A planned spike – a sale, a newsletter, a product launch – is the one kind of traffic you can prepare for. Do this a week beforehand, not on the day.
A week before
- Check caching is working and that product and category pages are actually being served from cache. This is the single biggest factor.
- Update everything now, so you are not applying an update during the sale. Then stop changing things.
- Take a backup and confirm you can restore it.
- Look at your slowest pages and fix them. Under load, a slow page occupies a connection slot for longer, so slowness turns into unavailability sooner than you would expect.
The day before
- Clear stale caches so the first visitors are not all generating fresh pages at once
- Check stock levels are right – a sale is a poor moment to discover a sync problem
- Place a full test order end to end, including payment
- Prune the scheduled actions backlog if there is one
On the day
- Avoid bulk product edits and imports while traffic is high
- Do not run a backup during the peak; it competes for the same resources
- Watch Resource Usage in cPanel so you can see what is under pressure
Tell us
If you are expecting something substantially outside your normal traffic, let us know in advance. It costs nothing, and knowing it is coming is far better than us seeing an unexplained spike and you seeing errors at your busiest hour.
