Black Friday falls on November 27 this year, and Cyber Monday on November 30. For many stores, the weeks around those dates bring the most traffic of the year. That traffic only pays off if your store is ready for it: pages that load fast, a cart that makes sense, shipping that is clear and an offer you chose before the rush, not during it.
This checklist covers five areas. Each has concrete checks you can finish in an hour or two, so you can fix the biggest problems first.
1. Speed and stability
A slow store loses shoppers quietly. They don’t complain; they leave.
- Walk through your store on a real phone, on mobile data: home page, product, add to cart, checkout, payment. Note every moment where you wait or hesitate.
- Ask your host what happens under heavy traffic. Check plan limits such as PHP workers, bandwidth and memory, and find out how quickly you can upgrade if you need to.
- Check your caching setup. Cart, checkout and account pages must be excluded from page caching, or shoppers may see wrong or stale carts.
- Compress large images and remove plugins you no longer use.
- Set up uptime monitoring with an alert to your phone, so you hear about problems before customers do.
- Plan a code freeze. Stop updating themes and plugins a few days before Black Friday, and test after your final update.
2. Cart and checkout friction
Every extra step, field or surprise between add to cart and payment gives shoppers a reason to stop.
- Count the clicks from add to cart to a completed payment. Remove every step that is not needed.
- Allow guest checkout. In WooCommerce this is a setting (WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy), and forcing account creation is a common reason to leave.
- Show shipping costs and totals early. Unexpected extra costs are the most cited reason for abandoned checkouts in Baymard Institute’s research.
- Offer the payment methods your customers actually use, and place a small test order with each one.
- Keep shoppers on the page. A cart that opens as a drawer lets people keep browsing instead of loading a separate cart page. Side Cart does this for WooCommerce, and it can also show free-shipping progress and relevant add-ons inside the drawer.
- Check how the coupon field behaves. If shoppers leave your page to hunt for a code, you may not get them back.
3. Shipping thresholds and delivery messaging
- Decide your free-shipping threshold. A common rule of thumb is to set it a little above your current average order value, which gives shoppers a reason to add one more item. Test it rather than assuming it works for you.
- Show the threshold where shoppers will see it: product pages, cart and checkout. A progress message such as “Add €15 more for free shipping” is clearer than a banner on the home page.
- Publish delivery times and holiday cut-off dates for your main carriers and countries. Customers want to know whether an order placed on a given date will arrive on time.
- Check that shipping rules and taxes calculate correctly for every zone you sell to.
4. Offer structure
Decide your offer before the day. Last-minute discounts tend to be the ones that hurt margin.
- Choose a structure that fits your margins: tiered discounts (spend more, save more), bundles, a free-shipping threshold or a free gift with purchase. Each one pushes shoppers toward a bigger basket in a different way.
- Work out the margin for each offer: price minus product cost, shipping, payment fees and discount. If you cannot say what a typical order earns after the discount, simplify the offer.
- Test how discounts, sale prices and coupons interact. Place several test orders and confirm that stacking works exactly as you intended.
- For tiered rewards in the cart, Progressive Discount lets you set multi-level rewards (percentage, fixed, free shipping or a free gift). For bundles on product pages, there is Smart Cross Sell.
5. Support readiness
- Write answers to the questions you know are coming: delivery times, returns, order changes, payment problems. Put them on an FAQ page and link it from the cart and checkout.
- Show holiday hours and expected response times.
- Check that order confirmation and shipping emails send correctly, and that they reach inboxes, not spam folders.
- Assign owners for the big days: who watches the store, who answers customers, who contacts the host if something breaks.
The final checklist
Use this as a quick list to work through:
- Store tested on mobile from add to cart to payment
- Host limits checked, caching excludes cart and checkout
- Uptime monitoring and alerts switched on
- Guest checkout enabled; steps and fields reduced
- Shipping costs and totals visible early
- Every payment method tested with a small real order
- Free-shipping threshold set and shown with a progress message
- Delivery times and holiday cut-offs published
- Offer chosen, margin calculated, discount stacking tested
- FAQ written and linked
- Order and shipping emails tested
- Code freeze date set; owners assigned for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Where to start
If you only have a weekend, do three things: test your store on a phone, show shipping costs and the free-shipping threshold in the cart, and decide your offer. These three affect most shoppers and are quick to check.
Want to see what a cart drawer with shipping progress and add-ons looks like?