Black Friday store checklist: a week-by-week plan

Black Friday prep easily gets squeezed into the last week: the campaign page goes up on the day of the sale, banners change at midnight and three popups open at once. Visitors can't find the end time, the shipping day or the code to use on the site.

This guide splits the work into four phases, with a checklist for each. The timeline assumes your main sale day is Black Friday, which falls on 27 November in 2026; if your sale starts on another day, shift the steps to match.

The timeline: four phases

1. 2–3 weeks before: open the campaign page on a URL with no year in it; review its title, meta description and product copy.
2. 1 week before: prepare the countdown, the shipping bar and an email popup; publish the email popup right away.
3. During the sale: keep one message, show one popup at a time, check everything on a phone.
4. After the sale: pause the countdowns, update the page instead of deleting it, measure the result.

2–3 weeks before: the campaign page and product copy

The campaign page is a category that collects the products on sale (a collection on Shopify). Google's advice for Black Friday pages is clear: use a recurring URL rather than a new one for each year's event; create the page well before the sale so Googlebot has time to discover and index it; link to it from your home page and use the URL Inspection tool to check that robots rules aren't blocking it (Google).

Put the event's name in the page title; Google's own example for sale pages carries the event name in the title (Google). If your title includes the year, update it every year together with the main heading on the page: when a page reused year after year keeps an outdated year in its title, Google may notice the mismatch and use the date from the visible heading in the search result instead (Google). In the meta description, state the dates and what's on sale; see the meta description guide for templates.

The page itself should explain the sale too: which categories are on sale, when it starts and ends, and the shipping and returns terms. Google says describing the event in the page text can help it identify the page as relevant to a specific sale (Google). If the discounts are only confirmed on the day, publish the page with general information first and add the details later.

Finally, look at the products you'll feature: they're the pages your ads and emails will send visitors to. Rewrite anything still using the supplier's text with the structure from the product description guide; if there are many, SEO Studio drafts the copy and you approve it.

• Open the campaign category on a URL without a year, or reuse last year's.
• Put the sale's name in the title and the dates in the meta description; if there's a year, update it with the main heading.
• Explain the categories, dates, and shipping and returns terms in the page copy.
• Link to the campaign page from your home page.
• Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to check that the page isn't blocked from crawling.
• Review the title, description, price and stock of the products you'll feature.

1 week before: on-site sales tools

Next comes the rest of the site: whichever page visitors land on, they should see the sale, when it ends and the shipping terms. In Roigo, you build these from Widget Studio templates; the table sums up which tool does which job.

Countdown bar

The countdown campaign template is a one-line bar: your sale text, the time left and a button. The countdown has two types: Until a date counts down to the same moment for everyone, while Per-visitor timer starts when each visitor first sees it. A Black Friday sale ends on the same day for everyone: choose Until a date and enter the real end time; a per-visitor timer would be misleading here.

Free shipping bar

If you're lowering your free shipping threshold for the sale, show it alongside the cart: the bar reads the cart from the platform itself and shows how much is left, which is why it works only on ideasoft, Shopify and ikas. Change the bar's threshold on the same day you change your store's, or the bar will quote an amount your store doesn't apply. Choosing the threshold and writing the messages are covered in the free shipping bar guide.

An email list before the sale

The list you'll notify when the sale starts gets built this week. The Email capture template is a simple popup that, by default, opens once visitors scroll 40% of the page. Add the address of your own privacy notice to the consent line under the form. You download the collected addresses as an Excel file from the Subscribers box on the My widgets tab and send the announcement with your own email tool. If you'd rather offer a reward, a prize wheel that asks for an email does the same job; just don't publish both at once.

Ships today bar

If you ship fast, the Ships today bar says “Order within 2 hours 14 minutes and it ships today.” The timer runs to your shipping cutoff on Turkey time; after the cutoff, or on a day you don't ship, the bar shows the next shipping day. You pick your shipping days and any days with no shipping in the studio. If you can't ship same day during sale week, move the cutoff earlier or don't publish the bar.

