Retail data
UK retail sales volumes fell 0.4% in September, even as online's share of spending kept climbing. Retailers who publish their Black Friday pages now give search engines the time they need before shoppers start comparing.
What the September figures show
UK retail sales volumes declined 0.4% in September, according to the latest Office for National Statistics data reported by InternetRetailing. The same release showed volumes grew by 0.7% across Q3 2026, so the dip sits inside a quarter that still moved forward. InternetRetailing reads the figures alongside retailers bracing for a muted Black Friday.
One month is a short window, and monthly retail figures often move about. They describe September and say little on their own about how shoppers will behave in late November.
Online's share of spending has held up. Online accounted for 28.3% of UK retail sales in September 2026, up from 27.3% in September 2025, based on ONS figures gathered in Sayu's study. That compares with 18.1% in September 2019, before the pandemic, and sits below the record of 37.8% set in January 2021, when lockdown pushed shopping online. These are shares of total sales, so they show where people spent and leave out how much they spent.
Why timing matters in a cautious season
Careful shoppers have every reason to compare before they buy. That makes it worth being visible from the moment they start looking, whenever that turns out to be.
Search wording gives a clue about what to build. Among the Black Friday terms measured in the study, "black friday 2025" was the most-searched in the UK, at 1.22 times the next product term, "black friday". That ranking covers only the terms the study checked and the period it looked at, so treat it as a guide to wording. It does suggest many shoppers include the year when they search.
Search engines need time to find, crawl and rank a new page. A deal page that goes live in the final days before the event may still be waiting to be indexed when shoppers are already comparing. A page published early, at a permanent web address, has time to settle in.
Speed counts too, because most deal browsing happens on phones. 70% of the websites UK Chrome users visited on phones passed Google's Core Web Vitals in September 2026, up from 65.5% in September 2025. Loading speed is the test sites fail most: 80.8% had a good loading score, against 89.4% for responsiveness to taps and 90.2% for layout stability. These figures come from real Chrome visits and only cover sites with enough traffic to be measured. A site fails when it is too slow, too jumpy or too slow to respond for at least a quarter of visits.
What this means for UK businesses
- Publish early. Put your Black Friday page live well before November, even if the deals are still being finalised.
- Keep one permanent address. Reuse the same page each year so it builds up search history, and update the year in the title and heading.
- Match how people search. Name the event and the year clearly in the page title, heading and opening line.
- Make it easy to find. Link to it from your homepage and main menu so search engines and shoppers can reach it.
- Check phone speed. Loading speed is the test sites fail most often, so trim heavy images and scripts on deal pages.
Analysis compiled by Sayu (sayu.co.uk), drawing on ONS figures and Sayu's published research.
