Black Friday is coming. You have prepared the offers, you have invested in advertising, you have notified your mailing list. Enter the traffic peak that you have been looking for for weeks.
And the store falls.
It is the worst possible scenario because the cost is not only the lost sale: it is having paid to bring those people. Let's avoid it.
Why the stores fall down on that day
A WooCommerce store is much more demanding than a normal website. And there is a specific technical reason that should be understood.
Normal pages can be cached: a ready-made version is saved and served to everyone. Very fast and with little consumption.
But the cart and the checkout cannot be searched, because they are different for each person. That means that each user purchasing generates real work: database queries, sessions, writes.
With normal traffic it is not noticeable. With ten times as many people at once, that work multiplies and the server reaches its limit.
What to do before
1. Ask your hosting how much you can tolerate
Literally, write to them: “I expect X simultaneous visits on Black Friday, does my plan support it?”
A decent provider will respond with data and tell you if it is appropriate to temporarily expand resources. Many allow you to upgrade your plan for a few weeks and return later.
Pay attention to the limits of concurrent PHP processes, which is usually the real bottleneck, rather than bandwidth.
2. Check that the cart is NOT cached
This error is serious and more common than it seems. If your caching plugin saves the cart or checkout, customers can see someone else's cart, or even their data.
Almost all caching plugins exclude these pages automatically, but check. There must be an explicit exclusion for cart, checkout and my account.
Practical test: add something to the cart, open the website in another browser in incognito and see if it appears.
3. Lighten the database
In traffic spikes, the database is what suffers. Two things that help a lot:
- Clean before: backlogged reviews, expired sessions, old abandoned carts, trial orders
- Review the autoloaded options: these are data that are loaded on each visit. If they have grown a lot, they penalize all pages
4. Do a load test (even if it's homemade)
There are services that simulate simultaneous visitors and some have a free plan enough for a small store.
If you don't want to complicate things, a domestic version: ask five or six people to enter at the same time and make a complete purchase while you watch the resource consumption on the hosting panel.
5. Prepare campaign images
Campaign banners are usually the heaviest part of the page, and arrive at the last minute without optimization.
Compress it, use WebP, and make sure the main banner is not a 3 MB image. On mobile, with a data connection, that is several seconds of blank screen just when the user is in the most hurry.
6. More frequent backups
During the campaign, each hour contains orders. Raise the frequency while the peak lasts, and check beforehand that the restoration works.
7. Have a plan if something goes wrong
Don't improvise in the heat. Have decided beforehand:
- Who do you call if the store goes down (with the phone at hand, not looking for it)
- What message do you put if you have to stop?
- How do you notify customers who had a half-ordered order?
The freezing rule
Repeat it like a mantra: since mid-November, nothing has been touched.
No updates, no new plugins, no design changes, not “a quick thing.” Except security emergency.
Any changes you want to make, make them now, with room to check that they don't break anything. Each modification that enters the middle of the campaign is a roulette.
After the campaign
When the peak passes, two things:
- Resume the updates that you left pending, calmly and one by one
- Check what went wrong. Look at the statistics: were there any slow moments? Abandoned carts at checkout? That tells you what to improve for next year.
And lower the hosting resources again if you had expanded them.
Summarizing
Preparing a store for Black Friday is not magic: it is doing in October and November what cannot be done in December. Talk to the hosting, check the cache, clean the database, test, and then don't touch anything.
If you prefer to have someone watching during the campaign, our plan for WooCommerce stores includes payment gateway and cart monitoring, reinforced copies, and priority support. Precisely because in these weeks an hour of downtime costs more than a year of maintenance.
Would you prefer us to review it? Take a look at our WordPress maintenance service either tell us what your website needs and we will respond to you in less than 24 hours.