We’re getting close to crunch time, folks. Black Friday will be here before we know it, which makes September a great time to get your website in shape - not just for the holiday rush, but for your business in general.

Here are five things you can do now to make your website better today and give yourself a nice runway into Black Friday.

Start with your top 10 products.

Look at your top 10 sellers from last Black Friday. If this is your first year in business, use your top 10 sellers for the year so far. Go through each product page and ask:

• Can you condense the description?

• Are you leading with benefits instead of features?

• Is everything spelled correctly?

• Is there anything customers routinely ask that should already be answered on the page?

Shop your website from your phone.

Don't just look at your website on your computer. Pull it up on your phone and actually shop it the way a customer would. Go from the homepage all the way through adding something to your cart and starting checkout.

• Can you easily find what you're looking for?

• Are the photos displaying correctly?

• Are the buttons easy to find and click?

• Is anything confusing, annoying or getting in the way?

Check your site speed.

Run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights, especially the mobile version, and see what's slowing it down. Shopify sites can get particularly bogged down during Black Friday traffic. We had a number of years at Erin's Faces when customers had trouble checking out because Shopify's servers were so saturated.

You can't control their servers, but you can do everything possible on your end to make your site as fast and easy to shop as possible. Look for oversized image files, apps you're no longer using and anything else unnecessarily slowing things down.

Get your Black Friday photography done.

If you're planning gift sets, bundles, gifts with purchase, special packaging or anything else you'll feature for Black Friday, get the photography or other creative assets done now. Whether you're taking the photos yourself, hiring a photographer or creating assets with AI, aim to have everything finished by the end of September.

It's one less thing looming on your to-do list when November gets busy.

Collect your social proof.

Pull together the customer reviews, testimonials, press mentions and customer photos you may want to use during Black Friday. Save everything in one folder now so when it's time to create your emails, website updates and social posts, you're not hunting through three years of emails and Instagram tags trying to find that one great review you remember seeing.

You don't need to have Black Friday figured out in September. But anything you can take care of now is one less thing you'll be scrambling to do when November rolls around.

Pick one of these to tackle this week, then move on to the next. Your website will be better for it now - and you'll be very glad you did the work when Black Friday gets here.