Optimize WordPress website for Black Friday 2023: 6+ important actions

Black Friday is famous and popular because of the high and incredible discounts that online stores offer near this day.  Many brands use this exceptional opportunity to sell their products and increase their income several times. Despite the fierce competition between different online stores, in order to attract the attention of customers to your website, you must provide them with a better user experience by optimize WordPress website for Black Friday.

There are different ways to optimize an online store. These methods, such as increasing the speed of the loading website, improving the appearance of the shop page, and simplifying the purchase process, encourage customers to prefer buying from an online store over other competitors.

If you want to use this opportunity to increase sales and earn more money, follow our complete guide on optimizing your site for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

A short history of Black Friday

Since 1924, the first Friday after Thanksgiving has been recognized as the unofficial start of the shopping season. Black Friday was celebrated for the first time in 1952 in America. This day is the last Friday of November and the day after Thanksgiving, which this year is celebrated on November 24, 2023.

The main purpose of the Black Friday auction is to offer discounts on all items, and this discount is so high that customers are encouraged to buy. On the one hand, the special offers and promotions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday satisfy the needs of customers at a lower cost, and on the other hand, stores can sell most of their products with a lower profit margin but a higher sales volume.

Today, websites like Amazon try a lot of marketing strategies on Black Friday and start Black Friday discounts a few weeks in advance. In this store, a series of on-sale products are offered with free gifts to encourage customers to buy.

Interesting statistics of Black Friday in previous years

• On Black Friday 2022, 2.3% more purchases were made than last year.
• 15% of orders on Black Friday 2022 in the US were overseas.
• 31% of customers started shopping on Thursday.

As you can see, the total amount of sales has increased significantly on Black Friday due to the significant discounts.

You can welcome this day with a few simple changes on your online store to optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday before launching a Black Friday advertising campaign.

Let’s review some of the most important improvements you need to take into account.

How to optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday?

If you are going to offer the highest discounts on your products on Black Friday to make more sales, you need to prepare your website for customers to visit and buy.

In this post, we have prepared some useful tips and tricks to help you optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday, increase its usability, and provide the best buying experience to the customers.

Keep reading and incorporate our recommendations into your online shop to see the impact of Black Friday.

Check your website loading speed

Online store visitors care a lot about web page loading speed. If it takes more than five seconds to load, they won’t wait and will simply leave your website to visit another one that loads faster.

In addition, the loading speed of your website is effective on your site’s SEO and your site ranking in Google search results.

On the other hand, heavy traffic of visitors starts in a short period, a few days before Black Friday, which can overwhelm your web server and cause slow page load times.

If there is too much traffic, it can even make it impossible for users to access your online shop:

For this reason, before starting the Black Friday marketing campaign, you must check the speed of your site with the help of one of the following tools:

• GTmetrix. 
•  PageSpeed ​​Insights 

If the results of this test show that your website speed needs to be improved, try the following simple methods:

• Reducing the number of product images.
• Delete data cache.
• Reducing the number of downloaded pages.
• Modify CSS and JAVASCRIPT codes.
• Integrate a content delivery network (CDN) with WordPress, such as Cloudflare.

With the help of these tricks, you can reduce the stress on your servers and optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday. As a result, your visitors can load your store faster.

The Best WordPress Plugins to Optimize the loading speed of your website

We will review some of the most popular and useful plugins to increase the speed of the WordPress sites:

WP Rocket plugin: With a simple user interface and quick setup, this plugin has the power of fast site loading with the most important optimizations, such as compression of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript codes, as well as CloudFlare compatibility.

Pagespeed Ninja plugin: By installing this plugin, you can speed up the loading speed of your website on desktop and mobile. Among the important features of this plugin, we can mention the improvement of the necessary rendering path, Gzip file compression, optimizing the size of all images, the possibility of loading lazy loading images, and shrinking HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.

Optimize your WordPress website for mobile 

With the increase in mobile shopping, optimizing your website for mobile users is essential. 

Due to the rising statistics and the high growth of the use of the WordPress content management system, Google is trying to encourage site managers to install AMP on their WordPress site, so that visitors can easily access the websites on their smartphones. 

Making the site responsive is another way to properly display the mobile version of your site, which is possible by optimizing its design or installing a new theme for your site.

