Why you should have a website monitoring tool ready for Black Friday

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!