Before Black Friday and Christmas, make sure your website is ready for the extra visitors. Our pre-Christmas checklist covers speed, forms, tracking, mobile, opening hours, delivery cut-offs and offer pages.
Black Friday falls on 27 November this year, and for many small businesses the weeks that follow bring the most visitors, the most enquiries and the least time to fix anything. If a form stops sending or your Christmas hours are wrong on Google, you may not find out until the quiet week after Boxing Day.
Most of the problems we find before the busy season are cheap to fix if you catch them early. This is the checklist we run through with clients in early November. It covers the website itself, so wherever visitors come from, the site does its job when they land.
1. Check speed with real-world data
Know the targets. Google's Core Web Vitals measure three things. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) should be 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should be 0.1 or less. Each is judged at the 75th percentile of visits, on mobile and desktop separately, so most visitors need a good experience, not just those with the newest phones.
Use field data first. Run your homepage, your best-selling pages and your contact page through PageSpeed Insights. Where your site has enough traffic, the top section shows real Chrome users over the previous 28 days. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console groups similar pages, which makes a slow template easy to spot.
Allow for the 28-day window. Because field data covers four weeks, a fix made in mid-November will only be partly reflected by Black Friday. Make changes early.
Watch the seasonal extras. Christmas adds weight: a big festive hero image, a promotional bar, a pop-up and a few new tracking tags. Check each one before it goes live.
- Never lazy-load the main image at the top of the page, as it delays LCP. Compress it and serve it at the size it is displayed.
- Give images width and height attributes, and reserve space for any banner that appears at the top of the page. Content that pushes the page down as it loads is a common cause of poor CLS.
- Remove tags and scripts you no longer use. Every widget, pixel and plugin adds code the browser has to download and run.
2. Test every form and the checkout
A broken form is the most expensive fault a website can have, because the visitor has already decided to get in touch.
Submit every form yourself. Contact, quote, booking and newsletter forms, on a phone and a computer. Check the confirmation message appears and the notification email reaches an inbox someone actually reads over Christmas, not the spam folder.
Make forms quick to fill in on a phone. Use the correct field types and autocomplete values (such as email, tel and postal-code) so browsers can offer autofill and the right keyboard. Cut any field you don't need, and make error messages say exactly what to fix.
Place a real test order. Buy something cheap with a real card, then refund it. Try a discount code and each payment method, and check the order reaches whoever fulfils it.
Check the journey, not just the button. If visitors reach a page but rarely enquire, the problem is often the page rather than the form. Our guide to why high traffic does not always mean enquiries covers the usual causes.
3. Make sure analytics and tracking are recording
You will use data from the busiest weeks to plan next year, so fix tracking now rather than finding a gap in January.
Check your key events in GA4. In Google Analytics 4, form submissions, phone clicks, bookings and purchases should be marked as key events, GA4's name for conversions. Check under Admin > Data display > Events. A newly marked key event can take up to 24 hours to appear in standard reports.
Watch a test go through. When you test your forms and checkout, use Tag Assistant to turn on debug mode, then open DebugView in GA4 and watch each event arrive. If one never appears, it isn't being recorded.
Use a unique transaction ID for every order. GA4 removes duplicate purchases that share a transaction ID, so a customer refreshing the thank-you page isn't counted twice. Sending the same ID, or a blank one, for different orders can badly undercount sales.
Check your cookie banner. Make sure it works on mobile and passes consent choices to your tags correctly. The UK rules on analytics cookies changed in 2026, and our post on cookie consent for Google Analytics explains what that means for your site.
4. Use your site on a phone, properly
Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, and many of your visitors will be on their phones.
Do a full journey on a mid-range phone using mobile data. Find a product or service, read the delivery or pricing details, then enquire or check out. Anything that annoys you will annoy customers more.
Make the phone number tappable. It should be a tap-to-call link everywhere it appears.
Check buttons and links are easy to hit. The accessibility standard WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum target size of 24 by 24 CSS pixels, with exceptions for things like links in a sentence.
Don't cover the content. A cookie banner, promotional bar, chat bubble and pop-up can all appear at once on a small screen. Decide which ones earn their place in December.
Keep mobile content complete. If you hide information on mobile, use accordions or tabs rather than removing it.
