Black Friday falls on 27th November this year and Cyber Monday falls on the 30th November. That sounds like plenty of time. Well it will be here in no time, so let's prepare now.

Every year we see the same pattern. Marketing plans the campaign in August, the creative lands in October, and the hosting gets thought about in the third week of November, usually when someone notices the checkout is slow. By then your options are limited and your stress levels aren't.

The good news is that Black Friday is far less dramatic than it was four or five years ago. More stores upgrade and scale up in advance, and sales now run over days or weeks rather than a single day. But a calm Black Friday still comes down to preparation. Our team is in 9:30 to 17:00 through the lead-up, and weekend cover is lighter, focused on monitoring alerts and checking tickets, so the work you do up front is what really counts. Here are the ten things our hosting team works through with every client before peak. Start now and you'll have time to fix whatever you find.

1. Look back at last year's numbers

Before you plan for this year, find out what actually happened last time. Pull your peak traffic, peak orders per hour and slowest page load from last year's Black Friday weekend. Then add your growth since. If you did 2,000 orders an hour at peak and the business has grown 30%, you need to be ready for at least 2,600. We'd plan for double your expected peak, because a single influencer post or a well-timed email can blow any forecast apart.

2. Load test your site, properly

A load test is the closest thing you'll get to a Black Friday rehearsal. Simulate real customer journeys, not just the homepage: browsing categories, searching, adding to basket and checking out. Checkout and search are where stores usually fall over, because they can't be cached. Run the test against a staging environment that mirrors production, and run it again after you fix whatever breaks.

3. Check your capacity and scaling

Once you know your expected peak, check your hosting can actually handle it. Some setups, typically on AWS or another cloud platform, include auto scaling, which adds front-end servers as traffic climbs. If yours does, make sure it's configured for how your store behaves: new servers take minutes to spin up and warm, which is too slow for a sudden spike at 00:01, so schedule extra capacity in advance for known peaks rather than waiting for the alarms. Check your account limits too, because hitting an instance cap mid-sale is a painful way to find out it exists.

Most stores don't have auto scaling, and that's fine. The equivalent step is to review your hosting package and ask whether it's sized for your Black Friday peak, not your average Tuesday. If it isn't, moving up a package (or adding resources for the peak period) is far easier to arrange in October than in the middle of a sale.

It's also worth putting Cloudflare in front of your site if you haven't already. Serving cached pages and static assets such as images, CSS and JavaScript from Cloudflare's network takes a big share of the load off your server, leaving more capacity for the requests only your server can handle, like search and checkout.

4. Warm your caches before the doors open

Full-page caching (such as Varnish) and object caching (such as Redis) do the heavy lifting on busy days. A cold cache means every early visitor hits the database directly, just when traffic is arriving fastest.

Run a cache warm-up after any deployment or flush, prioritising your homepage, top categories and Black Friday landing pages. And agree in advance who is allowed to flush the cache during peak. The answer should be "almost nobody".

Be careful how you warm, though. Some tools, such as the preload feature in WP Rocket, crawl thousands of URLs in quick succession, which can spike server load as badly as real traffic. Warm the pages that matter most rather than the whole site, keep the crawl rate sensible, and do it well before your busiest hours.

5. Agree a code freeze

The riskiest thing you can do in November is release new code. Agree a freeze date with your developers, marketing team and any third parties, and stick to it.

We recommend freezing at least a week before Black Friday and holding until after Cyber Monday. Get urgent fixes and promo logic in before the freeze, then test everything once more.

6. Audit your third-party scripts

Tag managers, chat widgets, review plugins, personalisation tools, payment and fraud services: each one adds load time and a possible point of failure. Remove anything you're not actively using. For the rest, know what happens if one goes down.

Does your checkout still work if a review widget times out? Find out now rather than on the day.

7. Check your security and bot protection

Peak trading attracts more than customers. Card testing, credential stuffing and aggressive scraping all rise around big sales, and bad bots eat the same server capacity your customers need.

Make sure security patches are up to date before the code freeze, your WAF and bot management rules are tuned, and rate limiting is in place on login, basket and checkout.

8. Prepare for the worst-case scenario

Hope for the best, but write down what you'll do if things go wrong. Confirm your backups are running and that you've actually tested a restore. Have a branded holding page ready to switch on if you need to queue traffic. Decide in advance at what point you'd pause a promotion or email send to protect the site.

9. Know your support and monitoring cover

The worst time to find out what your hosting support includes is in the middle of an incident. Check now how you raise an urgent issue (with us, that's through a support ticket rather than a phone line), what hours the team is working, and what cover looks like overnight and at weekends. Server monitoring typically means alerts and a response if your site or server goes down, but not if it's simply running slowly under load, so be clear on which situations are covered and which your own team will need to handle.

Then write a one-page contact sheet for your own side: your development partner, your payment provider, and the internal decision-maker who can approve changes. Share it with everyone on shift, and make sure they know how to raise a support ticket with the details needed to pick it up quickly: the URL affected, what's going wrong, and when it started.

10. Monitor in real time, and keep notes

Set up dashboards and alerts for the things that matter: response times, error rates, server load, checkout conversion and payment failures. Make sure alerts go to someone who's awake. Then keep a simple log over the weekend of what happened and when. It'll be the most useful document you have when planning next year.

Start now, sleep on Black Friday

None of this is glamorous, but all of it is the difference between a record weekend and a very long night. The earlier you start, the more of these you can tick off calmly, and the more time you'll have to fix what the load test turns up.

The Nublue team has been keeping high-traffic stores online through peak since 2005. If you'd like a second pair of eyes, we offer a free pre-peak hosting health check. We'll review your infrastructure, hosting package, caching and scaling setup, and give you a clear list of what to fix before November.