To ensure that your online store is mobile-friendly, you must:

• Design your website responsive or apply a responsive theme on your WordPress website.
• Run AMP on your web pages.
• Make sure your checkout process is mobile-friendly.
• Different sections of your store can be easily navigated through mobile.
• The loading speed of your website is good on mobile.
• Structure all web pages so that they display well on smaller screens.

The most useful plugins for website mobile optimization

Try these tools to make sure your site is mobile-friendly:

AMP plugin: The AMP plugin can produce a lightweight and compact version of your site to be displayed perfectly on mobile phones without the need for programming or any other complex operations. It is good to know that this WordPress plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and many other plugins.

WPtouch: WPtouch automatically adds a simple and beautiful mobile theme to your WordPress website for mobile visitors. This Plugin will ensure that your site’s ranking will no longer drop due to a lack of mobile compatibility!

Simplifying the purchase process and adding more payment options

If the buying and checkout processes are very complicated or long, it usually leads to cart abandonment during events like Black Friday when your online store faces high traffic from customers. In order to be able to provide a better buying experience for the customers to finish the purchase process, you need to simplify the purchase and payment processes as much as possible.

To simplify them, consider the following points:

• Enable guest checkout so customers can order products without creating an account from your online shop.
• Minimize the number of steps required to complete a purchase.
• Minimize the number of mandatory fields that the customer must fill in before the payment as much as possible.
• Offer multiple payment options, including:
• One or more wallets or payment services such as PayPal.
• A simple credit cart processor, such as Stripe.
• Mobile wallet options, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay.

The best plugins to optimize the purchase process

Let’s review some of the most effective plugins to help you improve your WooCommerce checkout page.

WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor and Manager: This plugin is useful when you want to modify and update fields on your checkout page. With an intuitive and beautiful interface, WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor and Manager allows you to add, edit, and remove the fields to edit your checkout page.

Direct Checkout for WooCommerce: By installing the plugin, the entire checkout process is simplified by skipping the cart page. When customers click on the ‘Add to Cart’ option, they are redirected to the checkout webpage. 

Support online customers during purchase

One of the most important tactics to optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is preparing online support and response processes in advance. Because many visitors need help during their first purchase from an online store. 

To make this happen, try to:

• Make sure you have a dedicated team to handle customer queries and issues quickly.
• Clearly announce your refund policy and process to customers to build trust and facilitate refunds when necessary. 
• Provide professional and trained support that enhances the customer’s buying experience.
• Before the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale, check that your contact information is correct.
• Installing an online chat plugin, that allows customers to communicate directly with the support team.
• Create a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page and answer all the basic questions of customers.

The most useful plugins for customer support

Chat system and online support in WordPress is possible with the help of many plugins. Here, you can find a list of the most widely used online chat plugins in WordPress:

LiveChat: LiveChat welcomes your site visitors with a beautiful chat box at the bottom of the home page. This box always remains visible and can be accessed with just one click. The features of LiveChat include the ability to personalize the chat box, the ability to save conversation history and view missed conversations, and the ability to share and send files.

Zendesk Chat: Using messaging features such as emojis, GIFs, and ready responses, this plugin creates a convenient experience for customers and allows you to manage incoming chats anytime, anywhere.

ThriveDesk: ThriveDesk is a lightweight and fast assistant plugin that enables you to start online chats with your customers without slowing down your site. With a customizable chat box, automated messages integrated with ChatGPT, and support for sending media and files, it’s the perfect solution for enhancing customer support.

Prepare the appearance of the website and increase the user experience (UX).

If you want your online shop to perform well on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the customer buying experience must be as perfect as possible.

Therefore, you should improve the user experience (UX) of your store with the following:

• Updating the website design and adding graphics and banners with the theme of Black Friday, available discounts, and free gifts.
• Simplify navigation menus and search functionality.
• Add options such as filtering products based on category, price, and other relevant criteria to ensure that customers can easily find what they are looking for.
• Adding the Add to Cart button on the shop page.
• Enable the ability to add multiple products to the cart at the same time directly from the shop page.
• Display the most important features of your products, like price, variations, title, image, etc., on the shopping page

The best way to optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday and add these features to your shopping page is to use the WooCommerce product table plugin. As you can see in the image below, with the help of this plugin, you can create a customized table and show a list of all products with their features in a table. 

