Is your website ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

If you think your website is ready for 2023’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, think again. Even the biggest brands endure site crashes and bandwidth issues this time of year. Adidas, HP, JD Sports, Target, Lego, Best Buy and even Apple all had problems keeping their sites up in previous years.

Fortunately, this post is here to help. We look at how you should prepare your website for these annual sales and prevent hordes of online shoppers from bringing it to its knees.

Optimise everything

Start by giving your website an overhaul. Perform a technical SEO audit to see how long it takes to load text and images and how long before content in users’ view windows stops shifting around.

Also, look for broken links or dud pages that could harm the user experience. Send a signal to Google that your website is ready for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

Secure your payment gateway

Next, ensure your payment gateway is secure and can cope with the increased traffic. Check with your provider the number of transactions you can process per minute and compare this to your expected sales. Change your subscription or service if you cannot process payments fast enough.

Add live chat support

It’s also worth knowing how to add online chat to your website. These tools let you serve multiple customers in real time, even if you have a limited number of agents.

Click4Assistance’s version also has additional features that make interactions more engaging. For example, you can use a pop-out panel to provide instructions or display marketing materials. You can also video chat with website visitors directly, building trust further.

Put your most profitable deals front and centre

Another way to prepare your website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is to put your most profitable deals front and centre on your website. Highlight your offers and discounts to encourage spending.

Continue advertising your best deals on product pages. Arrange SKUs in order of discount size or value for money. Use banners and pop-ups to remind shoppers to take advantage of discounts. Tell them that time is short and you have limited stock.

Add Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals landing pages

Also, you should add Black Friday and Cyber Monday-specific landing pages to your website. These direct customers towards the most relevant areas of your website and explain special offers in more detail.

Landing pages are a source of competitive advantage that helps divert prospects away from alternative websites. Quality funnels lead directly to your sales and checkout pages.

Become easier to find

Ensure your website and product pages are straightforward to find. Prioritise SEO to improve your rankings for Black Friday and Cyber Monday-related keywords.

You can do this by:

• Strategically incorporating relevant keywords into your website content
• Adding optimised meta tags, URLs, and image alt text
• Add high-quality content to appeal to Google’s E-A-T criteria (Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
• Adopt a backlink-building scheme using organic methods or a white-hat SEO agency
• Optimise your pages for local SEO, if applicable
• Adapt your SEO strategy to voice search

Create a sense of urgency

You can also prepare your website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday by implementing scarcity marketing tactics. Finding ways to remind shoppers that deals won’t last forever is a powerful motivation to buy. 

The most popular tactics include:

• Countdown timers, showing how much longer the sales will last
• Limited stock alerts, telling users to buy now or miss the chance to save
• Additional discounts for purchasing within 60 minutes of adding it to the basket

Integrate product pages with social media

Integrating product pages with social media can also work. Encouraging shoppers to share their experiences with their contacts may increase your digital footfall.

Ensure you have sufficient bandwidth

Finally, ensure you have sufficient bandwidth on your website’s backend to support expected traffic levels. E-commerce stores that function normally for most of the year can struggle during peak times on entry-level web hosting subscriptions.

Note that a single CPU core can handle around 220 to 250 concurrent users, with dual cores managing 500, and 3 MB of bandwidth will support around one user. Therefore, a bandwidth of 1.5 GB could host 500 shoppers at a time.

The horsepower you require will depend on expected demand and the size of your business. You may need multiple servers across various geographic locations to support your clientele.

Now you’re ready to dominate Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Putting all this together, and you are ready to dominate the holiday sales. Prioritise SEO, site loading times, and integrating products with social media for maximum sales impact.