As Black Friday approaches, online businesses are gearing up for their biggest sales day of the year. However, with the increase in traffic comes a surge in potential issues that can severely impact your sales. A sluggish website, downtime, or a clunky user experience can be all it takes to send customers to your competitors. Last year, online businesses lost billions collectively to slow websites. In this post, I will outline what I personally do to make sure our clients are the winners during the Black Friday season!
As a web developer working alongside our talented marketing team, I’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is to get the technical aspects of your website right. In this post, we’ll explore key elements like loading speed, hosting quality, image formats, and the testing tools you need to ensure your website is optimized for Black Friday. This post is mainly geared towards business owners, so rather than discussing custom coding techniques, I will focus on free plugins and apps that will get the job done. For best results, hire a developer, but you can move the needle quite a bit without one!
1. Loading Speed: The First Impression You Can’t Afford to Fail
Why It Matters:
A website that loads even a second too slow can cost you sales. Research has shown that for every second of delay, conversions can drop by up to 7%. Moreover, slow loading times negatively impact your SEO rankings, which means fewer potential customers will find your site organically during the busiest shopping season of the year.
Web Development Tips for Faster Loading:
Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of files your website needs to load, such as combining CSS and JavaScript files into a single request where possible. If your website is on Wordpress, this is the best time of the year to clean out your plugins.
Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for images and videos so that they only load when a user scrolls to them. This reduces the initial load time, allowing customers to access the main content faster.
Compression: Use file compression (Gzip) to reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Smaller files load faster, improving overall site speed. If you aren’t comfortable with this, you can gain a boost here using plugins like Autoptimize.
Reduce Redirects: Redirect chains can increase loading time by requiring multiple HTTP requests before content is fully displayed. Clean up any unnecessary redirects on your site. Again, this is the best time of the year to clean house.
Marketing Perspective:
A faster website means a lower bounce rate and higher engagement, which can directly affect conversion rates on Black Friday. Your marketing team should ensure that landing pages for specific promotions are well-optimized and load quickly to avoid deterring potential buyers.
2. Hosting Quality: The Foundation of a High-Performance Website
Why It Matters:
The quality of your web hosting can make or break your Black Friday success. Low-quality hosting may lead to slow response times or, worse, cause your website to crash under heavy traffic.
Web Development Tips for Hosting:
Choose a Scalable Hosting Solution: Opt for cloud-based hosting or VPS (Virtual Private Server) solutions that can handle large traffic spikes. Popular cloud hosting options include AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, which offer the flexibility to scale resources up or down as needed. We personally recommend Lightsail for most website solutions, as their backup functionality and burst capabilities are extremely strong for small and mid sized businesses.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): Implementing a CDN like Cloudflare or Akamai can significantly speed up content delivery by serving your site from multiple geographic locations. This reduces latency and ensures a fast user experience no matter where your customer is located. We have all of our clients’ nameservers routed through Cloudflare, but I wanted to include at least one alternative.
Security: Using a CDN drastically reduces your vulnerability to DDoS attacks, and arguably brute force attacks, because it limits the amount of times your website can be loaded by a single user. Cloudflare, even on their free plan, does an excellent job preventing most automated attacks, in my opinion.
Server Load Testing: Perform stress tests to simulate high-traffic scenarios. Tools like Loader.io or Apache JMeter can help you assess how your hosting infrastructure handles increased traffic and whether it’s ready for Black Friday. We do this ahead of flash sales to ensure maximum performance when we need it most. This in conjunction with the Lightsail “metric” tab tells us how many users we can realistically handle on our current setup.
Moving Servers: If your hosting isn’t up to snuff, we prefer the ease of use of WP Migration for moving websites. We paid once for their Unlimited extension, and we use it every time. For more assistance moving your website, email [email protected].
Marketing Perspective:
Ensure your marketing campaigns align with your website’s hosting capacity. A sudden flood of traffic from a successful email or ad campaign can crash an unprepared site. Communicate closely with your web team to make sure the server can handle the expected traffic surge. Since our team meets every day, we are extremely in tune with how this goes.
3. Image Formats: High Quality without the Heavy Load
Why It Matters:
Images are often the largest assets on a website and can greatly affect load time. High-resolution images may look stunning but can drastically slow down your site if not optimized correctly.
Web Development Tips for Image Optimization:
Use Modern Image Formats: Switch to more efficient formats like WebP or AVIF, which offer better compression without sacrificing image quality. Compared to JPEG or PNG, these formats can reduce file sizes by up to 30%. We typically use a quality setting around 70 WebP, and make sure the image resolution matches it’s display size.
Image Compression Tools: Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress images before uploading them to your site. If you want to optimize your live Wordpress website, I personally recommend EWWW Image Optimizer..
Responsive Images: Implement srcset in your HTML code to serve the appropriate image size based on the user’s device. This ensures that mobile users aren’t downloading desktop-sized images, reducing load time for smaller screens.
Offloading Images: We prefer to serve images from an S3 bucket into our lightsail instance to further reduce server load, and spread out resources.
Marketing Perspective:
Images play a vital role in enticing customers during Black Friday, especially with visual-heavy promotions or product displays. Optimizing your images for fast loading will ensure that marketing assets like banners and product images load instantly, leading to better engagement and fewer abandoned carts. This is typically the lowest hanging fruit for small businesses looking to speed up their load times.
4. Testing Tools for Your Current Website: Make Sure Everything’s Ready
Why It Matters:
No matter how well you think you’ve optimized your site, without proper testing, you're leaving a lot to chance. Testing your website regularly will help catch potential issues before they impact your Black Friday sales.
Web Development Tools for Testing:
Google PageSpeed Insights: This free tool provides an analysis of your site’s performance on both mobile and desktop and offers actionable recommendations to improve loading speed. While not as detailed as the other options, it can be easier to digest and follow compared to my favorites.
GTMetrix: GTMetrix allows you to see how fast your site loads and which parts of the page are causing delays. It also provides a waterfall analysis, showing the load time of each element on your page.This is my go-to for really diving into things, but non-developers might find the UI to be a bit overwhelming.
Pingdom: Similar to GTMetrix, Pingdom gives you detailed information about load times, file sizes, and the number of requests being made to your server. It's a great tool for ongoing performance monitoring. I used this tool for years before I switched to GTMetrix, and still go here for a second option from time to time.
Marketing Perspective:
Testing isn’t just for developers. Marketing teams should also test how their landing pages, promotional pop-ups, and CTAs perform under load. It’s important to have a bunch of perspectives when it comes to website performance, because every little bit matters a ton during the black Friday season!
Black Friday success hinges on more than just great deals; it requires a website that’s fast, reliable, and ready to handle heavy traffic. Customers across pretty much every market are becoming less patient with slow websites, and taking the time to speed your site up this time of year gives you the best fighting chance possible. If your website loads in 2 seconds, and your competitors load in 3-4 seconds, then you will be able to outbid them per click. In a hyper competitive online space, page load speed should never be the reason you don’t win.
Is your website ready for the Black Friday rush? Now’s the time to find out. Contact us for a Black Friday audit, and we will get you suggestions for free.