Black Friday or Christmas? What your website needs to get ready for either
Black Friday and Christmas land in the same six-week stretch, and together they make up the busiest trading period most businesses will see. Whether you take part in the discounting or focus purely on Christmas, the website behind it all needs to be ready before the traffic arrives.
The history of Black Friday
The term “Black Friday” predates the shopping event it now describes, and it didn’t start well. It was first used in September 1869 for a stock market crash caused by two Wall Street financiers manipulating the price of gold. It didn’t become linked to shopping until nearly a century later, when Philadelphia police used it to describe the chaos of Thanksgiving weekend crowds. Retailers reframed it in the late 1980s as the day their accounts turned from red to black after post-Thanksgiving spending.
For decades it stayed an entirely American event. Amazon introduced Black Friday deals to UK shoppers for the first time in 2010, discounting several hundred products, though take-up was slow at first, with most UK retailers focused on the usual run-up to Christmas. By 2012, Amazon had expanded its discounting considerably and other major retailers followed suit. Black Friday has become one of the biggest dates in the UK retail calendar, despite the country having no Thanksgiving of its own to explain why it falls where it does.
Where Cyber Monday fits in
The UK actually got its own version of Cyber Monday before it had Black Friday. In 2009, voucher code company eCoupons.com launched CyberMonday.co.uk, setting it as the first Monday of December rather than tying it to Thanksgiving, which Britain doesn’t celebrate. The concept itself came from the US: the National Retail Federation coined the term in 2005, after noticing a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving. By 2012, Argos and Amazon UK were both naming it their busiest online sales day of the year.
Whether to join in is your decision
Taking part in Black Friday is a marketing and brand decision, not something every business is obliged to do.
A growing number of UK independent retailers are choosing to sit it out. A November 2025 survey by the British Independent Retailers Association (BIRA) found that 76.79% of independent retailers planned to opt out of Black Friday that year, up from 69% the year before, with only 23.21% intending to take part. Members cited unsustainable margins and the dominance of large online platforms as the main reasons, alongside a concern that heavy discounting distorts normal buying patterns and undermines the value of a business built on service rather than price.
That does not make Black Friday wrong for everyone. Some businesses use it deliberately to bring in new customers or clear seasonal stock ahead of Christmas. Others decide it works against how they want to be seen, and put their energy into Christmas trading directly instead. Either choice is reasonable.
Christmas spend is not a choice in the same way
The Christmas sales surge is a welcomed increase in sales for most retailers and sectors.
Research from small business lender iwoca, published in 2023, found that 44% of UK small business owners expected to generate over a quarter of their annual revenue during the festive period, rising to 37% among retail businesses expecting over half their year’s takings to come from this window alone. “Christmas spend” also extends well beyond the obvious gift categories. A kitchen design and installation business often sees a rush of enquiries as people plan projects around family visits. A homeware shop might see demand shift from cushions to stocking fillers and board games almost overnight. Even service businesses that never think of themselves as seasonal tend to notice a bump in enquiries as people try to sort things out before the year ends.
Depending on your sector, it may have already started
For businesses selling physical gifts, particularly anything that needs time to arrive, the Christmas trading period may already be under way by the time you read this. That is not a problem in itself. You still have time to get your website in better shape for the weeks that remain, and most of what makes a difference doesn’t take long to fix.
Five ways to get your website ready
1. Refresh your photography. Seasonal photography does a lot of the work that copy cannot. If your product photos or homepage banner haven’t changed since last January, visitors will notice, even if they can’t say exactly why the page feels a little tired. A handful of new images showing your products in a Christmas context, or an updated banner reflecting current stock, is often enough to make the site feel current.
2. Update your content for the season. Your product descriptions, homepage copy, and any seasonal landing pages should reflect what is currently true: delivery cut-off dates, live stock availability, seasonal offers, and any changes to opening hours. Content that has not been touched since last month, such as a banner still referencing an old promotion, sends a small but real signal that the site is not being looked after, at exactly the point visitors are deciding whether to trust you with an order.
