Media sites typically see traffic spikes of 30-40% during the holiday season. When these peaks hit, publishing teams face a double challenge: handling more readers while publishing more content. Is your WordPress platform ready?
Four Critical Areas to Address
1. Publishing Workflow Preparation
- Schedule content deployment during off-peak hours
- Prepare evergreen content in advance
- Set up staging environments for urgent updates
- Create emergency response protocols for breaking news
2. Performance Optimization
- Enable caching effectively
- Optimizing static web assets (images, media, HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
- Implement CDN solutions
- Monitor database performance
3. Team Coordination
- Establish clear communication channels
- Define roles for high-traffic periods
- Create contingency plans
- Set up monitoring schedules
4. Platform security
- Ensure all softwares are up to date
- Require strong, unique passwords and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all user accounts.
- Regularly review and manage user accounts, roles, and permissions.
- Verify that the SSL certificate is active and properly configured.
Practical Steps for Your Team
Before the Traffic Surge
- Audit your current site performance (use tools like WebPageTest or Google PageSpeed Insights for frontend performance and NewRelic for backend performance)
- Review and optimize your largest content pages
- Test your publishing workflow under stress
- Set up real-time monitoring using tools like Sentry or NewRelic
Monitor these essential indicators:
- Core Web Vitals (CWVs) – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- Time to first byte (TTFB)
- Error rates
- Verify application logs for the following errors:
- Server overload – HTTP 503 Service Unavailable / 504 Gateway timeout
- Rate limiting – HTTP 429 Too many requests
- Verify application logs for the following errors:
- Publishing workflow completion times
Industry Best Practices
Leading publishers prepare for holiday traffic by:
- Implementing robust caching strategies
- Using scalable hosting solutions
- Establishing clear emergency procedures
- Testing systems under load
- Scheduling for a code freeze
Long-term Benefits
Preparing for holiday traffic surges delivers lasting advantages:
- Improved daily operations
- Better team coordination
- Enhanced publishing efficiency
- More reliable performance year-round
- Reduce revenue loss
Next Steps
- Start with a performance audit
- Review your publishing workflows
- Test your emergency procedures
- Train your team on peak traffic protocols
The goal isn’t just surviving high traffic—it’s maintaining smooth operations that let your team focus on creating great content, not wrestling with technical issues.
Need help preparing your publishing platform for peak performance? Contact us to discuss how we can help optimize your WordPress site for the holiday season and beyond.
