How Web Engineers Should Prepare Websites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Tags: blackfriday, webdev, templatemonster, tutorial
Published: 2022-11-21 17:02:18

The busy Thanksgiving shopping season is just around the corner. It means web developers and business owners should prepare their websites for the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday promo campaigns. Many customers are anticipating the start of Black Friday sale campaigns to grab epic deals and discounts from their favourite brands. To the biggest degree, it’s all about preparing your eCommerce website to handle loads of online orders. A lot of work involved in getting ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Most of this job should be handled by the web development teams managing your website. Choosing the best website templates to upgrade a website in style is also part of the process.

So, how exactly should web developers and engineers prepare their websites for the year's biggest sale? Let’s find it out.  

## Update your website with a Black Friday theme 

Choosing the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday themes for your website is essential to the preparation process. There are many ready-made designs that multiple niche-specific businesses can use to add a special vibe to their online projects. Depending on the company's goals, the update can be applied only to a landing page design or simply replacing the regular banner ads and popups with visuals promoting Black Friday deals. 

Let’s consider good and bad examples of websites featuring Black Friday and Cyber Monday designs.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/z37lwe8fpr9skgmt3z66.jpeg)


And here is an [example](https://www.templatemonster.com/landing-page-template/cyber-monday-landing-page-template-274811.html?utm_campaign=blog_site_blackfriday2022&utm_source=dev&utm_medium=referral) of the website that should have worked more on creating the Black Friday campaign.  It’s a ready-made design for a landing page, which you can use to promote the hottest deals in your electronic store. The design looks vibrant and catchy. The products are well-organized within the theme’s layout. 

And here is an example of the website that should have worked more on creating the Black Friday campaign. It’s poorly designed and doesn’t communicate the message clearly, making it more likely that people will leave the website without trying to figure out the deal. 


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2hf4w3fx79yfp2x2gfc9.jpeg)

## Be ready for traffic spikes
The start of Black Friday promo campaigns commonly leads to huge traffic spikes over the entire Thanksgiving weekend. Engineers should ensure their websites can handle this. If they can’t, servers can get overwhelmed. It can significantly affect your website’s performance and multiple lost sales. To prevent this, engineers should ensure their websites handle large traffic. They should provide web users with a seamless shopping experience regardless of the number of users browsing the inventory and placing orders simultaneously. Before the sales season begins, webmasters should contact web hosts to determine the traffic limitations and upgrade the plan whenever needed. 

## Improving the website’s security

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2fcosu2v9j5qill32uw0.jpeg)

It’s no surprise that increased interest in your company’s Black Friday campaigns can increase the risk of phishing schemes. People should be assured they can safely share their details while ordering any Black Friday specials from your website. Web engineers should ensure users their data is in good hands. 

There are several ways to do so. 

- First of all, these are SSL certifications that help you improve your website’s security. You can protect your website’s data from scammers by encrypting communication between your website’s servers and users’ browsers. 
- Besides using SSL, companies can consider implementing other approaches to defend their content, including setting up firewalls, captchas, and safe checkout pages. 

## Ensure the website looks good on mobile devices


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6ez7ju6u6swobck0cc6a.jpeg)

More than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. In 2021, mobile shoppers generated 40% of all sales during the holiday season. Such numbers indicate the importance of making your website fully adaptive to all types of smartphones and tablets. A company can lose up to 50% of Black Friday sales if it doesn’t run smoothly on mobile devices. 

How can engineers optimize their websites for mobile devices? First of all, one should ensure the website is fully responsive. Besides making your website look stunning on all screen sizes, responsiveness helps you improve your website’s SEO. It can help you improve your website’s ranking in search engines, making your Black Friday deals more findable to a larger community of users. 

## Improve website load speeds


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gzct12zklb4oceyex2um.jpeg)

Do you know how long it takes for your website’s content to load? [Researches show](https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/building-websites/website-load-time-statistics/) that 25% of customers quit web pages that do not load within 4 seconds. If you haven’t checked your website’s loading speeds recently, now it’s the best time to do it. [Google PageSpeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev) can come in handy for this purpose. 

If you figure out your website’s loading should be improved, you can take the following steps: 

- Resize images;
- Cache web pages;
- Get rid of the plugins you do not use. 

## Pay more attention to testing


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6457blvr9g3jra85rj8n.jpeg)

You cannot be 100% confident that you won’t miss any opportunity on sales on your website unless you test everything carefully. Web engineers should ensure there are no bugs or errors on the website. It’s important to test the website’s performance in all web environments, responsiveness, load times, etc. Everything should be running smoothly. 

## Analyze data


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/un3noxb0pwa9td6hun6x.jpeg)

Web engineers should consider this last but not least important point while preparing for Black Friday. It’s more like a technical part but cannot be neglected. 

Using tools like [SQL](https://www.codecademy.com/resources/docs/sql?utm_source=ccblog&utm_medium=ccblog&utm_campaign=cyberweek_2021&utm_content=how_engineers_prepare_websites_cyber_monday_blog) and [Python](https://www.codecademy.com/resources/docs/python?utm_source=ccblog&utm_medium=ccblog&utm_campaign=cyberweek_2021&utm_content=how_engineers_prepare_websites_cyber_monday_blog), web engineers can clearly understand their target audiences, users’ interests and online behavior. Such results can be further used for fine-tuning your website to deliver a better experience to your audience. It doesn’t mean you should only mind testing and improving your website during the busy shopping season. You should improve your website to deliver exceptional UI/UX to your clients all year round. 


Web engineers should take several major steps when preparing websites for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Suppose you are looking for a quick solution on how to update your website with a Black Friday or Cyber Monday design. In that case, you can always rely on website templates and creative digital assets intended to provide your customers with an unforgettable shopping experience this Thanksgiving.