How to get your website ready for Black Friday and Christmas

Christmas shopping doesn't wait for December. If you want your website pulling its weight this season, October is the month to get it ready, while there's still time to do it calmly.

Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November this year, with Cyber Monday on 30 November, and plenty of shops start their offers the week before. That leaves a little under eight weeks. Not long, but enough if you start now. Whether you sell online or you're a local business hoping for more festive bookings, here's what's worth doing first.

Start with speed and mobile

A lot of festive browsing happens on phones, often in a spare few minutes on the sofa or in a queue. If your pages are slow or fiddly on a small screen, people simply give up and buy somewhere else. Google has long encouraged site owners to focus on fast, mobile-friendly pages too, so this work helps you get found as well as helping you sell.

Quick wins you can do this week

• Shrink your images. Oversized photos are the most common reason small business sites feel sluggish.
• Remove what you don't use. Old plugins, apps and pop ups all add weight.
• Test on your own phone using mobile data, not your office wifi. That's how most customers will see it.
• Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, Google's free tool, and look at the top suggestions.

If the site is still slow after all that, the problem may be the build itself rather than the content. That's when it's worth talking to someone about web design properly, ideally in the new year rather than in the middle of your busiest weeks.

Make your offers easy to find

If you're running a festive offer, nobody should have to hunt for it. Put it on your homepage where it's visible without scrolling on a phone, and keep the wording short and clear.

It's also worth creating one dedicated page for your seasonal offers or gift ideas, with a simple address like /christmas-gifts/. Keep that same page and update it every year rather than making a new one each time. Over time it can build up its own place in search results, which is a quiet but useful SEO habit.

Get the practical details right

The unglamorous details are often what turns a browser into a buyer. People shopping for gifts want reassurance before they hand over their card.

Delivery dates and cut offs

Decide your last order date for Christmas delivery and show it clearly, both on product pages and in a banner. Check your courier's published last posting dates when they're announced, then add a day or two of buffer for yourself.

Opening hours

If you have a shop, studio or office, update your festive opening hours on your website and add special hours to your Google Business Profile for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. It stops wasted journeys and frustrated phone calls. If your profile needs some attention generally, my guide to getting found on Google Maps walks you through it.

Returns

If you're happy to offer a longer returns window for gifts, say so plainly near the add to basket button. It's a small thing that makes people far more comfortable buying for someone else.

Test your checkout

Place a real test order from start to finish on your phone. Check that payment works, that the confirmation email arrives and looks right, and that stock levels are accurate. Far better to find a problem now than on the busiest weekend of the year.

Plan your marketing now, not in December

The businesses that have a calm Christmas are usually the ones that planned in October. A little preparation now means you're not writing posts at midnight in the middle of the rush.

Email

Your email list is the one channel you fully own, so use it. A simple run of three or four emails works well for most small businesses: an early heads up, the launch of your offer, a last chance reminder, and a final note about your last order date.

Social media

Write and schedule your festive posts in advance. Gift ideas, behind the scenes glimpses of you packing orders, and reminders about delivery dates all work well, and they're easy to batch in a single afternoon.

Paid ads

If you're planning to run Google or Facebook ads, set them up and test them early. Competition for ad space tends to heat up in the run to Christmas, so it pays to know which ads work before the busiest weeks arrive. My paid ads page explains how I approach this for small budgets.

You don't have to discount to have a good Christmas

Black Friday isn't compulsory. For lots of small businesses, especially makers, independent shops and service providers, cutting prices just eats into margin you've worked hard for.

There are other ways to give people a reason to buy now:

• Free gift wrapping or a handwritten note
• Gift bundles that make choosing easier
• Gift vouchers, which are especially handy for service businesses
• Early booking for January, so you start the new year with work already lined up

Pick what suits your business and your customers, rather than following what the big retailers do.

A simple plan for the next few weeks

• Early October: check your speed and mobile experience, and test your checkout.
• Mid to late October: build your offer or gift page, write your emails, and update your Google Business Profile hours.
• Early November: schedule your social posts and emails, and get any ads set up and tested.
• Black Friday week: keep an eye on your site and reply to messages quickly.
• December: make your last order date impossible to miss, then switch your focus to gift vouchers and January.

You don't need to do everything on this list. Even picking the top three will put you in a far better position than leaving it all until the last minute.