PandaMoose AgencyGet your Magento store ready for Black Friday
Most stores that go down on Black Friday fail in the same few places: a cold or bypassed page cache, a database that locks under checkout load, cron and indexers fighting for the same tables, and a third-party call that hangs the whole checkout. We find those before your customers do.
Black Friday is on 27 November 2026.
- Readiness check
- $900 fixed
- Takes
- 5 working days
- Weekend on-call
- On request
Black Friday 2026 is over.
The checklist below works for any traffic peak. For a look from the inside, our infrastructure audit covers servers, database, deploys and costs: $1,500 fixed, 7–10 days.
The readiness check, day by day
- Day 1BaselineRead-only access to your servers and monitoring. We take last year’s peak from your analytics and set the target load.
- Day 2Load testHome, category, search, product and checkout at the target load, on staging or on production off-peak with your approval.
- Day 3Deep reviewFull-page cache and Varnish hit rate, Redis, slow queries and indexes, cron and indexers, third-party calls on checkout.
- Day 4Fix listEvery finding ranked by impact and effort. Quick wins can go in the same week through your pipeline, at our hourly rate.
- Day 5RunbookWho watches what over the weekend, alert thresholds, and what to do if checkout slows down. Handed over on a call.
$900 fixed. On-call cover for the Black Friday weekend is quoted after the check, once we know the store.
The checklist
What we look at first. Go through it with your team; anything you can’t tick is where the check starts.
- Full-page cache is on and warmVarnish or the built-in cache serves repeat views of category and product pages, with a hit rate above 90%. Warm it after every deploy and before the peak.
- Nothing quietly disables the cacheOne block marked cacheable="false" in a common layout turns off the full-page cache for every page that uses it. Customer data should come through private content sections instead.
- Redis split by jobSeparate Redis instances for cache, page cache and sessions, so a cache flush or eviction never logs customers out mid-checkout.
- Indexers on “Update by schedule”Cron running and healthy, no full reindex planned for the peak, and no import jobs scheduled for the weekend.
- Slow queries found and fixedThe MySQL slow query log reviewed for checkout, layered navigation and search, missing indexes added, and the buffer pool big enough for the working set.
- Search sized for the trafficElasticsearch or OpenSearch heap and shards sized for peak queries. Search is often the first thing to fall over.
- Static files and images on a CDNLong cache lifetimes, resized and compressed images, and no asset requests reaching the origin.
- Third-party calls can’t hang checkoutTimeouts on payment, tax, shipping-rate and ERP calls, and a known answer to what happens when one of them is slow.
- Payment provider briefedRate limits and fraud rules agreed with the payment provider before the peak, not during it.
- Load-tested at 2–3× last year’s peakIncluding search, cart and checkout, not just the homepage.
- Capacity lines up end to endSpare servers or autoscaling confirmed, and the database accepts the extra connections that more PHP workers open.
- Code freeze agreedNo deploys from a week before Black Friday until after Cyber Monday, except fixes.
- Backups and rollback testedA restore actually run, and a one-step rollback ready for the last release.
- Alerts that wake someoneResponse time, error rate and checkout success monitored, with an on-call rota for the whole weekend.
- TLS and DNS checkedThe certificate valid well past December, and DNS TTLs lowered in case traffic has to move.
Questions
When should we start?
At least two to three weeks before Black Friday. The check takes five working days, and fixes need time to go through your pipeline before a code freeze about a week before the peak.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to servers, monitoring and the Magento admin for the review. For the load test we agree the target load, the time window and the environment with you first.
Do you work with Adobe Commerce Cloud?
Yes. On Adobe Commerce Cloud we load-test on Staging, or coordinate a production test with Adobe support first.
What does fixing the findings cost?
The check is $900 fixed. Fixes are separate: your team can apply them from our list, or we do them at our Magento rate from $130 an hour.
Do you cover the weekend itself?
Yes, on request. On-call cover from Black Friday through Cyber Monday is quoted after the check, once we know the store.
Book the readiness check
[email protected]Send your store URL and roughly how much traffic you expect. We reply within one business day.