Black Friday is high-stakes for e-commerce. For small WordPress agencies managing dozens of client sites, it’s an operational stress test. Poor performance or checkout failures can result in lost revenue and reputational damage.
This checklist is for agencies managing WordPress and WooCommerce stores. It strips out generic advice and focuses only on what’s essential to keep sites stable and fast during Black Friday.
Black Friday readiness checklist for WordPress agencies
2–3 Weeks before sale (prep window)
Platform & plugin updates
- Update WordPress core, themes, and all active plugins.
- Confirm WooCommerce extensions are compatible with the latest core version.
- Test everything, especially checkout, subscriptions, and product variations.
- Log plugin versions and theme changes for rollback if needed.
Performance & server-side optimization
- 1. Benchmark homepage, product page, cart, and checkout flows.
- 2. Reduce bloat by unloading unused scripts, disabling animations, or disabling sliders on mobile.
- 3. Enable full-page caching and object caching (Redis or Memcached).
- 4. Audit and clean auto-loaded options in wp_options (especially transients).
CDN & asset delivery
- Verify CDN is actively serving assets.
- Enable image optimization (WebP/AVIF), minify, and defer non-critical JS/CSS.
- Purge and rewarm key pages.
Schema & SEO
- Validate schema on product pages with Google’s Rich Results tool.
- Update Open Graph and Twitter card metadata for sale promotion.
1 Week before sale (freeze & final prep)
Code & content freeze
- Freeze deployments. No new features, styling changes, or plugin installs.
- Disable in-dashboard file editing in wp-config.php.
- Lock down SFTP and cPanel access unless strictly needed.
Inventory & commerce setup
- Finalize discount codes and promo logic.
- Validate stock levels and syncing from any external inventory system.
- Confirm shipping methods, rates, and delivery cutoff info are visible.
- Disable out-of-stock add-to-cart functionality if needed.
Payment gateways
- Run sandbox and live test transactions for all active gateways.
- Confirm 3DS/SCA flows on Stripe, Klarna, etc.
- Verify success pages, emails, and logs for order status consistency.
Transactional emails
- Test order confirmation, shipping notice, password reset, and refund emails.
- Whitelist email sending domains and review deliverability in Mailgun/Postmark.
- Replace vague default copy (e.g., “Thanks for your order”) with sale-specific messaging.
Monitoring and backup
- Set up uptime, response-time, and error monitoring for every site.
- Schedule full-site backups nightly, DB backups hourly.
- Run one full test restore and verify: login, product catalog, order history, and user data.
- Store backup logs and timestamps in a centralized doc for internal reference.
24–48 Hours before Black Friday
Final QA
- Purge and pre-warm all caches for high-traffic URLs.
- Confirm promo banners, timers, and callouts display correctly on all devices.
- Disable resource-heavy plugins not needed for the sale, such as chat widgets, sliders, or pop-ups.
- Run a final cross-browser test for the mobile checkout flow.
Redundancy & access
- Create a read-only admin account for emergency access.
- Rotate API keys if shared insecurely during dev/testing.
- Create an alternate static fallback homepage if needed (simple HTML version).
Team readiness
- Assign coverage shifts, with timezone, role, and comms channel.
- Create a war-room Slack/Discord/Teams channel for live ops.
- Write 3–5 canned responses for clients before the sale’s live:
- Minor slowdown
- Major outage
- Plugin conflict
- Gateway failure
- Order anomalies
Black Friday: live day
Real-time ops
Monitor error logs, uptime, and page speed in real time (especially checkout and payment endpoints).
Run a low-value or coupon-based test order every 2–3 hours.
Watch abandoned cart rates and spikes in “order failed” statuses.
Incident response
Triage rules:
- If it’s breaking checkout, fix it immediately.
- If it’s cosmetic: log and defer.
- If unsure: rollback, then debug. Use the pre-written status messages for clients you prepared a couple of days before. Communicate internally first, externally fast.
Log everything
- Start a timestamped issue log:
- The time the incident started
- Who responded
- What was done
- Client impact
- Resolution time
Cyber Monday
Continuity
- Keep monitoring: Cyber Monday often sees higher midday traffic than Friday.
- Swap promo codes and adjust banners as needed.
- Re-check payment gateways, especially if traffic was heavy or errors occurred on Friday.
Post-sale prep
- Set expiry dates for coupons and remove sale-only plugins/scripts.
- Review support tickets for common problems (returns, shipping, failed payments).
- Start drafting post-mortem notes while issues are fresh.
Post-sale: within 48 hours
- Client reporting
- Create short reports for each client with:
- Total orders
- Uptime and performance
- Any issues + what was done
- Recommendations for improvement
Automate client reporting
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Technical cleanup
- Clear expired promotions, flush caching rules, and remove temporary redirects.
- Rotate access credentials if any were shared or used during incident resolution.
- Archive logs, store all monitoring/export data, and close down war-room comms channels.
Internal review
- What broke?
- What nearly broke?
- What surprised you?
- What process saved your ass?
- Turn those into documentation. Update your internal SOPs and prep next year’s checklists.
Conclusion
If you’re managing dozens of WordPress and WooCommerce sites, you can’t rely on instinct or last-minute fixes. You need systems: clear timelines, backups that restore cleanly, monitoring that alerts before clients do, and a team that knows what happens when things go wrong.
Use this checklist as your base process. Refine it. Add your own tools. Run it like it’s client-critical, because it is. And if you need one place to monitor all your client sites, track performance, and get alerts before something breaks, WP Umbrella is built for that.
Up next, how to prepare WordPress Sites for Black Friday 2025.
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