In e-commerce and tourism, a big share of the year's sales lands between November and December, between Black Friday, Christmas shopping, long weekends and, depending on the sector, high season. Those are the weeks when the most people visit the site and when there's the least room for anything to go wrong.
Many of the problems that show up on those dates could have been caught earlier. If your business follows that calendar, October is a good time to go through a few things calmly, while traffic is still normal.
Keeping the site up when more people arrive
A site that runs fine on an ordinary Tuesday can slow right down when far more visitors arrive at once, for example when the Black Friday email goes out or a social media campaign kicks off. The first things to struggle are usually search and listings with lots of filters, which are among the parts that put the most load on the database.
Before the season, it's worth running a load test that simulates that peak and seeing where things get stuck. Check image sizes, caching and your hosting plan as well, because some plans work fine all year and fall short on exactly those days. If you need a bigger server, it's better to know a few weeks ahead.
The purchase or booking flow
Make a full purchase or booking the way a customer would, from a phone and from a computer, with different payment methods. It sounds obvious, but it's common for something to have broken with an update months ago without anyone noticing, because the team doesn't buy from its own site.
Look at the steps you could cut and at how errors are shown. A discount code that doesn't apply properly or a confusing message when a card is declined makes a lot of people abandon their cart, and in the middle of a campaign that hurts more. If you're launching special discounts, test them first on a staging environment with the same rules they'll have on the day.
The integrations nobody sees
Several systems are usually involved behind a single purchase: the payment gateway, the ERP or stock software, the shipping company and, in tourism, the PMS that handles availability. Each one runs on its own, and when volume goes up, the connections between them are what usually fail first.
Some APIs cap the number of requests per minute, and a spike in orders hits that cap before anyone has planned for it. Other times stock doesn't sync in time and you sell products you no longer have, or a hotel books the same room twice. Check that these connections retry when a call fails and that an alert goes off if something doesn't arrive. And make it clear who on the team handles it if it happens mid-campaign.
Updates and security
CMS, plugin and server updates should be done before the busy season. During those weeks the sensible thing is to touch as little as possible, because if an update breaks something, fixing it in the middle of a campaign costs a lot more.
Some teams set a date after which nothing new goes live except urgent fixes, and keep it until after the holidays. Before that date, check SSL certificates, pending security patches and backups, making sure along the way that the backups can actually be restored. Fraud attempts and automated attacks also go up during high-traffic periods, so it's a good moment to review who has access to the admin panel.
When to start
Ideally, start a month to six weeks ahead of the peak, so there's time to fix whatever comes up. If your season starts with Black Friday, you're still in time, though it's best not to leave it for the last week.
At Liquid we work with e-commerce and handle maintenance for websites and apps all year round. If you'd like someone to go through all this with you before the season, we'll take a look.
