poorly timed or lack focus. Consider these Black Friday marketing strategies:
- Launch Black Friday marketing campaigns early.
- Offer early access to Black Friday deals through email lists.
- Use Black Friday sales strategies tailored to your audience.
4. Neglecting to Prepare a Comprehensive Checklist
Without a checklist to prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday, it’s easy to miss critical steps. Use resources like the ultimate Black Friday checklist or 20 tips to prepare your store for the big day. For example:
- Update product listings weeks ahead.
- Double-check inventory.
- Ensure website speed meets modern standards.
- Check our ultimate Black Friday list to note down everything you need to prepare.
5. Failing to Offer Exclusive Deals
Shoppers expect compelling Black Friday discounts. Black Friday deals may determine whether customers choose your store over competitors. Highlight your promotions in a dedicated section on your website or create a separate deals page as we have mentioned earlier. You can even create unique packages like Black Friday bundles to boost conversions.
6. Not Prioritizing SEO and Analytics
Effective Black Friday marketing hinges on knowing your audience. Analyze what worked last year and refine your efforts. Focusing on keywords like “2024 Black Friday” and “prepare for BFCM 2024” will help position your store competitively. Remember, eCommerce conversion rates peak when your Black Friday sales start with a bang!
7. Underestimating the Importance of Preparation
Finally, don’t leave planning until the last minute. Use tools like the Shopify App Store and follow tips to ensure you’re ready. Prepping for an event like Black Friday takes weeks of work. By addressing these common mistakes and improving Black Friday marketing efforts, you’ll avoid disappointment when sales during Black Friday roll in.
Bonus: Stunning, Ready Templates To Create The Perfect Black Friday Website
With that, we conclude our complete checklist of the steps you need to take while preparing your website for Black Friday shopping. But as promised, want to share with you some of our top picks of stunning, responsive, and fully customizable templates from Templately for the season.
While there are many tools and solutions that might help you find suitable designs, Templately is quickly growing into the most popular templates library for WordPress with seamless compatibility for Elementor and Gutenberg. To add to all of its amazing, dynamic styles and types, this cloud templates library comes with the facilities to let you work with your team and save ready designs to be used later. And the best part? You require no coding knowledge at all.
Templately brings you several ready Elementor and Gutenberg Black Friday and deals page templates to help you skyrocket sales this Black Friday sales season with a fully functioning, high-converting website guaranteed not to break. Here are a few noteworthy names that you can look at from the ultimate templates cloud:
🎁 BFriday 🎁 BlackNov 🎁 FlashFriday 🎁 Black Esale
Bonus: Create A Cyber Monday Website In Just A Few Clicks
Before we wrap up, we also want to remind you to be ready to run smoothly from Black Friday sales to Cyber Monday deals within the week. Prepare your website contents, banners, and deals beforehand to make quick changes, or simply keep a website template ready just for the occasion.
To help you out, Templately brings you some stunning, responsive, and fully customization website templates for the Cyber Monday campaign. Take a look below:
🎁 EleCyber 🎁 CyberSell 🎁 Cyber Dealz 🎁 CyberCred
Grow Your Business With A BFCM Checklist To Run Successful Black Friday Shopping Website
With that, we want to conclude our complete checklist of everything that you need to do while preparing your website for Black Friday shopping. Hope this helps you boost your business’ sales, conversions, and business during the busiest week of the year. Let us know how these suggestions work for you by commenting below, we would love to hear from you. Do not forget to subscribe to our blogs for such helpful guides, or join our friendly Facebook Community today.
