Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas run-in are the highest-traffic, highest-revenue weeks of the year for most Australian retailers and service businesses — and also the weeks a slow or broken website costs the most money. September and October are exactly the right time to run this checklist, while there's still time to actually fix what you find.
1. Load-test before the traffic spike, not during it
Traffic during BFCM can be three to ten times a normal day. Test your site under simulated load now. A host or hosting plan that's 'fine' on a quiet Tuesday can fall over completely on the Friday you need it most.
2. Fix checkout friction
Every extra field, every forced account creation, every unclear shipping cost is a cart abandoned during peak season, when shoppers have a dozen other tabs open. Offer guest checkout, show shipping costs early, and keep the whole flow to as few steps as genuinely possible.
3. Confirm your conversion tracking actually works
Test Meta Pixel, Google Ads conversion tags and GA4 e-commerce events end-to-end with a real test purchase. Broken tracking during your biggest ad spend of the year means flying blind on what's actually working.
4. Mobile is where most of your traffic will be
BFCM traffic skews heavily mobile. Actually check out on a phone yourself — slow taps, tiny buttons, and forms that are painful on mobile cost real sales during your highest-traffic weeks.
5. Get stock, shipping cut-offs and sold-out states right
Nothing erodes trust faster than adding something to cart only to find it's out of stock at checkout. Make sure inventory syncs in real time, and publish clear shipping cut-off dates for Christmas delivery well before the panic-buying period starts.
6. Prepare your promo and landing pages early
Build and test Black Friday and Christmas landing pages in advance, including how discount codes apply and display. Launching untested promo logic on the day itself is a common, entirely avoidable source of lost sales and support tickets.
7. Plan for a support surge
Peak season means peak enquiries. An AI chatbot handling order-status and shipping questions, or at minimum a clear, visible FAQ and contact path, keeps support volume manageable without slowing genuine sales conversations.
8. Back everything up before you touch anything
Take a full backup before any pre-season changes. If something breaks during a last-minute fix in November, you want a fast way back to a known-good state — not a scramble.
Start now, not in November
Every item here needs time to test properly — rushed fixes the week before Black Friday create their own risk. If you want your site properly stress-tested and peak-season ready, our web design and development team in Sydney can run this audit for you — book a pre-season review before the rush starts.