Prepare everything a week ahead, but don't publish it all at once. Widgets have no start date, and what you change in the studio doesn't affect the live version until you press Publish. Publish the email popup right away and the countdown when the sale starts; check the desktop and mobile previews separately.

• Set up the countdown as Until a date with the real end time, and link its button to the campaign page.
• Match the free shipping bar's threshold to the sale threshold.
• Publish the email popup with a link to your privacy notice.
• Create the coupon codes in your platform and test them in the cart.
• Set the Ships today bar's cutoff for sale week.
• Check every widget in the desktop and mobile previews.

During the sale: one message, one popup

Showing visitors who came for a sale three separate offers makes the decision harder. Google also recommends banners that take up a small fraction of the screen over full-page interstitials, and says intrusive dialogs and interstitials make it hard for search engines to understand your content, which may lead to poor search performance (Google).

• One popup at a time. The code on your site opens one popup at a time and queues the rest until the previous one closes, so with three popups a visitor closes all three in a row. Save a second offer, such as an exit-intent popup, for after the sale.
• Bars say the same thing. Bars on the same edge stack instead of covering each other, but two bars take another slice off the top of a phone screen. Pause the announcement bar once the sale starts, and keep the end time and discount the same everywhere.
• Cart and checkout stay calm. Only widgets you target at these pages, plus corner buttons, appear there; the free shipping bar also shows on the cart page, but not in the checkout steps.
• Pick the frequency. On the Behavior tab, show a popup once per visit, once a day or only once, so visitors who close it don't see it again on every page.

Browse the home page, the campaign page, a product and the cart on a real phone. If a widget takes up too much room on mobile, show it on desktop only from the Targeting tab; if you want the countdown only on the campaign page, choose Custom URL and enter part of the address (black-friday). If you change the discount mid-sale, edit the widget and press Publish changes.

• Publish the countdown when the sale starts and pause the announcement bar.
• Keep at most one popup live on the site at a time.
• Keep the end time and discount the same in the bar, the popup and the campaign page.
• Browse the home page, the campaign page, a product and the cart on a phone.
• Check your view allowance in the dashboard.

After the sale: pause, keep the page

When the countdown ends, the bar doesn't remove itself: it shows the text from the Text when time is up field (“The sale has ended” in the template). As soon as the sale is over, use Pause on the My widgets tab; the widget leaves your site within a minute. A paused widget isn't deleted and keeps its settings, so next year you change the end date and publish it again.

Don't delete the campaign page: Google recommends reusing the same URL each year (Google). Keep the page live and update its copy to say the sale is over; next year you open the new sale at the same address. If you've put your free shipping threshold back, put the bar's threshold back too.

Measure with your own data: the My widgets tab shows each widget's views and clicks for the last 30 days, and your platform's sales reports show orders and order value. The discount's own effect is hard to separate from the widgets', so note which widgets got clicked and start from that list next year.

• Pause the countdowns and sale announcements.
• Keep the campaign page: update its copy and keep the URL.
• If you changed the free shipping threshold, change the bar's back too.
• Download your email list and deactivate the sale codes in your platform.
• Note your widgets' views and clicks alongside your orders.

Step by step with Roigo Widget Studio

1. In Widget Studio, pick the Countdown campaign template and edit the text, the end date and the button link.
2. On the Behavior tab, choose when and how often it appears; on the Targeting tab, choose its pages and devices.
3. If you haven't yet, add the one-line install code from Roigo to your platform's admin once; it stays the same for later widgets.
4. Keep the widget as a draft, press Publish when the sale starts and Pause it when the sale ends.

Plans differ in how many widgets can be live at once: 1 on Free, 5 on Pro and 25 on Business. If you have a single widget, give sale week to the countdown; run the email popup the week before and pause it when the sale starts. Every template and display rule is on the Widget Studio page.