As online shopping continues to grow, this year\u2019s Black Friday is set to be one of the biggest events for retail websites. To make the most of this shopping season, it\u2019s essential to have your site fully prepared. Here\u2019s how to get your website ready for Black Friday 2025.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
As Friday 28th<\/sup> November approaches, you should have your website ready in plenty of time for the sales. You may need to create a special Black Friday shopping category that contains all the items on offer, you\u2019ll want to display an eye-catching Black Friday sales tag for each item and you\u2019ll need to let customers know how much they are saving by displaying the discount.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Putting all this in place requires quite a bit of work. You\u2019ll have to decide which products are going in the sale and how much discount you can afford to offer, you\u2019ll need to create the new category, move sale products to it and ensure the discount and promotional material is displayed for each item. Additionally, you may also want to set up your site to maximise sales by offering upselling and cross-selling deals and displaying related products.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n People will flock to Google in search of deals on Black Friday and its those websites that rank well which will take the lion\u2019s share of visitors. For this reason, it\u2019s a good idea to create special landing pages for Black Friday and ensure that these are optimised with relevant keywords and quality content.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n While you don\u2019t need to publish your sales products until Black Friday, the landing pages that link to them need to be live on your site well before 28 November, as they\u2019ll need to be indexed by Google before they can appear in search results. You can add the links to the products when the sale goes live: in the meantime, use the Black Friday landing page as a teaser, perhaps even for taking email addresses so you can send reminders to interested shoppers on the day itself.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Not all your efforts should go into gaining traffic from search engine results. You should also consider using PPC advertising for the sale, though this might be the most expensive time of the year to do so. Another important part of your marketing should be to promote your Black Friday sale on social media. The earlier you can start doing this, the better – and remember to link to your landing pages.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Though Black Friday is the biggest selling day of the year for many websites, for plenty of others it\u2019s a disaster. The main reason is that they get so much traffic, their server isn\u2019t able to cope with demand. Without sufficient RAM, CPU and bandwidth resources to cater for the spike, your website may begin to function very sluggishly. As a result, you\u2019ll see visitors leaving as quickly as they arrive and those much-anticipated sales won\u2019t happen. The worst-case scenario is that your site will go offline: not only will you lose sales but any investment in advertising will also have been wasted.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n If you are expecting significant traffic, the best way to avoid downtime is to ensure your hosting package provides all the resources you need. This may mean scaling up to a bigger package or a more powerful hosting solution like VPS, dedicated server or cloud. Those sites using shared hosting are the ones most at risk here. There are two reasons for making sure your site is secure in time for Black Friday. The first is to gain the trust of potential customers. You may get a lot of new visitors during the sale who are unfamiliar with your brand. Making sure your site is seen as secure will give them increased confidence to carry out financial transactions on your website.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The most important way to do this is to have an SSL certificate<\/a> installed which encrypts data sent between a user\u2019s browser and your server and which stops payment details from being stolen in transit. Once you have an SSL certificate, web browsers will display the padlock icon next to your URL in the browser address bar, signifying to users that your site is safe. Without an SSL, instead of a padlock, users will see the words \u2018Not secure\u2019 and a triangular warning icon. If they click on this, they are warned not to enter sensitive information, like passwords or credit card details, on your site.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The second reason for ensuring your site is secure is that Black Friday is an exceptionally busy day for cybercriminals seeking to take advantage of the hectic goings-on. The day is associated with a rise in all forms of criminal activity: phishing scams, DDoS and ransomware attacks, online fraud, malware distribution and site hacking. It is imperative that, before Black Friday begins, you have made your site as secure as possible and that you have backups in place to restore it quickly if it is attacked.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n WHUK provides a wide range of security features, including advanced firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, spam filters and remote, encrypted backup solutions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 2025 could well be a bumper year for Black Friday sales with people buying online in greater numbers. To take advantage of this, you\u2019ll need to prepare your site in time, optimise landing pages, promote your sales on social media and via advertising, make sure your site can cope with increased traffic and that it\u2019s secure.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n If your site needs secure, high-performance hosting, visit our homepage<\/a> to see our range of hosting solutions.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As online shopping continues to grow, this year\u2019s Black Friday is set to be one of the biggest events for retail websites. To make the most of this shopping season,…<\/p>\nGet the message out<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Make sure your website can handle the traffic<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMake sure your site is secure<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Conclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n