Black Friday is right around the corner, and that means retailers are on high alert for the busiest and most important shopping day of the year.

Despite the annual bargain bonanza morphing in recent years into a digitally-led event that seems to stretch from early November right the way up to Christmas, the traditional pre-Holiday Friday remains the busiest day of the year for in-person purchases, too. Last year, Black Friday footfall in physical stores was up 4.5% on 2022, while total sales was up 1.1%.

That means store owners have got to be prepared for a surge in visitors through their doors and sales through their checkouts again this year. And while plans for inventory and merchandising, pricing strategies and promotions will have been months in the making, one other crucial thing that can’t be overlooked is the health of your POS.

Discounts might fail to inspire your customers, stocks of popular items might run out sooner than expected. But nothing derails your Black Friday quite like a POS creaking under the pressure and slowing down or even failing.

Even with the countdown to Black Friday entering the final straight, there’s still time to run last-minute checks to ensure your POS hits peak performance this holiday season.

Here’s what to do.

Clean all your hardware

It might sound simple, but a thorough clean can work wonders in protecting your POS equipment as we hit peak season. Computer hardware inevitably gathers dust and grime over time, and some of it will inevitably get into fan systems, casing etc.

Your POS is going to be working overtime come Black Friday. Harder working processors mean more heat is generated. And heat plus dust – well, that’s a bad mix for the health of any electronic device.

Giving everything a good clean now will prevent excess dust from getting into casings come the big day and potentially causing problems.

Check for software updates

It’s really important to make sure you have all your POS software updated to the latest available versions before you hit peak season. New software releases fix known bugs which could hamper your POS performance at just the wrong time. Just as importantly, software updates include security patches that guard against the latest known threats. Black Friday is definitely not the time you want to suffer a major data breach or a ransomware attack

Test your WiFi

One way or another, POS systems depend on some kind of internet connection these days. Even if you’re not running cloud-based POS software, your payment consoles sure need a connection to work. For most businesses, WiFi is the most convenient option. Especially if you want to connect several endpoints at once.

The busier your checkouts are come Black Friday, the more strain they’re going to put your WiFi under. Slow connections, or a shortage of bandwidth, could seriously hamper your ability to process sales at the kind of speed your customers expect.

Now is the time to run a test to see what kind of condition your connection is in. You can use online services like CloudFlare or SpeedTest.net. Or speak to your internet service provider (ISP).

Think about backups and offline working

Finally, it’s always better to be prepared for the worst just in case something does go wrong rather than be caught out unawares. Should your POS suffer an outage of some kind over the Black Friday period, there are contingency plans you can put in place. Some POS systems, for example, have the option to work offline should your internet connection fail. Check with your POS partner if this is the case with yours. And even if it isn’t, it may be something they can setup with on-location servers and continuous backups. Another thing to consider is a universal power supply (UPS) in case you experience a power outage.