Black Friday falls on 27 November this year, and Cyber Monday follows three days later. For most Kent businesses that means eight or nine weeks between now and the busiest trading period of the year — and for a lot of independent shops, salons, restaurants and trades, more of that trading now happens through the website than through the door. A slow checkout, a booking form that silently fails, or opening hours that were never updated on Google costs real bookings in December, not just clicks.
This is the point in the year to check, not to hope. Here’s what to look at on your WordPress site before the rush starts, in the order it matters.
1. Confirm your hosting can take the traffic spike
Most WordPress sites run fine on an ordinary week and then buckle the moment traffic triples. Cheap shared hosting is the usual culprit — it’s built for average load, not peak load, and Black Friday weekend is peak load for almost every sector, not just retail. A restaurant taking December bookings or a tradesperson getting a rush of “can you do this before Christmas” enquiries sees the same spike.
Two things to check now, not on 26 November:
- Run your homepage and your busiest product, booking or contact page through a speed test. Anything loading in over three seconds on mobile is losing visitors before they see what you sell.
- Ask your host directly what happens if traffic spikes — whether you’re on shared resources that slow down under load, and whether there’s a cost or a call involved in scaling up in an emergency.
This is exactly the gap managed WordPress hosting is built to close, with resources and caching sized for the busy weeks rather than the quiet ones — we’ve covered why WordPress sites slow down over time in more detail if you want the full picture.
2. Check backups and security before fraud attempts spike too
Peak shopping season isn’t only a traffic spike — it’s when bot attacks, card testing fraud and plugin exploits spike as well, because attackers know sites are busiest and least likely to be watched closely. Earlier this year we wrote about the WordPress plugin hijack that hit dozens of popular plugins; incidents like that don’t stop happening just because it’s nearly Christmas.
Before the season starts:
- Confirm you have automated, off-site backups running — not just a plugin that says “enabled,” but a backup you could actually restore from if the site went down on 28 November.
- Update every plugin and theme now, while you have time to test the site afterwards and fix anything that breaks. Don’t leave version updates until the site is under load.
- If you take payments through WooCommerce or a booking plugin, check your SSL certificate is current and that any fraud or bot-protection settings are switched on, not just installed.
3. Update your Google Business Profile for the holidays
Google Business Profile changed a lot this year, and it’s now doing more of the work that used to happen on your website — Ask Maps and AI-generated answers pull directly from your profile, including your hours. A profile still showing your normal hours over Christmas doesn’t just look neglected; it actively sends people the wrong information at the exact moment they’re deciding whether to visit or order.
Before December:
- Add special hours for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day — Google treats these separately from your regular weekly hours, and they need setting individually.
- Post your order or booking cut-off dates directly on the profile — “last posting date for Christmas delivery” or “last bookings before 24 December” — so it shows up in Google’s answers, not just buried on your site.
- Refresh your profile photos with anything genuinely seasonal. A profile that hasn’t changed in months reads as less active in both Google’s ranking signals and in the AI-generated summaries now showing above search results.
4. Test the actual buying or booking journey yourself
Most website owners look at their homepage regularly and never once complete their own checkout or booking form from a phone. Do it this week, start to finish, as a customer would.
Specifically:
- Place a test order or make a test booking on mobile, using a slow connection if you can — a 4G signal on the seafront in Whitstable on a busy Saturday, not office wifi.
- Check what happens after checkout or booking: does the confirmation email actually arrive, and does it land in the inbox rather than spam?
- If you offer delivery or collection, make sure the cut-off dates on the site match what you can actually deliver — “order by 20 December for Christmas delivery” needs to be correct for Canterbury, Whitstable and Herne Bay postcodes specifically, not copied from a generic template.
- Test your contact form the same way. A form that’s been quietly failing since October is one of the most common reasons a business “doesn’t get many enquiries” in December.
5. Refresh the pages people will actually land on
Your homepage isn’t where most Christmas traffic lands — it’s your gift guide, your most popular product, your booking page, or whichever service page ranks for the searches people run in November and December. Give those pages direct attention rather than assuming last year’s copy still fits.
- Add a clear, dated line about delivery, collection or last-booking deadlines near the top of relevant pages — not just on a separate shipping information page nobody visits.
- If you sell gift vouchers or gift cards, make sure that page is easy to find from the main menu, not three clicks deep. It’s one of the highest-converting pages on a local business site every December.
- Check your fastest-loading, highest-traffic pages are also mobile-friendly end to end — this matters more for your Google ranking too, and it’s central to why a well-maintained WordPress site keeps ranking better than a neglected one.
Start this week, not in November
Every item here takes longer to fix once the site is under load and you’re also trying to run a busy trading period. A speed problem found now can be solved properly. A speed problem found on 28 November gets a panicked, expensive fix or gets ignored until January, by which point the trading window has passed.
Set aside an afternoon this week to work through this list, or send it to whoever manages your hosting and ask them to confirm each point directly. If you’re not confident your site would hold up under Black Friday traffic or that your backups would actually restore, that’s worth finding out now — while there’s still time to do something about it.