White Friday is expected on 27 November 2026, and 11.11 is on 11 November. That is the date Salla lists for White Friday; stores usually confirm their own dates closer to the time. Either way, you have about four weeks. Most brands spend that time on ads and discounts. Far fewer check whether the website can handle the traffic those ads will send.
A slow page, a broken checkout or a missing banner costs you the same as a bad ad, except you pay for the click and still lose the sale. Here is a checklist you can work through in order, from cheapest fix to biggest.
1. Decide what the site must do during the sale
Write it down in one line: "Visitors can see the offer, pick a product and pay in under two minutes on a phone." Every item below serves that line. If a change does not help, leave it for January.
2. Test the whole purchase on your own phone
Do not trust the desktop preview. Open the site on a phone on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. Find a product from the home page, add it to the cart, apply a discount code and pay. Then do it again in Arabic if your site has an Arabic version.
Note every moment you hesitate. Small buttons, a popup that covers the cart, a field that will not accept an Arabic name: each one is a lost order on sale day.
3. Check speed with the three numbers Google uses
Google measures page experience with Core Web Vitals. According to web.dev, a page counts as good when, for most real visitors:
- Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content shows) is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page reacts to a tap) is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps while loading) is 0.1 or less.
Run your home page, your best-selling product page and your cart through PageSpeed Insights today. The usual causes of a bad score are oversized hero images, too many apps or plugins, and chat widgets that load before the content.
4. Shrink your images before you add sale banners
Sale season means new banners, and new banners are usually the heaviest files on the page. Export them at the size they are shown, not the size of the original design. Use modern formats such as WebP where your platform supports them. Never put your offer only inside an image: the text should be real text, so it loads fast, scales on small screens and can be read by search engines.
5. Build one clear landing page for the offer
If your ads say "up to 50% off", people should land on a page that shows exactly that. Not the home page, not the full catalogue. A sale landing page needs the offer in the first screen, the end date, the best products, and one button. Keep the menu short.
It also gives you a clean place to measure results. When the sale ends, you swap the offer or take the page down without touching the rest of the site. A landing page like this is the kind of project we build in 5 to 7 days, starting from $419.
6. Make sure the checkout works for your customers
Run a real test order with each payment method you offer: card, cash on delivery, and any local wallet or buy-now-pay-later option. Check that the confirmation email arrives, that the order shows up in your admin, and that stock goes down.
Then look at what you ask for. Every extra field costs you orders. If you do not need a company name, remove it. If delivery in Saudi Arabia or the UAE needs a city and area picker, make sure it works on a small screen.
7. Check your tracking before the traffic arrives
The worst time to discover your purchase event is not firing is the morning after the sale. Make one test purchase and confirm it appears in your analytics and in each ad platform you use. Check that your discount codes are tagged, so you can later see which offer actually brought buyers.
If you want to know whether the sale will make money, work out your margin per order first. Our free store profit calculator does it in a minute.
8. Plan for a traffic spike
If you run on a hosted platform such as Shopify, Salla or Zid, the platform handles most of the load, and your risk is mostly apps and heavy themes. If you run your own WordPress or WooCommerce site, ask your host what happens at ten times your normal traffic. Turn on caching, and remove plugins you no longer use.
Whatever you run, take a full backup before you change anything, and agree who can be reached on sale day if something breaks. A phone number is better than a ticket.
9. Freeze changes one week before
Set a date, for example the Friday before the sale, after which nothing changes on the site except prices and stock. Plugin updates, theme tweaks and "just one more feature" are how sites break right before they matter.
10. Write your post-sale list now
After the sale, you will want to know which pages were slow, where people left, and which products sold out. Decide today what you will look at. Keep the data, and compare it with next year.
The same list works for UAE National Day on 2 December and for year-end offers. If your site is solid now, you are ready for all three.
When to ask for help
If your site scores badly on speed, breaks on phones, or needs a new offer page in under three weeks, talk to a developer now, not the week of the sale. A business website from Kastana Dev starts from $1,049, with a care plan from $79 per month that covers updates and fixes so the site is not left alone between campaigns.