The Black Friday Ecommerce Site Readiness Checklist (Start 60 Days Out)

The stores that get crushed on Black Friday aren't usually the ones with bad products or weak marketing. They're the ones with perfectly fine websites that buckle when traffic jumps 10x overnight. A TLS config that works at 200 concurrent visitors fails at 2,000. An image server that feels slow suddenly feels broken. A checkout race condition that's never mattered shows up as dozens of duplicate orders.

None of this is new information. Every ecommerce engineer knows about peak-season scaling. But most stores never actually run the checklist — they just hope, and then spend the first hours of the biggest sales day firefighting instead of selling.

60 Days Out: Infrastructure & Audit

Run a full health audit

You need to know what's broken before traffic amplifies every problem. Run a complete site health scan and fix every critical issue: broken links, missing images, redirect chains, oversized assets, missing security headers. All of these get worse under load.

Load test at 5x your forecast

Whatever traffic you're expecting, test at five times that. Tools like k6 or Loader.io can simulate traffic spikes against staging. Record baseline response times for the checkout flow specifically — that's where pain becomes lost revenue.

Review CDN and caching config

Cache hit ratio should be above 85% on product images and static assets. If you're hitting origin for every request, you'll hit your rate limits and see cascade failures. Pre-warm the cache before your sale starts.

30 Days Out: Content Freeze & Monitoring

Freeze non-critical deploys

The worst Black Friday outages almost always trace back to a deploy that shipped the week before. Set a hard freeze on non-critical changes 30 days out. Only security patches and sale-specific content updates should go live.

Set up synthetic monitoring

A real-user monitoring tool catches problems after customers hit them. Synthetic monitoring catches problems before. Set up checks on: homepage, category pages, product pages, cart, checkout, order confirmation. Alert on response times above 3s, not just on outright failures.

Verify inventory syncing under load

A product going oversold during a flash sale is almost always an inventory sync race condition that doesn't surface at normal traffic. Talk to your platform or ERP integration about concurrency behavior before the sale, not during.

7 Days Out: Final Checks

SSL expiration

Check every certificate in your stack. SSL expiring on Black Friday morning has happened to more stores than you'd believe. Set calendar reminders for 90, 30, and 7 days before any certificate expires.

Third-party dependencies

Your site depends on dozens of external scripts: analytics, chat, reviews, advertising pixels, A/B testing. Any one of them going slow makes your whole site look slow. Audit third-party script performance with Chrome DevTools. Consider a tag manager with timeout limits.

Payment processor status

Stripe, PayPal, Square — all have had Black Friday incidents. Make sure you have a backup payment method configured and that your checkout gracefully handles processor errors rather than showing a generic "something went wrong" page.

Day Of: The Runbook

Have a written runbook with specific people assigned to specific problems. Who responds if the site goes down? Who decides to disable a third-party script if it's slowing everything? Who monitors payment processor status? Don't try to figure this out at 9 AM on Black Friday.

The Hidden Issues That Bite

In order of how often we see them cause trouble:

1. Redirect chains at scale — Fine at 100 requests, catastrophic at 100,000. Audit every 301.
2. Uncached GraphQL queries — Headless stores often skip caching on API calls that absolutely need it at peak.
3. Over-reliance on external reviews widgets — When Yotpo or Trustpilot slow down, your product pages hang.
4. Oversized product images not running through a CDN — One 4MB hero image multiplied by a spike kills bandwidth budgets.
5. Session-based cart storage — If sessions are in memory on a single server, autoscaling breaks carts.

The 5-Minute Pre-Flight Check

Right before your sale goes live, do these five things:

1. Run a fresh StoreVitals scan and confirm zero critical issues
2. Test checkout end-to-end with a real credit card (refund yourself)
3. Verify your discount code applies correctly at checkout
4. Confirm your analytics and conversion pixels are firing
5. Post a screenshot of your monitoring dashboard to your team channel so everyone's watching the same numbers

Then go sell something.