# What Is Black Friday? Meaning, History and 2026 Dates > What is Black Friday? Learn what the name really means, the 2026 dates, how it differs from Cyber Monday, and what it means for your online store. Every November, the same thing happens to online stores. Traffic that normally trickles in shows up all at once, your inbox fills with discount emails from every tool you have ever tried, and someone on the team asks whether checkout can handle it. That week has a name: **Black Friday**. So, what is Black Friday? Most people define it as "the day after Thanksgiving with big sales." That is correct but thin. Black Friday is now a season that starts in October, spans continents and runs mostly online, and the numbers below show how much money moves through it. This guide covers what Black Friday means, where the name really came from (the popular story is wrong), the 2026 dates, how it differs from Cyber Monday and Cyber Week, and what it means if you run a website, a WooCommerce store or a SaaS product. ## TL;DR (Too Long, Didn't Read?) Short on time? Here is the whole guide in a few lines: - **Black Friday is the Friday after US Thanksgiving**, the traditional start of holiday shopping. In 2026 it falls on **Friday, November 27**. - **Philadelphia police gave it the name in the 1950s** to describe traffic chaos. The "stores finally get in the black" story came later, in the late 1980s. - **Cyber Monday (November 30, 2026) is now the bigger US online day.** Adobe counted $14.25B on Cyber Monday 2025 against $11.8B on Black Friday. - **It is global.** Salesforce measured $336.6B in global sales over Cyber Week 2025. - **For site owners, Black Friday is a capacity problem as much as a marketing one.** Traffic arrives in sharp spikes, and checkout is the hardest page to cache. - **Plan it as a season, not a day.** The work you do in October decides whether your site stays up in November. ## What Is Black Friday? **Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, when retailers launch their biggest discounts of the year to open the holiday shopping season.** It began as an in-store event built around doorbuster deals and early opening hours. Today most of the spending happens online, and the "day" stretches into a week or more. Think of it like the opening game of a sports season: the season runs for weeks, but the opener draws the biggest crowd. ### A Few Things Worth Knowing - **It is not a public holiday.** Many Americans have the day off because it follows Thanksgiving, but in the UK and most other countries it is a normal working day. - **The date moves every year.** Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November, so Black Friday always lands between November 23 and 29. - **The sale window keeps growing.** Hostinger's 2026 Black Friday page lists a sale from **October 19 to December 14, 2026**, and Kinsta had its 2026 waitlist page live by October. ## Why Is It Called Black Friday? The Real History The story you hear most often says stores ran at a loss ("in the red") most of the year and finally turned a profit ("in the black") the day after Thanksgiving. [**History.com**](https://www.history.com/articles/black-friday-thanksgiving-origins-history) calls that version inaccurate. The real history has three parts. ### 1. The First Black Friday Was a Gold Crash The first recorded "Black Friday" had nothing to do with shopping. It was **September 24, 1869**, when the US gold market crashed after Wall Street financiers **Jay Gould and Jim Fisk** tried to corner the nation's gold supply and failed. ### 2. Philadelphia Police Named the Shopping Version In the **1950s**, Philadelphia police used "Black Friday" for the day after Thanksgiving, when suburban shoppers and tourists flooded the city ahead of the Army-Navy football game. Officers could not take the day off and had to work extra-long shifts. By **1961** the term had caught on locally. Merchants tried to rebrand it as "Big Friday" and failed. The name stayed mostly a Philadelphia thing and was still not in common nationwide use in 1985. ### 3. Retailers Gave It a Happier Meaning in the Late 1980s In the late 1980s, retailers recast the name with the "red to black" profit story, which turned a complaint into a celebration. History.com also debunks a more recent myth linking the day to sales of enslaved people in the 1800s: that claim has no basis in fact. The date itself has a political backstory. In **1939**, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to give retailers a longer shopping season, which critics nicknamed "Franksgiving." Congress fixed Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in **1941**, and that rule still sets the Black Friday date. ## When Is Black Friday 2026? Here are the 2026 dates, confirmed against the [**Klaviyo BFCM calendar**](https://www.klaviyo.com/uk/bfcm/calendar): | **Event** | **2026 Date** | **Day** | |---|---|---| | Thanksgiving (US) | November 26 | Thursday | | Black Friday | November 27 | Friday | | Small Business Saturday | November 28 | Saturday | | Cyber Monday | November 30 | Monday | These dates mark the peak, not the start. Expect "early Black Friday" offers from late October and a few sales running into mid-December. ## Black Friday vs Small Business Saturday vs Cyber Monday vs Cyber Week People use these four names interchangeably, but each started for a different reason and favors a different kind of seller. Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation coined **Cyber Monday** in **2005**, in a press release from its digital division, Shop.org. Online retailers had noticed sales climbing on the Monday after Thanksgiving, when people got back to fast office internet. **American Express** founded **Small Business Saturday** in **2010** to send more customers to local shops. **Cyber Week** has no single official definition. Adobe measures five days (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday), while Salesforce measured seven for 2025 (November 25 to December 1). Check the window before you compare two reports. | **Event** | **Origin** | **Main channel** | **Who it favors** | **2025 US online spend (Adobe)** | |---|---|---|---|---| | **Black Friday** | Philadelphia slang, 1950s | Online and in store | Big retailers, broad discounts | $11.8B | | **Small Business Saturday** | American Express, 2010 | Mostly in store | Independent and local shops | Not reported | | **Cyber Monday** | NRF / Shop.org, 2005 | Online | Ecommerce, SaaS, digital products | $14.25B | | **Cyber Week** | Industry term, no fixed definition | Online | Anyone running a multi-day sale | $44.2B (5 days) | If you only remember one line: **Black Friday opens the season, Cyber Monday is the biggest online day, and Cyber Week is the full stretch your servers need to survive.** ## How Black Friday Went Online and Global For years Black Friday meant lines outside stores before dawn. Online now dominates the numbers. [**Adobe Analytics**](https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/12/adobe-cyber-monday-hits-record) tracked **$11.8B** in US online spending on Black Friday 2025 (up 9.1%) and **$44.2B** across Cyber Week (up 7.7%). Mobile devices drove **57.5%** of Cyber Monday sales. The event spread abroad too. **Amazon introduced Black Friday deals in the UK in 2010**, and Walmart-owned Asda ran its first UK Black Friday sale in **2013**. After fights broke out in Asda stores in 2013 and Tesco stores in 2014, Asda stepped back in 2015, and UK retailers spread deals across a calmer, more online "Black week" ([Marketplace](https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/24/world/black-friday-shopping-exported-london-uk-us-holiday)). Salesforce measured **$336.6B** in global sales during Cyber Week 2025 and **$79B** on Black Friday alone, with AI assistants and agents influencing 20% of orders. Adobe saw AI-referred traffic to US retail sites jump **670%** on Cyber Monday. Your visitors now arrive from chat assistants, social feeds and price trackers as well as search. ## What Black Friday Means for Online Businesses This is where things get serious for anyone who runs a website. The discount is a marketing decision. Everything after the click is an infrastructure decision. ### 1. Traffic Arrives in Spikes, Not Waves Black Friday traffic jumps when your email lands, an influencer posts or a deal site lists you. Paddle says its customers saw **up to 20x their normal traffic** over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and Adobe found US shoppers spending about **$16M per minute** at the 8 to 10pm peak. A server sized for a normal Tuesday will struggle with twenty Tuesdays at once. Size capacity for your peak hour, not your daily average. ### 2. Checkout Is the Hardest Page to Keep Fast Page caching makes product and landing pages cheap to serve. Cart, checkout and account pages are personal to each shopper, so they skip the page cache and hit PHP and the database on every request. On a busy WooCommerce store, slowdowns start there. You need both layers: [**edge page caching**](/edge-page-caching-how-does-it-work/) for public pages, plus enough CPU, PHP workers and [**Redis object caching**](/advanced-redis-object-caching-for-wordpress/) for the uncached ones. ### 3. Shoppers Compare Prices Harder Adobe recorded peak Cyber Monday 2025 discounts of **31% on electronics**, **28% on toys** and **25% on apparel**. Shoppers carry those numbers in their heads when they land on your page. You do not have to match them. Bundles, value adds and first-term discounts often protect margin better than a flat price cut. ### 4. Email Becomes Your Busiest Channel Klaviyo's BFCM data, as [**summarized by Mavlers**](https://www.mavlers.com/blog/klaviyo-bfcm-optimal-send-times/), shows email engagement peaking around **9 to 10am ET** and purchases around **noon to 1pm ET**. The catch worth knowing: an email that sends a traffic spike to a slow site still loses the sale. ### 5. Bots Show Up Too Scrapers, card-testing bots and login attacks hit stores when the team is busiest. A web application firewall and rate limiting matter most in November. ## How a Site Owner Should Think About Black Friday You sit on one side of Black Friday or both: you sell during it, or you buy during it (hosting, plugins, tools). **If you sell**, run it as a project with a deadline. Decide your offer now, build your Black Friday landing page, load test checkout and freeze plugin updates a week before launch. Our [**Black Friday checklist**](/black-friday-checklist/) turns that into tasks with deadlines. **If you buy**, read the renewal price before the discount. A low first-term price can jump at renewal, and lifetime deals deserve extra scrutiny: buyers in a [**SitePoint thread on lifetime hosting**](https://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/anyone-here-using-lifetime-hosting-worth-it-in-the-long-run/480645) worry that "lifetime" means the lifetime of the company. Favor offers with clear terms. **Either way, look past the weekend.