Monitoring
Status Pages
Pricing
Black Friday will be here before you know it, ushering in four of the busiest days for online retailers. Most consumers view the period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday as an ideal opportunity to score some bargains, both in brick-and-mortar stores and online. Online shopping during this four-day shopping window has become especially popular, with traffic increasing by 20% to 25% each year for the past few years.
There is every reason to believe that this trend will continue this year, and it’s not too early to begin planning for this year’s onslaught. Last year, the websites of many online retailers experienced slow loading times during this period, and some even crashed for several hours. Here are a few steps that you can take to get ready to help you avoid becoming a casualty during this key shopping period.
One of the first things that you should do is look at your website’s infrastructure. May and June represent an excellent opportunity for you to evaluate how your website is performing and to carry out any routine maintenance required to ensure that your site is ready for the expected increase in traffic. Evaluate your infrastructure with the goal of avoiding any downtime for maintenance during the peak selling season. These two months are also an excellent time to install any new services.
July is the perfect time to test your website’s performance to look for any issues that might affect the loading time. Look at your historical traffic data for this four-day period, and evaluate your ability to handle Black Friday’s increased traffic loads, assuming that traffic will increase over last year. Also, see whether you have any applications that are particularly sensitive to increases in traffic. If you find any areas that present a challenge, this is the time to install the technology that will mitigate the problem.
In August, freeze the implementation of any updates to your website’s infrastructure. Then, look at your analytical data again to uncover any potential weaknesses remaining. Conduct load tests of your site to be sure that any changes that you made in July are performing as expected. Testing high loads in August gives you adequate time to make any changes before Black Friday arrives.
In September and October, evaluate any natural increase in traffic loads. You should start to see a natural increase in traffic loads by October, and analyzing real traffic data rather than the artificial traffic that you used for load testing can often uncover some surprises. Check your site daily to ensure that it is handling increased traffic loads efficiently. At this point, your preparations for Black Friday should be complete.
In November, continue your daily traffic analysis. If you’ve been checking your analytics during the past six months, you should only need to make minor adjustments as your traffic increases. Expect exceptionally large traffic loads on Black Friday, with spikes of up to 15 times the average traffic for a typical day during the rest of the year being possible.
Come December, evaluate how your site performed, and use the results of that analysis to help you plan for the peak shopping season in 2018.
Share this
4 min read On 13th August 2026, a storm knocked out cooling at RadiusDC’s Phoenix data centre, which hosted essential Namecheap operations. To protect hardware from thermal damage, Namecheap took services offline while temporary chillers were brought in. The incident and recovery ran for roughly 30 hours, with Namecheap’s own site unreachable for about 11 hours 42 minutes
3 min read On Wednesday 19 August, Monzo had an outage. DownDetector logged more than 3,000 reports by midday. Monzo’s own statement was direct about what it did next: it activated Monzo Stand-in, its fully independent backup bank, while it investigated an issue affecting customers. By the end of the day, Monzo said the issue was resolved and
3 min read GitHub’s incident on 17 August 2026 ran from 13:28 to 21:15 UTC, seven hours and forty-seven minutes. At peak, web and API traffic saw error rates of around 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached roughly 50%. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were affected alongside Git operations, Actions, Pages, Issues, Pull Requests
3 min read Adding a new website, launching a customer portal, or handing a service to a new team should be straightforward. Setting up monitoring is part of that job, but it is easy for a manual step to be missed when information is spread across several systems. StatusCake now integrates with viaSocket, giving teams a way to connect
7 min read A website may be standing and still be in trouble. It may answer a request, return a cheerful 200 OK, and yet load slowly enough that visitors begin to lose patience. Its certificate may be nearing expiry. Its domain records may have changed. A server may be filling its disk in the background, patient and
6 min read StatusCake tells you that something might be broken. Hermes can check whether it really looks broken, decide who should hear about it, send the email, and keep the record for tomorrow morning’s summary.
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
