12-Week Black Friday Readiness Plan: Load Test Early or Risk Costly Downtime
Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November, giving website operators roughly 12 weeks to prepare for peak traffic surges. Adobe recorded $11.8 billion in US online spending on Black Friday 2025, while Splunk and Oxford Economics estimate unplanned downtime costs large companies around $15,000 per minute. The preparation framework prioritises setting measurable performance targets before testing, fixing identified issues, and freezing code changes ahead of the event. Site owners are advised to calculate expected concurrent users from last year's peak-hour analytics, then load-test beyond that figure to find real capacity limits. A single named owner — not a committee — should oversee the countdown, coordinate fixes, and hold authority to enforce a code freeze before the day.
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