Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
It’s that time of year again – no, not Christmas, but the hugely anticipated Black Friday. When discounts hit bigger numbers than the lottery, and customers get into a bargain-hunting frenzy. But it’s not all fun and games as a company owner during the biggest sales season of the year; unfortunately, you’re more likely to suffer website issues than on an average day.
Why do websites suffer during Black Friday?
Good question. Websites suffer during the week of the 22nd November, and especially on the 26th November every year because of huge volumes of traffic that hit them. Contrary to popular belief, a website can actually very easily “break”, and even more so during a sales period like this.
Surges in website traffic can cause troubles with your server, your page speed, and a whole host of other fundamental elements of a high-performing website.
What can I do to make sure my website stays up during Black Friday?
It’s easy for us as an uptime monitoring solution to say “hey you! You need our uptime monitoring solution”, but it’s actually true and more than ever during this time. For example, if you get 20% more traffic to your website on the 26th November but your checkout page goes down and you have no idea about it until 20 minutes later, how many sales would you have lost? How much revenue will that equate to? How does that affect your Q4 goals?
StatusCake will alert you when:
- Your website experiences downtime in any of your chosen locations (it’s important to remember that just because your website is up in the UK, it doesn’t mean it’s not down in another country)
- Your website experiences any server issues
- Your page speed is too slow for a good customer experience
- You have SSL issues that could prevent customer trust and therefore sales
- Any domain problems (no one wants their domain hijacked during the biggest revenue week of the entire year)
Do I only need website monitoring for Black Friday?
Although Black Friday puts an intense amount of pressure on your website, this isn’t the only time that you need a website monitoring tool working in the background of your website. Your website can go down at any time, anywhere, and it can take hours for you to realise, and even longer for your team to get it back up and running. If you’re not convinced, then you may be interested to know that even the biggest websites in the world have experienced downtime including Google, Facebook, and Slack, to name just a few.
Monitoring your website is imperative all year round for:
- Customer experience on your website
- Customer trust
- Sales and revenue
- SEO and Core Web Vitals
- Maintaining a high quality website infrastructure
- Brand reputation and awareness
You can prepare this Black Friday by taking advantage of our 40% off any paid plan discount. Stay online, drive revenue = simple!
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026