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For online stores heading into peak season

Your Black Friday website checklist. For a store that stays up and keeps selling.

On the biggest revenue days of the year, the failures that cost the most are the ones uptime tools cannot see. This is the checklist to run before the rush, and what to watch right through it.Black Friday is 27 November 2026. That is 37 days to get your store ready.

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01 · The stakes

Same failures, ten times the cost

A store can answer every request with a 200 status and still be haemorrhaging orders. On Black Friday, these are the ones that hurt.

The payment script that breaks mid-rush

Peak traffic, a theme or plugin update, and one provider's checkout script quietly stops loading. Orders still trickle in, so nothing looks wrong, while everyone who wanted that option leaves.

The discount that misfires

The code does not apply and customers bounce, or the sale price never reverts and you keep discounting long after the weekend is over. Either way it is money, at your highest-volume moment.

Order emails that hit spam

A sender-reputation dip on your busiest hour and confirmation emails stop landing. Customers do not complain, they just open a support ticket asking where their order is.

Uptime said 200 OK the whole time.

02 · Checklist

The Black Friday website checklist

Everything worth checking before the weekend, and the TLDTrack check that keeps watching it for you.

01

Before the rush

  • Your store holds up under a traffic spike

    Uptime monitoring checks every 5 minutes, with retry logic tuned for e-commerce edges so a transient blip does not page you for nothing.

  • No SSL certificate expires mid-sale

    Certificate and renewal tracking warns you well before anything lapses.

  • Your DNS is stable and unchanged

    DNS monitoring compares your A, AAAA, MX, NS, CNAME and TXT records every 3 hours and alerts on any change through the peak.

  • You run a security scan before you open the doors

    Security scans check ports, TLS and known vulnerabilities on demand.

  • Your store is fast enough to convert

    PageSpeed monitoring tracks your homepage’s load performance weekly, so a slow store does not cost you the sale.
02

Checkout and payments

  • Your checkout still shows every payment option

    Visual monitoring screenshots your checkout page and compares it on every check, so a missing payment method is flagged on the next run.

  • Payment and tracking scripts are still present

    Content monitoring alerts when a payment or analytics script you name disappears from a page.

  • Your cart and checkout APIs are healthy

    Service monitors run health checks on carts, checkout endpoints and subdomains separately from the storefront, each with its own uptime record.
03

Prices and promos

  • The sale price actually shows on product pages

    Visual monitoring and content checks watch the real price shown on a product page, not just that the page loads.

  • Promotions start and end on schedule

    Visual monitoring flags when promo copy or prices change, or stay the same past the date they should change.

  • Prices revert cleanly after the sale

    Visual monitoring catches the product pages still selling at Friday's price the following week.
04

Order emails

  • Confirmation emails actually reach the inbox

    Email deliverability testing checks a real message sent from your store for authentication, reverse DNS, blacklists and content problems.

  • SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass

    DMARC monitoring checks your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records daily and alerts when one is removed or weakened.
05

After the sale (Cyber Monday cleanup)

  • Sale banners and countdowns come down

    Visual monitoring and brand checks show you the pages that still look mid-sale days later.

  • Nothing is left looking off-brand or out of date

    Brand consistency checks every page against your brand kit so leftover campaign styling gets flagged.

  • Expired promos and prices are fully reverted

    Visual monitoring gives you a clear before-and-after on the pages that matter.

03 · Agencies

Running Black Friday for many client stores?

Watch every client store from one dashboard through the whole weekend, with alerts filtered by type and severity for each person and channel. No installation, no code on their storefronts.

See TLDTrack for agencies

04 · How it works

Set it up now, not on the day

01

Add your store

Drop in your domain and TLDTrack reads your DNS, mail setup and certificate automatically. Nothing to install.

02

Switch on the checks you need

Every module toggles on or off. Baselines settle in over the days before the weekend, so drift stands out clearly on the day.

03

Get alerts where you work

Email, SMS, mobile push, Slack, Microsoft Teams or webhook, naming exactly what changed and where, so you fix it before customers notice.

05 · Trust

UK built by a working web agency

500+

websites monitored

Cyber Essentials Certified

Cyber Essentials certified

ICO Registered

ICO registered

06 · Questions

Frequently asked questions

When should I set up monitoring before Black Friday?

As early as you can, and at least a couple of weeks ahead. TLDTrack learns a baseline of how your pages, prices and checkout normally look, so the earlier it is watching, the more clearly a Black Friday change stands out. Setting it up on the day still helps, but you lose the head start.

Will monitoring slow my store down during peak traffic?

No. Every check runs from TLDTrack's own infrastructure. We visit your pages the way a customer would; we never add scripts or weight to your storefront, so nothing you do here costs you speed on the day.

Does it work with Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build?

Yes. TLDTrack monitors from the outside, so it works with any platform: Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or fully custom. There is nothing to install and no code to add.

What about Cyber Monday and the rest of the weekend?

Monitoring runs on its normal schedule all weekend, so the whole Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch is covered, not just the Friday. The cleanup section of the checklist is there for the days after, when leftover banners and un-reverted prices tend to linger.

Can I watch competitor pricing over the weekend too?

Only by adding the competitor’s site to your account as one of your monitored websites. Visual and price monitors work on pages of the sites in your account, and each site counts toward your plan limit.
Mark Grice, founder of TLDTrack

Mark Grice, founder of TLDTrack. Runs FullyCoded, a Cornwall web agency, and built this to keep 500+ client sites in front of him every day.

What happens next

Go into Black Friday knowing you'll hear about problems first

Do it yourself

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Start a free trial and put your checkout, prices, order emails and infrastructure under watch before the rush.

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Talk it through

Arrange a call with Mark

If you would rather talk through how this works across every site you look after, we can go through it together.

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Selling online all year? See TLDTrack for e-commerce stores.