3. Build a dedicated offers or gift page. A single page that pulls together your seasonal offers and gift ideas gives visitors somewhere obvious to land, wherever they arrived from. Trying to make do with a busy homepage usually means visitors have to work harder to find what they came for, and some won’t bother.
4. Check your site can handle the traffic. Peak trading weeks bring far more visitors than a normal month, and a site that runs fine under everyday conditions can slow down badly under pressure. Make sure your hosting plan can handle a spike, and check that caching is switched on, so pages aren’t rebuilt from scratch for every visitor. If you’ve just added new photography (see tip one), compress those images before they go live, since oversized images are one of the most common causes of a slow page. Also, confirm your analytics and conversion tracking are set up correctly before the campaign starts, not after, so you can see what drove traffic and what it converted into. Run your key pages through a free tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see where load times could improve. A slow site during your busiest period is one of the most avoidable ways to lose a sale.
5. Test your checkout and payment options. Walk through your own checkout process as if you were a new customer, on both desktop and mobile. Confirm that payment methods work and that stock levels update correctly, so you don’t sell items you cannot fulfil. Check that delivery information is accurate for the dates involved too. Take a backup before making any last-minute changes to banners or content, so a mistake at the busiest point of the year is a quick fix rather than a scramble. And if it’s been a while since you checked, confirm your SSL certificate is current, and your checkout pages still show as secure, since browsers will actively warn visitors away from anything that isn’t. A checkout that fails, or promises delivery that will not arrive in time, causes far more damage during Christmas week than it would at any other point in the year.
Your next step
If you are not confident your website is ready for the busiest weeks of the year, we can help you. At Popcorn Web Design, we build websites that hold up under pressure and give visitors a reason to buy, year-round.
Get in touch with the team, and let’s make sure your website is ready before the traffic arrives.
Frequently asked questions
When did Black Friday start in the UK?
Amazon introduced Black Friday deals to UK shoppers for the first time in 2010. By 2012, other major retailers had joined in, and it has since become one of the biggest dates in the UK retail calendar.
Do I have to take part in Black Friday?
No. Whether to join in is a marketing and brand decision, not an obligation. A November 2025 survey by the British Independent Retailers Association found that more than three quarters of independent retailers planned to opt out that year, citing unsustainable margins and concerns that discounting undermines brand value.
What is Cyber Monday?
Cyber Monday is the online-focused counterpart to Black Friday, falling on the Monday after. The term was coined in 2005 by the US National Retail Federation after it noticed a spike in online sales on that day, and it was introduced in the UK in 2009.
How much of my annual revenue could come from Christmas trading?
It varies by business, but research from iwoca found that 44% of UK small business owners expected to generate over a quarter of their annual revenue during the festive period, and 37% of retail businesses expected over half their year’s takings to come from this window.
What is the single most important website fix before Christmas?
No single fix matters more than the rest, but checking that your website can handle a traffic spike and confirming that your checkout works properly under real conditions are the two most likely to cost you a sale if left unchecked.
How do I know if my website can handle the Christmas rush?
The clearest way is to test it before the traffic arrives, not during it. Ask your host or developer what your current plan’s resource limits are, and what happens once you hit them. A free tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights will flag slow-loading pages under normal conditions, though it won’t simulate an actual spike. For more certainty, a proper load test run by your hosting provider or web developer will show how the site behaves under a surge of visitors, rather than leaving you to find out on the day
Do I need to upgrade my hosting before Black Friday?
Not always, but it’s worth checking rather than assuming. Shared hosting plans, which many small business websites run on, often have lower resource limits than a dedicated or cloud-based plan, so a sudden spike in visitors can slow the whole site down or, in the worst case, take it offline. If your current plan has never been tested against real traffic, ask your host what its limits are and whether you can scale up temporarily for peak weeks. It’s a smaller job to sort in October than to fix mid-sale in November.
What is caching, and why does it matter for a traffic spike?
Caching stores a ready-made version of your webpages, so the site does not have to rebuild each one from scratch every time someone visits. Without it, a sudden rise in visitors means the server has to repeat that work all at once, which is one of the most common reasons a website slows down or crashes during a sale. Most hosting providers and website platforms offer some form of caching, and it is worth confirming it is switched on and working correctly before your busiest weeks begin.
