Black Friday without surprises: preparing your online store

Most Black Friday outages are decided weeks earlier: an outdated plugin, a missing cache, a hosting plan already at its limit on a normal day. Work through the areas below two or three weeks ahead, then freeze the store on the day itself.

Speed

• Update early. Take a backup, then update WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and plugins. The safest route is cPanel, with WP Toolkit or, on Web Hosting SSD plans, Softaculous; the WordPress dashboard is the fallback. See also how to update WordPress without breaking the site.
• Trim plugins. Deactivate and delete anything you do not use. Every extra plugin slows pages down and can become a security hole.
• Turn caching on. WordPress Hosting and Business Hosting plans run the LiteSpeed web server, so the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is the obvious choice (setting up LiteSpeed Cache). On Web Hosting SSD (Nginx and Apache), use a compatible caching plugin. Either way, the cart and checkout must stay out of the cache; confirm it with a test order.
• Lighten images. Convert photos to WebP and upload them at the size they are displayed, not straight from the camera.

Hosting resources

In cPanel, open Metrics, then Resource Usage, and look at an ordinary day. If you already hit the CPU or memory limits now, the campaign will push you past them.

• Look for the cause first: heavy plugins, frequent scheduled tasks, bots crawling your product filters.
• If the limits are still reached after that, move to a bigger plan from the client area in good time (changing your plan). For large stores a VPS may be the better fit.
• During the campaign, run product feeds and syncs with other platforms less often.

Payments and security

• Guard the checkout with CAPTCHA and a cap on payment attempts. Bots use small stores to test stolen cards, and the payment processor may then block your payments.
• Walk the whole buyer journey: product, cart, coupon, payment, confirmation email and invoice. Then repeat it on a phone.
• Make sure confirmation emails do not land in spam. Send a test order to a Gmail address and to one on another service (see why emails end up in spam).

Backups

TopHost hosting is backed up daily with JetBackup and the copies are kept in two separate locations. Even so, download your own copy before the campaign and store it off the server (downloading a full account backup). If a change breaks something, you can restore the site with JetBackup 5.

The campaign newsletter

A web hosting account can send no more than 400 emails per hour (mail service restrictions). A big list sent from the hosting eats that allowance and delays order confirmations, so use a dedicated newsletter service for mailings.

Timeline at a glance

1. 2 to 3 weeks before: updates, plugin clean-up, caching, images, resource check.
2. 1 week before: decide on the plan, run a full test order, protect payments, review scheduled tasks.
3. The day before: fresh backup downloaded, stock, prices and discount dates checked, automatic updates paused for key plugins.
4. Campaign day: no installs or updates (except urgent security fixes), watch orders and Resource Usage, place a test order now and then.

Frequently asked questions

The site shows "Resource Limit Is Reached"

The account has reached its plan's resource limit. Pause anything that is not urgent and check usage in Resource Usage. Full explanation: the article on the Resource Limit Is Reached message.

Will a bigger plan fix any slowdown?

Only if you are hitting the limits. If you are not and the store is still slow, the cause is usually in the store itself: heavy plugins, large images or no caching (why a website loads slowly).

I see lots of failed orders for small amounts

That is the classic sign of automated card testing. Let your payment processor know and add CAPTCHA to the checkout. The antivirus on the server scans for infected files, so it cannot block this kind of attack.