Black Friday and other campaigns can put unusual pressure on a website. Prepare before the traffic arrives.
Simplify the Page
Campaign pages should be light, focused, and cacheable where possible. Avoid unnecessary embeds and heavy scripts.
Measure the page before making changes. Compress campaign images, remove video that loads automatically, and check which third-party scripts are requested. Advertising, chat and personalisation tools may be necessary, but every service adds another dependency during the busiest period. Test the page on a normal mobile connection rather than judging it only from an office connection.
Test Checkout
Run test orders and confirm payment, email, stock, tax, and shipping behaviour.
Test successful and declined payments, discount codes, guest checkout and account creation. Confirm the customer receives the correct email and that the order reaches the system used for fulfilment. If the offer starts or ends at a particular time, verify the website, payment platform and marketing team use the same time zone.
Warm the Cache
Clear and rebuild caches before the campaign starts. Make sure important pages are not accidentally excluded.
Visit the homepage, campaign page, category pages and popular products after clearing the cache. Do not cache baskets, checkout pages or personalised account responses. If you use a CDN, confirm that a cache hit is being returned for public assets and that a purge will be available if the offer changes.
Check Capacity and Recovery
Review recent CPU, memory, database and PHP-worker usage with enough time to act. Take a tested backup before the campaign freeze, confirm who can restore it, and avoid major plugin or theme updates immediately before launch. Agree who will pause advertising if checkout fails; continuing to buy traffic during an incident makes recovery harder.
Monitor During the Event
Watch uptime, resource usage, logs, and payment gateway status during the busiest period.
Use an external uptime check for the campaign and checkout pages, then watch application errors and slow database queries. Record a normal baseline beforehand so a genuine traffic problem is easier to distinguish from routine background activity. Keep hosting and payment-provider support details available to the person on duty.
Campaign traffic rewards preparation and punishes last-minute plugin changes.
