Black Friday readiness: making your shop survive the spike
Your shop runs fine for 364 days a year. Then Black Friday arrives, traffic goes 20x, and the wheels come off at the worst possible moment. Here is how to be ready.
Black Friday breaks shops that are perfectly healthy the rest of the year, because the bottleneck only shows up under load. Cache aggressively at the edge, keep the cart and checkout dynamic, add a waiting room as a safety valve, and load-test before the day — not during it.
There's a special kind of dread reserved for ecommerce teams in late November. The site that's hummed along all year is about to take a month's worth of traffic in a single afternoon, and everyone quietly wonders whether it'll hold. The good news: surviving the spike is mostly preparation, not luck.
Why the day is different
Normal traffic is forgiving. Your server handles requests one after another with room to spare. Black Friday compresses a huge number of visitors into a narrow window, and every weak point you've been ignoring — a slow query, an uncached page, an origin with no headroom — gets stress-tested at once.
The readiness checklist
Cache everything you safely can
Product pages, categories, the homepage — these look the same for every shopper. Serve them from the edge so your origin handles a fraction of the load.
Keep the personal parts dynamic
Cart, checkout and account pages must bypass the cache. Define exactly which cookies mean "this is personal" so everything else stays cacheable.
Add a waiting room as a safety valve
If demand ever exceeds capacity, a queue holds visitors gracefully instead of letting the site collapse for everyone.
Load-test in advance
Simulate the spike on a quiet day. Find the breaking point now, while you can still fix it calmly.
Have a rollback plan
Freeze risky deploys for the week. The best Black Friday change is no surprise change.
The most common Black Friday failure isn't the shop server — it's the database behind it, drowning in cart and session writes. Caching the read-heavy pages at the edge frees the database to do the writes that actually make you money.
What "good" looks like on the day
Black Friday rewards the boring work you do in advance. Cache the shared pages at the edge, keep carts and checkout dynamic, put a waiting room in front as a safety valve, and load-test before the rush. Do that and the biggest day of your year becomes a calm one — which is the whole point.
Mads has worked in IT — mostly hosting — since he was 16. He took an early stake in a SaaS company and helped grow it through to its acquisition by Visma, has built and run data-center networks, and served as CTO of a Danish data center. He started NordicCDN to make fast, secure infrastructure simple to use.
