Black Friday 2026

Black Friday Checklist for WooCommerce Stores

Black Friday is November 27. Most of what breaks that weekend can be caught now: a slow checkout, a coupon that won't apply, bots testing stolen cards, a backup nobody has ever restored.

This is the list we work through on the stores we look after. Finish it before your freeze date, then stop changing things until the weekend is over.

Not sure where to start? Run a free scan to see your store's speed and security in about a minute.

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Speed and capacity

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Test your speed on your phone, on the homepage, a product page and checkout. If checkout drags, fix that first.
Use a real phone on mobile data, not your office Wi-Fi. A slow product page or checkout costs more sales than a slow homepage. Why your WooCommerce store is slow
Ask your host if your plan can handle a traffic spike, and what happens if you go over.
Some plans slow down or shut off a site that goes over its limits. Ask whether they add capacity on their own, or whether you need to ask ahead of time. Hosting built for sale traffic
Make sure cart, checkout and My Account are never cached. A cached cart breaks orders and can show one shopper someone else's cart.
Most caching setups skip these pages by default, but custom rules and CDN settings can override that. Ask whoever set up your caching to confirm. Caching that respects the cart
Remove plugins you don't use. Each one adds weight, and a deactivated plugin can still be attacked.
Deactivate first, wait a day to make sure nothing broke, then delete. Fewer plugins also means fewer updates to test before the freeze.

Checkout and payments

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Place a real test order on your phone and on desktop, start to finish, as a new customer.
Use a real card and refund it after, since test mode skips the parts that break. Try it as a guest, with a coupon, and with Apple Pay or Google Pay if you offer them.
Test every Black Friday coupon before you send the email that announces it.
Check the start and end dates, the minimum spend, which products it leaves out, and whether it stacks with other coupons or sale prices.
Schedule your sale prices, then check they turn on and off on time. Scheduled sales follow your store's time zone, which may not be yours.
Check the time zone in your WordPress settings, then look at a sale product right after the start time to confirm the price changed.
Check stock levels on your sale items. Turn on stock tracking so you can't sell what you don't have.
Overselling a deal means refunds, apology emails and bad reviews in the busiest week of the year.
Check shipping rates and cutoff dates for the holiday rush.
Post the last day to order for delivery by Christmas, and show it on product pages and at checkout, not only in an email.
Confirm order emails arrive, for you and the customer, and don't land in spam.
Send test orders to a Gmail and an Outlook address. If either lands in spam, set your store up with a proper email sending service.
Warn your payment processor if you expect a big jump in sales. A sudden spike can trigger a review or a hold on your payouts.
Contact them ahead of time if you'll run far more volume than usual, and make sure your refund policy and contact details are easy to find on your site.
Check that sales show up in your analytics. If purchase tracking is broken, you won't know which emails and ads paid off.
Place a test order, then look for it in your analytics and ad accounts the same day.

Fake orders and fraud

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Turn on your payment provider's fraud screening. On Stripe, that's Radar. On PayPal, check the fraud protection settings.
The default rules are a starting point. Review them before the weekend, not after the first wave of chargebacks.
Put a bot check on checkout, sign-up and login. It stops bots from running stolen cards through your store.
Bots don't only use the checkout page. Cover every way to pay, including Apple Pay, Google Pay and the saved-card page in My Account.
Limit how many orders one visitor can try. A real customer doesn't place 40 orders in five minutes.
Limit by IP address and by email address, and turn away cards that fail again and again.
Look at the last 30 days of failed orders. A burst of them from random names means bots have already found you.
Look for many small orders, made-up names and email addresses, and failures minutes apart. How to stop card testing
Review big orders before you ship them. Billing and shipping addresses that don't match, and rush shipping on expensive items, are common signs of a stolen card.
A chargeback costs you the product, the shipping and a fee. Holding a suspicious order for a day costs far less.

Security and backups

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Update WooCommerce, your plugins and your theme. Test on a staging copy first.
Do it a week or two before your freeze, not the night before, so problems show up while there's still time to fix them. How we test updates before they go live
Review your admin users. Remove anyone who no longer needs access, and turn on two-factor login.
Check shop manager accounts too, and everyone with access to your hosting and payment accounts.
Check what loads on your checkout page. Remove old tracking scripts and anything you don't recognize. Card skimmers hide there.
Every script on checkout can read what customers type. If no one on your team knows what a script does, find out before the weekend. How we protect checkout
Confirm you have a recent off-site backup, and that someone has restored one. A backup you've never restored is a guess.
Off-site means not on the same server as your store. Know how long a restore takes, because on Black Friday every hour down costs real money.

Before the big weekend

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Pick a freeze date (we use November 20). After it, no updates or changes unless something breaks.
Changes need a few days to show their problems. Anything that has to change after the freeze goes to staging first.
Set up an uptime monitor that texts you. Have it check checkout, not just the homepage.
A homepage can load fine while checkout is broken, and an email alert is easy to miss on a holiday weekend.
Decide who's on call Thursday through Monday, and how they'll know something's wrong.
Write down who can make changes, who can approve refunds and who calls the host, with a phone number for each.
Save your payment processor's and host's support numbers where you can find them fast.
Note your account ID or PIN too. Most support lines ask for it before they'll help.
Write answers to the questions you'll get most. Shipping cutoffs, returns, order changes and "Where's my order?"
Put them in your FAQ and in saved replies, so a busy day doesn't mean slow answers.

During the weekend

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Check orders and failed payments twice a day. A spike in failures is your early warning.
Look for failed payments, orders stuck in Pending payment and orders that never reached Processing. Each one points to a different problem.
Watch your speed in your busiest hours. If pages slow down when traffic peaks, call your host before it turns into downtime.
Check from your phone during your email sends and the evening rush, when traffic is highest.
Leave the store alone. Save the new ideas for January.
If something breaks, fix only that, and test it on staging first if you can.

After the weekend

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Write down what broke and what worked while you still remember. It's next year's checklist.
Note your busiest hour, which offers sold and any problems customers ran into.
Lift the freeze carefully. Run the updates you held back on staging first, then catch up in small batches.
Don't install a month of updates at once. If something breaks, you won't know which one did it.

Want us to run this list for you?

AssemblyWP looks after WooCommerce stores: speed, updates, security, fraud protection and monitoring, handled by a team that knows Woo. There's still time to get yours ready before the freeze.

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