5. Get your Christmas opening hours right everywhere
Wrong hours mean wasted trips, missed calls and poor reviews. This year Christmas Day falls on a Friday, the Boxing Day bank holiday moves to Monday 28 December, and New Year's Day is also a Friday.
Google Business Profile. Add special hours for each day that differs from normal. Google suggests confirming your hours for official holidays even if they are the same as usual, so customers know the information is accurate. Special hours cover closures of up to six days in a row. If you are closing for seven days or more, Google advises marking the business as temporarily closed instead.
Your website. Update the contact page, footer and any chat widget that promises a response time. If your site uses LocalBusiness structured data, you can mark seasonal hours with dates so they apply only over the holiday.
Set expectations for replies. If nobody will answer enquiries between Christmas and New Year, say so on your contact page and form confirmation message, with the date you'll reply.
6. Make delivery cut-offs impossible to miss
If you sell physical products, the big pre-Christmas question is "will it arrive in time?" If your site doesn't answer it clearly, customers will email you or buy elsewhere.
Set your dates from your couriers' dates. Royal Mail publishes its Christmas last posting dates each year, so check those and the dates for any courier you use. Work back, allow time for picking and packing, and set a last order date for each delivery option.
Show them where decisions are made. A delivery page alone is not enough. Put the cut-off on product pages, in the basket and at checkout, plus a slim site-wide banner sized so it doesn't shift the page.
Keep one source of truth. Store the dates in one place, such as a single content block, so every page stays consistent.
Plan what happens after the last date. Decide now what your messaging switches to once standard delivery has passed, such as express delivery, click and collect or gift vouchers, and who changes the banner on the day.
Be clear about returns. Online customers have a legal right to cancel up to 14 days after their order is delivered, without giving a reason. If you offer an extended Christmas returns window on top of that, spell out exactly which orders it covers and when it ends.
7. Prepare stock, offer and seasonal pages
Seasonal pages need to be live, findable and accurate before the traffic arrives.
Use a recurring address for recurring sales. Google's advice for Black Friday pages is to use the same URL every year, for example /sale/black-friday rather than /sale/2026/black-friday, and to create the page well before the sale so it has time to be found and indexed. Link to it from your homepage too.
Keep out-of-stock pages live. If a product sells out but is coming back, keep the page up, say clearly that it is out of stock and suggest alternatives. Update the availability in your product structured data too.
Match your Merchant Center data. If your products appear in Google Shopping or free listings, availability must match across your product page, structured data, checkout and product feed. Google disapproves products when they don't.
Keep offers honest. Under UK consumer law, mandatory charges belong in the price you show up front, not added later at checkout. A countdown timer that claims an offer is ending when it isn't is a banned practice, and "was" prices need to reflect a genuine previous price.
8. Lock things down before the rush
The weeks before Christmas are not the time for a redesign or a major plugin update.
- Agree a change freeze from mid-November, allowing only urgent fixes and planned content updates.
- Make sure backups are running and someone knows how to restore one.
- Check renewal dates for your domain, hosting and SSL certificate.
- Ask your host whether your plan can cope with a spike in visitors.
- Write down who to call if the site goes down over the holidays.
Your pre-Christmas website checklist
- Key pages tested in PageSpeed Insights, and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console reviewed
- Festive images, banners and pop-ups checked for speed and layout shift
- Unused tags, scripts and plugins removed
- Every form submitted on mobile and desktop, with notification emails arriving
- A real test order placed and refunded, including discount codes and each payment method
- GA4 key events checked, a test watched through DebugView and unique transaction IDs sent with every purchase
- Cookie banner working on mobile and passing consent choices correctly
- A full journey completed on a phone using mobile data
- Christmas hours set on Google Business Profile and updated on the website
- Delivery cut-offs shown on product pages, in the basket and at checkout
- A plan for what changes after the last delivery date
- Black Friday and Christmas pages live on recurring URLs and linked from the homepage
- Stock levels, prices and product feeds matching what the site shows
- Change freeze agreed, backups checked and renewal dates confirmed
Want a second pair of eyes on your site before the rush?
Our website team builds and looks after websites for UK businesses of all sizes. If you would like us to check your speed, forms, tracking and seasonal pages before Black Friday, book an initial discovery call and we will come back with a clear list of what to fix first. Prefer to talk? Call us on 01509 357412.
