Holiday Website Checklist: 9 Fixes to Make Before Black Friday

Quick answer: Before Black Friday (November 27, 2026), make sure your website is fast on mobile, your hosting can handle a traffic spike, your checkout or contact forms work, your holiday hours and offers are updated everywhere (including Google Business Profile), and you have a backup and a plan if something breaks.

Whether you run an online store, a restaurant, a professional practice or a service business, the holidays bring more searches, more visits and less patience. A slow page, a broken form or wrong hours on Google can send a ready-to-buy customer straight to a competitor.

Here are nine fixes to make in the next two weeks.

1. Test your site speed on a phone

Most holiday browsing happens on mobile. Open your site on your own phone over cellular data, not office Wi-Fi. If it feels slow to you, it feels slower to a shopper. Compress large images and remove unused plugins or scripts. Read more about mobile responsiveness.

2. Make sure your hosting can handle a spike

A promotion that works can take a site down if the hosting is underpowered. Ask your host what happens when traffic doubles. Quality managed hosting is cheap insurance during your busiest season.

3. Run a real test purchase or form submission

Go through checkout or your contact form exactly as a customer would. Do you receive the notification? Does the confirmation email arrive? Do discount codes work? Check every payment option for e-commerce sites.

4. Update holiday hours everywhere

Update your website, Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook and Yelp. Google Business Profile lets you set special hours for holidays like Thanksgiving, so customers (and AI assistants) get accurate answers.

5. Put your offer front and center

If you have a holiday promotion, gift card or year-end deal, put it on the homepage, ideally above the fold, with a clear button. Better yet, send traffic to a focused landing page built for the offer.

6. Update plugins and take a full backup

Update your CMS, theme and plugins before the rush, not during it, then take a full backup you know how to restore. A website maintenance plan handles this for you year-round.

7. Check your SSL and security

Make sure the padlock shows on every page and your SSL certificate isn’t expiring in December. Shoppers won’t enter payment details on a page their browser flags as “Not secure.”

8. Plan your holiday emails

Your email list is the audience you own. Schedule a few well-timed emails: an early-access offer, a Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday message, and a year-end thank you. Here’s how email marketing can help.

9. Know who to call if something breaks

Write down who manages your website, hosting and domain, and how to reach them over a holiday weekend. If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that’s worth fixing now.