Black Friday in WooCommerce: how to prepare your store for traffic and orders

Getting ready for Black Friday in WooCommerce comes down to three things: a fast store, a tested checkout and after-sales support that is ready to go. The deadline? 24.11.2023. Everything has to be ready before that date. Any change pushed in the last week before the sale leaves little time to catch bugs. And a bug under heavy traffic costs the most. Below are the steps in order of importance: freezing changes, performance, testing, the sale day itself and what happens after it.

Where do you start preparing a WooCommerce store for Black Friday?

With a change freeze date and a checklist. Promotions can wait. Finish updating WordPress, your theme, your plugins and your PHP version early enough to leave a few days for checking the store afterwards. From the freeze date on, you don’t update anything unless it’s urgent (a security fix, for example). Before you touch anything, make a full backup of the store, meaning both files and database. Then check that you can actually restore it. A backup nobody has ever restored is more of a hope than a safeguard.

1. Set a change freeze date and tell your team about it.
2. Update WordPress, WooCommerce, your theme and your plugins.
3. Make a backup and do a test restore in a separate environment.
4. Measure performance and remove bottlenecks.
5. Run a full test of the purchase path.
6. Schedule sales and coupons with dates.

How do you check and improve WooCommerce store performance?

Measure the store with a tool like Lighthouse, then compare the score with plugins switched on and off. WooCommerce itself suggests this kind of baseline: the WooCommerce performance documentation gives a Performance score of 90 or higher on a basic Woo store as the recommended standard. Your store, with lots of add-ons, will probably score lower. That’s fine. The point is for the comparison to show what slows it down.

Guess what slows a store down most often? Exactly, too many plugins. Take stock of them: what each one does, whether you still need it and whether it duplicates another one. Switch off and delete the ones you don’t need, no sentiment. Then move on to page caching, image compression and size, and finally hosting resources such as the PHP memory limit. Oh, and don’t cache the cart, checkout or customer account pages. They show data for a specific shopper, so caching would make a mess there.

Testing your store before the sale: what to check step by step

Go through the whole customer journey, from the product page to the order confirmation email. Once on a computer, once on a phone. Above all, check:

• adding to cart and changing quantities,
• how coupons work and how they combine with sale prices,
• payments in test mode for every gateway,
• shipping methods and their costs for different carts,
• transactional emails to the customer and to the store,
• invoice generation.

Run the tests on a copy of the store, that is on staging. Not on production. Otherwise you’ll end up with fake orders and mess up your real stock levels. Check your inventory too: do the numbers add up, and how does the store behave when a product sells out? Customers should see right away that an item is out of stock. Finding out after paying is a sure way to get an angry email (and a refund request).

How do you set up sales and discounts so they don’t block sales?

Schedule sale prices and coupons in WooCommerce with a start and end date. Changing prices by hand at midnight? I don’t recommend it. You set the sale price schedule when editing the product, and the expiry date in the coupon settings. With coupons, think the restrictions through: usage limits per coupon and per customer, combining with other discounts, minimum cart value and excluding products that are already on sale. A badly configured coupon can wipe out your margin. Or reject valid orders, which is even worse. Every price cut also has to show the lowest price from the 30 days before the promotion, which we covered in our post on the Omnibus Directive from December 2022.

What should you do on Black Friday when traffic goes up?

You don’t change anything. You watch the store and respond according to a plan you wrote down beforehand. Turn on uptime monitoring, keep an eye on PHP and WooCommerce error logs, and have your hosting support contact at hand. Decide in advance who watches orders, who handles payments and who replies to customers. Write down a contingency plan ahead of time too: how to disable a problematic plugin, when to restore a backup and who makes that call. Nobody has the head for working out procedures in the middle of a fire.

Handling orders and customers after Black Friday

After the sale, fast fulfilment and smooth returns are what count. They decide whether customers come back. Sort out the order queue, keep statuses up to date and tell buyers the real shipping time, especially when the warehouse can’t keep up. Handle returns and complaints in line with your store terms and consumer law. Finally, write down lessons for next year: what slowed the store down, which steps needed manual fiddling and what was missing from the checklist.

All in all, a successful Black Friday in WooCommerce stands on three legs: a fast store, a tested purchase path and a plan for sale day. What next? Set your change freeze date this week. The whole schedule depends on it.

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