All columns of this product table can be edited and customized. Also, this plugin has many features, including adding different filters, a quick search box, Add to cart button, the ability to add multiple products to the cart at the same time in the product table, display of a floating shopping cart, and hundreds of other options for optimizing the shopping page of your ecommerce store and let the customer enjoy buying from your site.

Optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday by preparing a product list

Preparing your product list is the most important task you should do before starting your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing campaign.

To optimize your product list, consider the following:

• Start by updating your product description. Make sure they are clear and concise.
• Highlight the key benefits and features of your products.
• Use high-resolution images that showcase your products from different views.
• Display the regular price, discounted price, and total savings to attract customers.
• Keep product availability information up to date to avoid disappointment and potentially negative reviews.
• Identify your best-selling products and make sure you have enough inventory to meet growing demand.

Implement different marketing strategies

In order to attract and retain customers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it is important to create a strong marketing plan. You can use various strategies to attract customers during this holiday, such as:

• Consider sending newsletters and promotional emails through email marketing and engaging social media posts.
• Run targeted ads to reach new audiences and inform them about the discounts and free gifts you have offered on your site’s products during this period.
• Offer free shipping to encourage your customers to buy more on Black Friday.
• Optimize your website for relevant keywords related to Black Friday and Cyber Monday to get better search engine results.

Offer giveaway free gift products to improve customer buying experience

Offering free gifts not only makes your customers happy but also increases the number of orders on your website. If you apply the right strategy for the gift promotions on your online shop, amazing results will await you.

Promotions always attract the attention of customers and cause a rapid increase in traffic. This is a Win-Win deal because buyers save more money and sellers get more sales.

The benefits of offering free gifts on Black Friday

• Keeping loyal customers and attracting new customers.
• Increasing sales of products that remain in stock.
• Increase Brand Awareness.

The most used free gift strategies on Black Friday

The free gift offers can be applied on the site with different rules depending on the purpose of your Black Friday marketing campaign. We review some of the most popular methods of this type of marketing strategy:

Buy x Get x Repeat: In this method, you induce the customers that the more they buy, the less they pay. This type of offer convinces the audience to bulk purchase a product or products in a specific category from your site. For example, you can offer them that on Black Friday, they will receive 1 free accessory for every purchase of 4 pieces from the Accessories category.

Subtotal Repeat: This type of free gift promotion is very suitable for increasing the overall sales of your site on Black Friday. For example, you can offer a customer a free gift for every $100 subtotal amount of an order. So, if a customer makes a $300 purchase from your site, they can receive 3 gifts.

BOGO: In this type of free gift strategy, you are actually giving a 50% discount on the purchase of any product from your online store. You can limit this offer to a specific product on Black Friday. So, if the customer orders that specific product from your site, they can get the second product for free.

Offer Free Gift to logged-in customers: With this marketing method, you can encourage site visitors to submit information such as their email or contact number in your registration form to get more leads on Black Friday.

Using the free gift for WooCommerce plugin make offering free gift with different strategies on Black Friday easily possible. It is very straightforward to create rules in this plugin with a variety of free gift marketing methods such as Buy x Get y, BOGO, Subtotal, etc. 

This plugin allows you to limit the created rules to a specific date, like Black Friday. To make this happen, you just need to add a condition in the condition box and set the date of the created rule to Black Friday with the help of an easy-to-use built-in calendar:

Why should you prepare for Black Friday sales?

Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year for online stores. Because the last Friday of November marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season for everyone. By preparing your store for this high-traffic day, you can also ensure that everything is ready for Christmas.

Black Friday and Christmas are only a month away, and most stores experience the most of their annual sales during this month. That is why you should not miss this opportunity.

The benefits of preparing for Black Friday sales include the following:

• Increased sales and more income from selling products.
• Attract new customers by offering irresistible discounts and promotions.
• Increase brand awareness by running different marketing campaigns during these events.
• Increase sales of in-stock products by using marketing strategies such as BOGO, etc. 

Conclusion

If you want to optimize your WordPress website for Black Friday and increase your sales on this event, you should make it a priority to prepare your website for one of the biggest shopping days of the year. The best time to start optimizing your WordPress website for Black Friday is today. We have prepared a complete guide for you so that you can take the necessary steps to optimize your online store.

Do you have questions about how to prepare your website for Black Friday? Ask your questions using below comment form!