Black Friday Preparation Checklist for Online Stores

Black Friday is the biggest stress test of the year for your eCommerce stack.
With unpredictable demand, high expectations, and tight competition, one thing matters above all: technical readiness.

This is the moment when your caching, scalability, and performance setup will either make you shine or slow you down. Let’s make sure you’re fully ready for the spike.

So what do you need to prepare?

1. Check your hosting before it’s too late

Your hosting environment is the backbone of your Black Friday success. If it’s not ready, nothing else matters.

• Upgrade your hosting plan. Make sure you have enough CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to handle the surge. With Hypernode, you can scale up instantly before the rush.

• Run a stress test. Simulate heavy traffic to see how your store performs under pressure. Identify weak points early slow queries, timeouts, or caching gaps and fix them before customers arrive.

• Monitor resource limits. Keep an eye on memory and CPU Usage. Use Hypernode Insights to see all the bottle-necks and lacking resources in one single place. Looks like you need more resources? Take an action and upgrade now instead of on Black Friday itself.

💡 Pro tip: Don’t wait until traffic spikes to scale. Hosting upgrades are smooth before Black Friday, not during it.

2. Caching is everything

Caching can make or break your Black Friday performance. Without it, even the best hosting setup will struggle.

• Enable full-page caching (Varnish, Fastly, or built-in Magento caching).

• Make sure marketing parameters (like UTM tags) are included in the cache. Otherwise, every campaign link bypasses it which kills performance and costs more server resources.

• Warm up your cache before promotions go live.

• Combine caching with compression and a CDN to reduce latency for global visitors.

A well-cached store can handle 10× more visitors with the same resources that’s performance you can feel in both speed and sales.

3. Speed and performance optimization

Fast pages convert. Slow pages don’t.

Before Black Friday, spend time making your site lean and efficient:

• Optimise large images and remove unnecessary extensions.

• Use GTMetrix or Real User Monitoring (RUMVision) to test your real-world performance.

• Watch your Core Web Vitals especially Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

• Test checkout performance from both desktop and mobile.

RUM data gives you real insights into where users experience lag helping you fix what actually matters before peak hours hit.

4. Security and backups

The more traffic you get, the more attention you attract from customers and from bots.
Before Black Friday, tighten your security setup:

• Enable HTTPS across your entire site and confirm your SSL certificates are valid.

• Keep your CMS, extensions, and PHP version updated.

• Use a firewall and strong access controls for admin areas.

• Schedule automatic daily backups and verify that they can be restored quickly if needed.

Your store should be prepared to handle both high demand and unexpected incidents without downtime.

5. Final Pre-launch checklist

Before your campaigns go live, make sure every technical box is checked:

☑️ Hosting plan upgraded
☑️ Cache and CDN configured
☑️ Marketing parameters cached
☑️ Stress tests passed
☑️ SSL and DNS renewed
☑️ Backups verified
☑️ Monitoring tools active

When this list is complete, your eCommerce store is ready to perform at full power.

Make this your smoothest Black Friday yet

Black Friday shouldn’t be stressful not when your hosting is ready for it.
At Hypernode, we build high-performance Magento and Shopware hosting that’s made for peak-traffic events like this.

From advanced caching and scalable plans to powerful developer tools, Hypernode keeps your store fast, secure, and stable when it matters most.

🚀 Book your free hosting consult