# Black Friday Monitoring Checklist for Stores

> Black Friday is Nov 27. Use this week-by-week monitoring checklist to make sure your store, checkout, and payment providers hold up when traffic peaks.

*Source: https://monitoristic.com/blog/black-friday-monitoring-checklist*

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Black Friday is Friday, November 27. Cyber Monday is November 30. If your store has a bad hour that weekend, it costs more than any other hour of the year, and every fix happens under pressure.

The good news: almost everything that protects you can be set up now, six weeks out, in an afternoon. Here's the checklist, week by week.

## What to Monitor

Keep the list short and focused on the pages that make money:

- **Homepage**: the first thing ad and email traffic lands on.
- **Your best-selling product page**: if one page carries the weekend, watch it directly.
- **Cart**: customers who can't add to cart leave.
- **Checkout**: the most expensive page to lose.
- **Your store's API or webhook endpoint**, if you run one (inventory sync, order webhooks).

Set each monitor to expect a `200` status code, so a server error or a misconfigured redirect counts as a failure.

Also bookmark your platform's and payment provider's official status pages. When something breaks, the first question is "is it us or them?" Our guides cover what to watch for [Shopify](/monitor/shopify), [WooCommerce](/monitor/woocommerce), and [Stripe](/monitor/stripe).

**One honest limit:** an uptime check confirms your checkout page loads and answers correctly. It can't complete a purchase. Place a real test order yourself each morning of the sale weekend.

## Six Weeks Out (Now)

- [ ] **Add the monitors above.** Use the fastest interval your plan allows on checkout and cart. On Monitoristic that's every minute on Business, every 2 minutes on Pro, and every 5 minutes on Lite.
- [ ] **Send alerts somewhere you'll actually see them.** Telegram on your phone for you, a webhook into your team chat for everyone else. Email at 2 AM doesn't count.
- [ ] **Set a slow-response threshold on checkout.** A checkout that takes eight seconds loses sales just like one that's down. See [the true cost of a slow website](/blog/the-true-cost-of-a-slow-website).

## Two Weeks Out

- [ ] **Publish a status page** and link it from your footer, so customers can check before they email you. Here's [how to set one up](/blog/how-to-set-up-a-public-status-page).
- [ ] **Agree on a deploy freeze** for sale week. If you must ship something, schedule a [maintenance window](/blog/how-to-use-maintenance-windows) so planned work doesn't trigger alerts.
- [ ] **Run a fire drill.** Take a staging page down on purpose, confirm the alert arrives, and time how long it takes to reach you.

## Sale Week

- [ ] **Every morning:** place a test order, check overnight alerts, and glance at checkout response times.
- [ ] **If something breaks:** confirm it from a second network, post an incident update on your status page, fix or roll back, then post the all-clear. Our [outage checklist](/blog/what-to-do-when-your-website-goes-down) walks through each step.

## After Cyber Monday

- [ ] Review uptime and response-time history for the weekend. Note what alerted, what didn't, and what was slow.
- [ ] Lift the deploy freeze and fix what you postponed, while it's fresh.

## The Short Version

| When | Do this |
|---|---|
| Now | Monitor homepage, product page, cart, checkout, and your API. Route alerts to your phone. Set a slow threshold on checkout. |
| 2 weeks out | Status page live. Deploy freeze agreed. Fire drill done. |
| Sale week | Morning test order. Watch alerts and checkout speed. Update the status page if anything breaks. |
| After | Review the history. Lift the freeze. |

Stores have the least room for error this time of year. If you want a closer look at what to watch on an online store, see [monitoring for e-commerce](/for/e-commerce). Plans start at $5/month; see [pricing](/pricing).