Keep Your Site Up on Busy Sale Days: A Pre-November Speed and Infrastructure Check
The November sales period multiplies your visitors. From hosting capacity and payment tests to caching and backups, here is what to check before the campaign.
When the November sales period (Black Friday, 11.11) arrives, everyone talks about ad budgets. But if the crowd your ads bring lands on a site that will not open, or opens slowly, every lira you spent is wasted. This post gives you a concrete checklist for the two or three weeks before visitors arrive. We have kept the technical terms plain; it is enough to go through the list together with whoever built your site.
Capacity and speed: measure first
Hosting is the rented server that stores your site's files and serves them to visitors. On a shared plan, many sites share one server; you may be fine on ordinary days, but when visitors multiply on a campaign day the site slows down or shows errors. Look at last year's busiest day and this year's planned ad budget, then ask your hosting provider in writing about your plan's limits for simultaneous visitors and resources. We are not suggesting you switch provider; only that you know how far your current plan will stretch. Moving temporarily to a stronger plan for campaign week is also an option.
You can make a simple estimate of capacity. Look in your analytics tool at how many people visited on last November's busiest day, think about how much you will raise ad spend this year, and leave room for two or three times that number. You do not need the exact figure; the point is to be sure the site will not let you down halfway through an unexpected crowd.
There is also the database and plugin side. If you have many products, filtering and search pages are the heaviest users of resources. Ask your site manager to test how these pages behave under heavy use before the campaign; you can also search for a product and change filters yourself and watch how long the page keeps you waiting.
- To measure speed, enter your home page, a product page and your cart page into Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and read the mobile results, since most visitors arrive on phones.
- Resize images to the size they actually appear at. Unresized phone photos are the most common cause of slow pages.
- Use lighter image formats such as WebP where possible.
- Make images below the fold load after the page opens (lazy loading).
- Remove old plugins and sliding banners you no longer use.
Cache and CDN: keeping the crowd off your server
A cache keeps a ready-made copy of frequently requested pages. Instead of building the page from scratch for each visitor, the site hands out the copy and the server gets a break. A CDN is a network that spreads those copies across many locations so content comes from the point nearest the visitor. Many site tools let you switch these on in a few clicks. But personal pages such as the cart and checkout must not be cached, or one customer could see another's basket. Confirm this with whoever sets it up.
During campaign periods, bots and automated programs also strain a site. Your security plugin or your hosting provider's protection can filter these out; ask whether the settings are on. Strengthen the passwords of your site admin accounts and review who can log into the admin panel. On a busy day the site has to be both fast and safe.
Checkout and virtual POS: test with a real card
A virtual POS is the bank-linked connection that lets your site take card payments. The payment step is the most fragile, because your site, your bank and the 3D Secure verification all have to work together. Before the campaign, run a few test purchases with cards from different banks, on both phone and desktop, with and without instalments. Tell your virtual POS provider your campaign dates and ask about your transaction limits and any issues to expect on busy days. A customer who hits an error while paying often does not come back, so also make sure the error messages are understandable.
Backups, the campaign page and watching on busy days
- Take a full backup before the campaign starts and try restoring it once to be sure it works.
- Prepare the campaign page, sale prices and stock at least a week early; do not leave it to the last night.
- State the campaign end date and delivery times clearly on the page.
- Check that the address your ads point to is the right page and that it opens.
- Set up a free uptime monitoring service; it emails or messages you if the site goes down.
Once the campaign starts, open the site on your own phone often too. Write down your hosting provider's emergency support channel and phone number beforehand so you do not lose time when something breaks. Watch the ad budget with the same care; ad spend continues even while the site is slow.
Spreading the preparation over two or three weeks eases things for you and for your site. Changes made on the last day usually bring new errors.
Finally, set a rehearsal day. Walk through the campaign page, the ad link, the cart and the payment like a customer and note every snag you see. The rehearsal usually takes an hour but shows you, in advance, a few expensive surprises that would otherwise hit during the campaign.
A shop that checks its door, till and shelves before the crowd arrives is ready for the sale.