Hey everyone,

I would like to know how you approach performance and scaling specifically for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush.

With high traffic spikes, tons of concurrent users adding items to carts, and hitting checkout at the same time, server resources get pushed hard. For some client sites, I usually have to temporarily scale up CPU and RAM just to keep the servers from crashing.

To tackle this, I'm currently building a custom theme from scratch focused on raw performance, minimizing database queries and keeping WordPress/WooCommerce hooks and filters to an absolute minimum.

Right now, full-page caching is enabled everywhere except for the dynamic areas (side cart, cart page, and checkout). I'm also creating a theme from scratch and I'm trying to optimize everything and avoiding to do a lot of calls to database or adding lot of filters/actions.

I’m also implementing:

* Cloudflare, CDN
* SiteGround Memcached (Object Caching)
* Server resource scaling

What are your go-to optimizations to prep for the BFCM surge? Or do you keep your stores running lean enough year-round that Black Friday doesn't require any special prep?