Black Friday is November 27. Peak rehearsals are booking now. Book a slot

Ecommerce Performance

Platform-specific notes that feed Evaluat’s ecommerce, checkout, and peak-readiness pages.

Ecommerce is where a slow page has a price on it, so these posts are platform-specific. Why Magento checkout dies first under load and Why your Shopify store slows down under load explain the failure each platform is prone to, WooCommerce performance testing shows how to find a WordPress store's limit, and Load testing a headless or Hyvä storefront covers the setups where the front end and the checkout are separate systems.

The 12-week Black Friday plan puts all of it on a calendar. It is the post to open in August, not November.

The product pages these posts feed are ecommerce performance testing, Magento performance testing, checkout performance testing and peak readiness.

A virtual waiting room drawn as a queue, a gate and a shop. On the left, a crowd of shoppers waits in the queue. In the middle, the gate lets them in at 150 a minute. On the right, the site holds 900 shoppers at once and stays fast for everyone inside. The queue is the easy part; the number at the gate has to be measured.

What is a virtual waiting room?

A virtual waiting room is a holding page in front of a website that lets visitors in at a rate the site can serve and queues everyone else, so a busy sale becomes a wait instead of a crash. Installing one is the easy part. Choosing how many shoppers it lets in is the hard part, and that number has to be measured.

Ahmad Farzan ·

A code freeze calendar for Black Friday 2026 drawn as a timeline from 26 October to 4 December. A feature freeze starts on Friday 30 October, a full freeze starts on Friday 13 November followed by a final load test on the frozen build, Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November within the peak week, and a gradual thaw begins on Tuesday 1 December.

What is a code freeze, and should you have one before peak?

A code freeze does not protect you from the release you shipped in September. It protects the site you last load tested, by stopping changes nobody has proved since. Freeze about two weeks before Black Friday, include tags, configuration and content as well as code, and keep a tested route open for genuine fixes.

Ahmad Farzan ·

A worked example of sizing a Black Friday load test from last year's analytics. The busiest hour averaged 600 people on the site at once. Multiplying by 2.4 for the peak minutes after the email send gives 1,440, adding 8% growth gives 1,555, and adding 20% headroom gives a load test target of 1,900 virtual users.

How to estimate peak traffic from your analytics

Across the 138 retailers Queue-it tracked, Black Friday 2025 drew 78% more visits than an average October Friday. Your load test needs your own number, and last November's analytics already hold it. Find the busiest hour, find the minutes inside it, scale for growth, and turn the result into virtual users and journeys.

Ahmad Farzan ·

A twelve-week countdown to Black Friday on 27 November: targets set at week 12, the first load test by week 8, fixes and a re-test by week 6, a spike rehearsal by week 4, a code freeze from week 2, while the expected traffic curve climbs to its peak on the day.

How to prepare your website for Black Friday: the 12-week plan

Black Friday 2026 lands on 27 November, and most sites that fail that morning failed weeks earlier, when nobody rehearsed the traffic. This plan counts down from the day: set targets from last year's analytics, find your real ceiling while fixes are still possible, rehearse the opening spike, then freeze and stand watch. Starting late? Jump in at your week.

Ahmad Farzan ·

A headless page load on a timeline. The server response is a small blue slice on the left, where a protocol load test stops timing. The browser render is the long orange slice that follows: download, execute, hydrate, paint. The user's total wait spans the whole timeline, and the page is not usable until the render finishes.

Load testing a headless or Hyvä storefront

A headless storefront decouples the frontend from Magento and may render on the client, server, or edge. Hyvä is different: it is a lighter, server-rendered Magento frontend that replaces much of Luma's JavaScript stack. Both still need browser measurement and backend capacity testing, but for different reasons.

Ahmad Farzan ·

On a Shopify store, the platform sends a cached page fast, but each shopper's browser still has to run the theme, app, and third-party JavaScript, which pushes Core Web Vitals from good toward poor under load.

Why your Shopify store slows down under load

Shopify is hosted, so buyers assume it scales, and its cached storefront genuinely does. The slowdown lives somewhere else: the theme, apps, and third-party JavaScript a merchant adds run in every shopper's own browser, where an HTTP load test never looks. Under load, that is where a Shopify store actually slows. Here is why, and how to see it.

Ahmad Farzan ·

On a WooCommerce store, the cached catalog is served straight from cache, but cart and checkout run the full uncacheable path on every request: WordPress boot, autoloaded options, plugin hooks and queries, a PHP worker, and MySQL.

WooCommerce performance testing: find your store's limit under load

WooCommerce runs your store, which means the slow paths are yours to fix. Its cached catalog flies, but cart, checkout, and my-account run PHP and MySQL on every request, and on budget hosting a thin worker pool caps how many shoppers that path can hold. Here is why it slows under load, and how to test a staging copy.

Ahmad Farzan ·

Sale traffic splits at the full page cache: catalog pages are served from cache, while cart and checkout bypass it and land every click's full work on PHP and MySQL.

Why Magento checkout dies first under load

Every sale, the same picture: the homepage is fast, product pages are fine, and checkout is timing out. That is not bad luck. Magento's cache serves the catalog, but cart and checkout hit PHP and MySQL on every click, exactly where the work is heaviest and hardest to share. Here is why, and how to test for it.

Ahmad Farzan ·