Smashing your Black Friday marketing campaign is a goal worth celebrating - so long as your website can handle it. There are plenty of technical barriers, not to mention the worry you won’t have a surge to contend with at all!
This guide covers how to fundamentally improve your website so it can handle the Black Friday surges - and a couple of tips on how to get customers to flock to your site in the first place.
The Black Friday Surge
Adobe estimates that Black Friday spending will reach a record $10.8 billion this year, an increase from the $9.8 billion in 2023 - and that’s not even the highest shopping day. Cyber Monday takes that spot, bringing in an estimated $12.4 billion in 2023, and an expected $13.2 billion this year.
In short, there’s big money to be made on Black Friday, but only if your business is ready. If you don’t prep your website for potential spikes in traffic ahead of time your sales might be impacted by:
Server Overload: If your server isn’t equipped to handle a massive number of requests, it can crash completely.
Database Issues: If you have an extensive catalog, a traffic spike could cause errors.
Site Errors: High user volumes could cause errors loading media, 404 errors, broken links, or even the “spinning wheel of death.”
Slowdowns: Even if your website doesn’t crash completely, high traffic volumes can slow it down considerably, to the point where it becomes too frustrating for customers.
How to Prepare Your Website for the Black Friday Traffic Surge
From getting the right people by your side, to focussing on the right strategies, here are the ways you can be Black Friday ready:
Improve your website’s infrastructure
You need to prepare your website for Black Friday by increasing its capacity to handle large traffic volumes, as well as ensuring it won’t crash on the day. This can be done through a range of methods:
Improve your hosting plan
The first step is to check your server capacity. This can usually be found in the details of your hosting plan. If your hosting plan is limited, then consider upgrading to a more powerful plan ahead of the Black Friday surge.
Audit and improve your website
Even a small error can spiral when there’s a lot of traffic. Go through every page and check the links work, make test purchases yourself to check all your payment and shipping options are functional, and assess the overall user experience your customers can expect. Doing this in advance means you can fix any problems in advance, instead of scrambling as sales drop off.
For best results, consider a full SEO audit. This way you can identify all the technical on-site issues holding your website back. Fixing them isn’t just going to be great for your organic and search engine marketing efforts, but it will also help support that large traffic surge this coming Black Friday.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Adobe reports that 52.8% of purchases made with large businesses are made on mobile. For small businesses, 43% of users are buying on their phones. This is a huge amount of potential customers, so make sure that you test your site’s mobile responsiveness and friendliness in the lead-up to Black Friday.
In some cases, this is about fixing minor issues. For others, you may need to invest in a better, more responsive theme or design for your website. If you don’t have the staff available, consider outsourcing this task to ensure it’s ready in time.
Back up your website
Your website might crash, or worse, it may be hacked in the lead-up to your sales to push you to pay a ransom. The simplest way to protect your business is to back up your entire website. You can do this right through your hosting provider. WordPress, for example, allows you to log in to cPanel and generate a new backup saved on your computer or external SD card.
Use a load-balancing solution
You can help spread traffic to all available servers instead of overloading one first and causing issues. This is done with a load balancer or with a content delivery network.
If you run your servers, you’ll need either hardware load balancers that spread traffic evenly across all your available servers, or you’ll want to look into a software-based solution that runs on a virtual machine.
If you don’t manage your own servers, however, it’s important to make sure that your web host offers this feature.
Fully set up your supportive web systems
Don’t forget to check if any marketing tools and CRM systems integrated with your website are ready, too. After all, you don’t want to lose out on all that valuable customer data Black Friday can bring because your tech stack was overwhelmed.
Stress test with simulations
Third-party stress test tools let you simulate heavy traffic loads without actual customers on the other end. These tools are available in user-friendly packages for those small business owners trying to manage IT in-house. If you’re an expert, however, you may prefer a free, open-source JavaScript stress test tool instead.
Regardless of which tool is right for you, you will want the ability to adjust the stress test so you can find your traffic limit. Once you know the limit, you’ll be able to test how effective your other website improvement efforts have been.
Use automation to give each user a great experience
You’ll also want to think about the tools that work to help improve customer satisfaction. While your website might be running fine, a traffic surge can lead to other issues with the customer experience.
That’s where automation comes into play.
Take logistics. The last thing you want is for an order to be placed and it to get lost amid the Black Friday rush! Consider instead automating as much of this step as possible. AI for logistics, for example, efficiently manages relationships with suppliers and product fulfillment brands. There’s no manual data entry to allow human error to slip through - and if you start running low on something, orders can automatically be placed rather than waiting for you to notice.
Automation can also be used in customer-facing roles. You can set up automated dispatch notifications and live tracking so customers can quickly check and adjust delivery preferences on their time. You can even use automation to provide personal recommendations based on cookie data (where the user has been on your site) or previous order history (through newsletters).
Hire the right tech experts to take your business to new heights
You want top-tier IT professionals on your side ready to prep your website to handle traffic surges. Ideally, they’ll also optimize it with the latest automation and AI tools so you can offer a stellar customer experience to more people.
The problem is that it can be all too easy to let preconceived notions or even biases impact who you hire and bring in, hurting your business in the short and long run. This can easily be avoided by using Oleeo’s blind recruitment tips, but it’s harder to do when outsourcing an agency. The good news is that, ultimately, the answer is to always look at the work they do. For new staff, focus on their skills, experience, and ideas. For outsourcing, look at portfolios first.
If you’re growing big outside of Black Friday, then hire full-time. Otherwise, consider hiring freelancers or outsourcing to an IT agency to help with the surge instead.
Tips for Bringing in Traffic
For best results, you should also invest in several paid and organic marketing strategies to encourage a surge in Black Friday traffic—otherwise, all your efforts will go to waste. There is a lot you can do, too.
For one, you should optimize your entire website’s content. This will improve the success of your landing pages, reduce bounce rates, and direct the surge in traffic to where you want it to go.
Another smart way to increase traffic is through social commerce. Social commerce is a type of in-video shopping now found on social media, and it’s becoming big. McKinsey & Company expects social commerce to make up 5.2% of eCommerce sales (which equates to $79.6 billion) by 2025.
If you deal with B2B customers rather than B2C, you’ll want to invest in lead generation. By planning in advance, you can collect data on who’s visited your site and then use that information to start a retargeting campaign for those leads.
For example, say your business offers shipping logistics for retail brands. You can use the top demand generation tools to compile a list of potential leads (brands that have visited or interacted with your brand) and retarget them with a unique Black Friday deal.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday is too good of an opportunity for any business to pass up. That’s why you need to build your website up so that it can handle the surge in traffic with ease. You’ll also want to provide plenty of routes for your customers to find your brand during this critical sales period.
To make all this possible you need either the right people, or the right know-how. If you don’t have the know-how, but want to take the lead, don’t worry. You can kickstart your future as a web development whizz with one of our ready-made bootcamp courses today!
Author:
Natasha Thakkar - Content Marketing Manager
Natasha Thakkar brings over a decade of marketing expertise to her role as Content Marketing Manager at Oleeo, a tech company that specializes in producing recruitment software solutions. Skilled in lead generation and communication, Natasha shapes content that enhances Oleeo's brand and resonates with audiences. With experience handling global campaigns and an approach rooted in innovation and engagement, she excels in strategic campaigns, skillfully adapting to trends and connecting with audiences to optimize visibility. Connect with Natasha on LinkedIn.
