Black Friday Site Speed Checklist

Let’s talk turkey

Thanksgiving is a time of tradition – colonial pilgrims, food and/or football-induced naps, and a mad rush to shop some of the best deals of the year. 2023 saw over 90 million Americans shop online on Black Friday, spending nearly $9 billion in the process. It’s a tense time for e-commerce operators, who find themselves with a stomachache – not just from too many sweet potatoes, but from the helpless feeling of relying on an often fragile digital ecosystem.

At Sandstone, we speak constantly about the impact of site speed on online sales success. A fast site builds trust, boosts inbound traffic from Google, and gets customers quickly and happily through your conversion funnel. The same best practices that work throughout the year should definitely be applied at peak times, but since it can be hard to focus on technical performance while you’re stressed about stocking inventory and tweaking the perfect creative content, we’ve put together a stress-free, practical checklist to get you through Cyber Week.

Run speed tests on your top products

You might be familiar with basic site speed tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. These are invaluable for measuring and improving the performance of your online store. A common mistake for Shopify stores is to run the speed test just on your site’s home page. While this will capture site-wide slowdowns (like defective scripts or misbehaving pixels), it’s also important to check all of the key pages in your conversion funnel for any page-specific issues. That hysterical new photo of a turkey modeling your latest product? Might not have been compressed before being uploaded to your PDP at the last minute.

Running tests on your top selling products (and especially any that you’re driving direct traffic to) is a quick way to sanity check your site’s performance where it matters most. Don’t forget to actually visit the pages in a browser too, in case there’s an issue that wouldn’t show up in a speed test (like an image that’s the wrong aspect ratio).

Pause any unnecessary pixels or tags

We often recommend a quarterly audit of the 3rd-party tracking pixels or tags installed on your shop, to make sure that you’re only loading the things you really need. So hopefully you’ve done that recently and your site is already lean. But if not, the week or two before a major sale is a great time to go through GTM or have a developer check your site code to make sure that only essential pixels are live.

There are a lot of moving pieces in an e-commerce business and it can be hard to keep track of who installed what plugin and which pixels are still active. A little bit of process can go a long way here. We recommend using a shared spreadsheet to track a complete list of all of the external plugins, pixels, and tags that your business is currently using, so that your entire team is up to speed and aware of what’s needed. You don’t need an over-eager developer accidentally turning off a crucial remarketing pixel for the sake of trying to save a few milliseconds. You also don’t want zombie plugins loading on every page of your site long after your contracts have expired.

Go easy on the assets, especially GIFs

You’re welcome to spend the after-dinner hours debating how to pronounce “gif” with your guests, but you don’t want your site visitors to be doing that while they’re waiting for your homepage to load. While GIF images can be fun and attractive assets, they are also some of the worst site speed offenders due to their typically large sizes.

If you’ve got a great GIF that you really want to use, make sure it’s properly lazy-loaded so that it doesn’t affect initial page load times. You might be surprised, but video is often a much more efficient file format to get a similar animation, and just as easy to display on your site. Plain old static images are fastest, but even then make sure you’re compressing raw assets so that the file sizes are manageable. A general rule is to prefer JPG to PNG for things like hero images.

Beware of plugin dependencies

It’s the busiest day of the online shopping year – for you, and for every one of those 3rd party plugins you’ve installed on your site. The last thing you need is for your site to go down just because that UGC widget you added is offline. Plugins and e-commerce shops are often a tangled web, but the best thing you can do is be prepared for an emergency. Work with a developer to simulate outages from any external services you rely on. You’ll at least want to have a branded error page ready to go in case of catastrophic issues. Of course, if Shopify itself goes down you might be in trouble. Good to have contingency plans ready to go and reviewed with your entire team, just in case!

If it ain’t broke…

As tempting as it can be to make everything pixel perfect in time for your store’s big closeup, the most effective (and stress-free) shops we’ve seen are very rigorous about enforcing a freeze on any site updates in the immediate leadup to big sales. Some will freeze code changes for the week or so prior, and some will lock their content. Doing so gives your team a bit of breathing room; no one has to panic that the last update they made will tank sales for the year, and gives you peace of mind that your site will be up. Of course there’s always an emergency exception – ask us how many frantic calls we’ve gotten from clients on Thanksgiving night! – but the best defense is being prepared and having a protocol. Any last minute changes should be fully reviewed, signed up, tested, verified, and ready to roll back if needed. It’s easy to take this overboard – you don’t want to handcuff yourself to bugs or typos – but the principle is sound. If it’s not blocking sales, leave it til January. This time of year is ideal for starting on those hefty backlog projects that there’s never enough bandwidth for.

TGIBF

Ultimately the success of your sales comes down to what you’re selling and how you’re selling it. With over 4.6 million active online stores on Shopify alone, consumers in 2024 are overwhelmed with choice. So many factors in e-commerce are out of your control, don’t let a sluggish, bloated site be the reason for your competitors’ success. Channel your inner turkey – did you know turkeys can run at up to 25 mph? – and give your customers a delightful online shopping experience that will have them coming back year round.

While your site might be blazing fast, don’t forget to slow down and savor the moments that make all that hard work worthwhile. We at Sandstone wish you and your families a happy, healthy, and successful holiday season!