Holiday traffic is brilliant… until slow pages or crashes turn carts into exits. Faster sites convert better, and resilient apps keep revenue flowing when the rush hits. Here’s how to prep now—without burning the team out in December.
1) Map your real peak traffic (not just the homepage)
Don’t guess. Pull logs from your edge/CDN and APIs to see when peaks happen and where visitors actually go. Sketch the mix so your tests match reality. For example:
- 60% → /homepage
- 25% → /dealpage
- 12% → /support
- 3% → /about
Do the same for API calls (auth, catalog, pricing, checkout). This becomes your blueprint for synthetic load tests.
2) Load-test to find breakpoints, not just averages
Recreate typical user flows with the traffic mix above, then steadily crank it up. Watch errors, latency, saturation and queue depth across the stack. Fix the issues that hit the most users first (a 10% checkout error beats a 1% image timeout). Tell Ops before you unleash the flood—they’ll thank you.
3) Size capacity with marketing (and last year’s data)
Ask marketing what’s coming (campaigns, influencers, flash sales) and pull last year’s week-by-week numbers. If you’re unsure, plan for 5–6× your normal peak, then sense-check the cost vs. expected uplift with leadership.
4) Scale early, soak, then freeze the risky stuff
Add capacity weeks before the surge and let it sit under rehearsal traffic. Keep testing every few days. A week out, monitor prod closely and avoid last-minute changes that alter your capacity profile (big dependencies, schema changes, new image formats, etc.).
5) Assume parts will fail—and contain it
Build in redundancy and circuit breakers so one flaky dependency doesn’t take the whole site down. Add targeted monitors for known weak spots from testing, plus clear runbooks and on-call rotations for the big days.