** November customers only pay off if they stay, so plan customer retention after Black Friday before the sale starts. ## Get Your Site Ready for Black Friday Traffic with xCloud Your site has to stay fast at the moment the most people want to buy. You can run your own servers and watch graphs at 3 a.m., or hand that job to a team that does it every day. **xCloud** supports both paths. [**xCloud Managed Hosting**](/managed-hosting/) starts from $5/month, and plans like **Growing** (4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 128 GB NVMe, $30/month) suit busier stores. If you prefer your own DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner or AWS servers, [**xCloud Self Managed Hosting**](/self-managed-hosting/) gives you the control panel, with your first server free for up to 10 sites. - ✅ **Free migrations** to move off slow shared hosting before November. 👉 See the [**full server migration guide**](/docs/perform-a-full-server-migration-with-xcloud/). - ✅ **Staging sites** to test your sale theme, coupons and checkout safely. 👉 Follow the [**staging environment guide**](/docs/how-to-create-a-staging-environment-in-xcloud/). - ✅ **Cloudflare Enterprise** and Patchstack-powered [**Site Security PRO**](/site-security-pro/) through [**xCloud add-ons**](/hosting-addons/). - ✅ **Automatic backups and 24/7 chat support** for the week you cannot afford to wait. The honest caveat: no host can rescue a checkout that loads every plugin you own. Hosting gives you headroom, and you still need to test. Our guide to the [**best hosting for WooCommerce**](/best-hosting-for-woocommerce/) compares the options fairly. xCloud is also running Black Friday 2026 offers: a **lifetime deal on the self-managed hosting control panel** and a **Black Friday-exclusive discount on xCloud Managed Server plans**. [**See xCloud's Black Friday deals**](/black-friday-web-hosting-deals/), or check current plans on the [**pricing page**](/pricing/). **Ready for your busiest week? [Get your xCloud Black Friday deal](/black-friday-web-hosting-deals/) and move your store before the traffic arrives.** ## Plan Your Black Friday 2026 Now, Not on Thanksgiving Night Black Friday started as a police complaint about Philadelphia traffic, picked up a cheerful backstory in the 1980s and grew into a global, mostly online season worth hundreds of billions of dollars. For site owners it means a few days of extreme demand that reward preparation. This week, put the 2026 dates in your calendar, decide your offer and check whether your hosting can take a spike many times your normal traffic. If it cannot, fix it in October, while migrations are calm and nobody is refreshing the checkout page. If you have found this blog helpful, feel free to [**subscribe to our blogs**](/blog/) for valuable tutorials, guides, knowledge, and tips on web hosting and server management. You can also join our [**Facebook community**](https://www.facebook.com/groups/xcloud.community) to share insights and engage in discussions. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When Is Black Friday 2026? Black Friday 2026 is **Friday, November 27**, the day after US Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday follows on November 30, and many brands open their sales weeks earlier. ### Why Is It Called Black Friday? Philadelphia police coined the shopping meaning in the 1950s to describe the crowds and traffic after Thanksgiving. Retailers added the "stores get into the black" explanation in the late 1980s. The first recorded "Black Friday" was a gold market crash on September 24, 1869. ### Is Cyber Monday Bigger Than Black Friday? Online in the US, yes. Adobe measured $14.25B on Cyber Monday 2025 versus $11.8B on Black Friday. Black Friday still opens the season, so most brands run offers across the whole week. ### Is Black Friday Only an American Event? No. Amazon brought Black Friday deals to the UK in 2010, and the event has spread worldwide. Salesforce measured $336.6B in global sales during Cyber Week 2025. ### I run a WooCommerce store on shared hosting. Should I upgrade before Black Friday? If your store slows down during normal promotions, yes, and do it in October. Checkout pages cannot be fully cached, so they need real CPU and PHP capacity during spikes. A managed server with free migration, like [**xCloud Managed Hosting**](/managed-hosting/), gives you that headroom. ### Do Hosting Companies Offer Black Friday Deals? Almost all of them do, from $1 first months to lifetime control panel deals. Compare the renewal price and terms, not just the headline discount. Our [**Black Friday web hosting deals**](/black-friday-web-hosting-deals/) roundup covers what to look for.