The sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday are breaking records in the US every year. E-commerce stores are making a lot of money on these shopping days. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales have seized the market by storm, both online and offline.
Websites are important for businesses today because they help them get leads, keep customers interested, and make money. Any lag in the website performance can significantly affect your business.
You can’t afford for your e-commerce store to go down, crash, or slow down during the Black Friday holiday season, when you plan to make the most profit on Black Friday.
To prevent the Black Friday and Cyber Monday website crashes, you need to optimize your website performance, prevent downtimes, and avoid losing sales. In this blog, we will explore these ways to prevent slowness and downtime on your website, helping you increase your conversions on big sales days.
Prevent Website Crashes On Black Friday & Cyber Monday
The slowness of your website directly causes you to lose your sales. If you think that website speed optimization for Black Friday is not that important, then these facts will be eye-opening for you:
- Website disruptions can cause a huge loss in finances. The Uptime Institute’s 2024 research says that 16% of outages cost businesses more than $1 million.
- A recent survey by Acronis found that more than 60% of downtime events cost businesses more than $100,000, which is up 39% since 2019.
So, don’t crash on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. Get ready ahead of time to do well.
1. Do Performance Tests Before The Big Day
Testing your performance is the best way to know if your e-commerce platform and its infrastructure can handle a web traffic spike or not. The goal of performance tests is to make the back end of your store work better.
Maybe you are unsure about how many visitors to expect, but doing a performance test with a good method will help you determine how many people your site can handle without crashing or slowing down. Moreover, you can find the area of optimization to prevent downtime.
Tips for Performance Testing – Avoid Website Crashes
To keep your website healthy and optimized, these steps are a must. It will not only prevent the website from crashing but also increase your black friday sale and provide better customer retention.
1. Keep Enough Time To Optimize
Don’t wait until Black Friday sales or a user complains about an outage or slowness. Keep a gap between the sale and testing your site performance. It takes time to fix performance problems. So, instead of preparing the performance test for your site in the final few days, do it ahead of time. Save enough time to fix any difficulties that come up. Also, get the test data and test environment ready ahead of time.
2. Check Third-Party Integrations Work
Check that all the different third-party connectors are up to date. You can see a big difference in how well your web store works when you keep your third-party integrations up to date. Make sure they can handle a lot of traffic at once, test them numerous times, and don’t add new features at the last minute.
3. Set Your Test Preferences According to Risk
You need to put the most important and necessary features for your business at the top of your list. The features that your visitors use the most when they shop on your site. The most important features for most online stores are user login, payment gateway, order processing, and shopping cart.
You need to put the most important and necessary features for your business at the top of your list. The features that your visitors use the most when they shop on your site. The most important features for most online stores are user login, payment gateway, order processing, and shopping cart.
4. Set Up Monitoring for the Site
Site monitoring can help you keep track of how well your store’s infrastructure is doing. There are tools that will assist you in keeping an eye on your site. Set up alerts and monitors to stay up to date on what’s going on in your store. You should keep a check on every part so that none of them can cause problems later. Also, check the database often by looking at the transactions, database indicators, and locks.
5. Check Out Loading Speed With The Actual Load
Be honest about how much traffic your site can handle. Try running loads that you think will happen throughout your holiday selling promotion. If you only test a small amount of stress, you won’t be ready for the real load during the Black Friday sales.
Test your site performance on different devices for actual monitoring. These load time metrics illustrate how crucial it is to optimize your website’s loading time-
- The BBC lost 10% of its users for every extra second it took for a page to load.
- Walmart experienced 2% boost in conversions with each 1-second page load improvement.
- Amazon found that every 100 ms delay costs them 1% loss in sales, approximately equal to $3.8 billion in annual revenue at today’s scale.
6. Enhance Mobile Shopping Experience
If you want to make more money from e-commerce sales, you need to make sure your store works well on mobile devices. Shoppers are more likely to shop on their mobiles and expect a fast-loading website. We live in a time when cellphones are reigning all over the world.
According to research data, half of the web traffic comes from mobile devices. In the last quarter of 2024, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 62.54 % of global website traffic.
7. Strengthen the Infrastructure of your Site
You can temporarily improve your site’s infrastructure to get ready for busy times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales when traffic goes up a lot. Thanks to cloud solutions, which are especially helpful for small e-commerce enterprises. In the case of optimized expenses and performance, you will find that the auto-scaling strategies are the best.
Test your site’s performance in an environment similar to the one used in production. The goal is to find out when your site will break. You should never test your site when a real customer is in the middle of making a transaction.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, when holiday sales like Black Friday & Cyber Monday are around the corner, you cannot afford website downtime and crashes. For this, you need to keep your site up-to-date with mobile-friendliness, security checkups, and loading speed to maximize sales. We have combined strategies and steps to take before the sale commences, helping you prevent website crashes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
FAQs
Q1. What can I do to prevent website crashes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Q2. Why do e-commerce sites go down on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Q3. How important is website speed during BFCM sales?
Q4. Should I buy cloud hosting to keep my BFCM downtime to a minimum?
Q5: When should I start getting my website ready for Black Friday traffic?
Q6. What are the most important parts to check for performance?
September 9, 2025
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Ishan Makkar
Ishan Makkar is the Founder of Website Speedy, a performance optimization platform dedicated to making websites faster, more user-friendly, and SEO-ready. With deep expertise in technical SEO and Core Web Vitals, Ishan helps businesses reduce bounce rates and deliver lightning-fast digital experiences.
