Essential Checklist: Get Ready for Peak Traffic Season with Fastly
Senior Sales Engineer LATAM
Peak season is almost here, and every click counts. Higher traffic, growing demand, and users expecting instant experiences. Now is the time to make sure your site is ready for anything.
Here’s a list of essential tactics to keep your site fast, secure, and prepared to scale!
Instant load: first impressions matter
Shielding: your defense against traffic spikes
Total resilience: no more “site unavailable”
Rate limiting: smart control without sacrificing speed
Dynamic lists: real-time adjustments
Optimization: devices and content
1. Instant Load: First Impressions Matter
What it does: Serves content directly from cache to reduce latency and reduce load on your origin server.
Benefit: Your users see your site almost instantly, improving their experience and reducing abandoned carts.
Quick tip: Check your cache hit ratio. If it’s below 90%, there’s still room to optimize performance.
2. Shielding: Your Defense Against Traffic Spikes
What it does: Creates a protective layer between traffic and your origin, absorbing spikes and protecting your backend.
Benefit: Less overload, lower egress costs, and greater stability during high-traffic days.
Quick tip: Set the Shield close to your origin, for example, San Francisco, for maximum efficiency.
3. Total Resilience: No More “Site Unavailable”
What it does: With Restart and Backup Origin, failed requests automatically retry and redirect to a secondary origin.
Benefit: Your site keeps running even if one origin fails, avoiding visible errors and revenue loss.
Quick tip: Configure multiple origins and strategic retries to cover any contingency.
4. Rate Limiting: Smart Control Without Sacrificing Speed
What it does: Limits the number of requests per second to protect your applications from abusive or excessive use.
Benefit: Keeps your APIs and critical resources safe without affecting legitimate users.
Quick tip: Set clear rules: if a bot exceeds X requests per second, block or penalize automatically.
5. Dynamic Lists: Real-Time Adjustments
What it does: Allows you to modify configurations (IPs, countries, URLs, user-agents) instantly, without deployments. These lists can be used in your CDN configuration to block unwanted user-agents, implement geoblocking, validate or rewrite URLs, and more.
Benefit: Perfect for flash sales, global campaigns, or live events where every second matters.
Quick tip: Update lists directly from the CDN; changes apply within seconds.
6. Optimization: Devices and Content
What it does: Detects user device and connection, delivering optimized and compressed images and content.
Benefit: Fast, efficient experiences without sacrificing quality, on mobile and desktop alike.
Quick tip: Adjust resolution and weight instantly; a mobile user should never receive a 4K image meant for a desktop.
Peak season doesn’t wait, and neither do your users. With Fastly, your site doesn’t just stay online during the moments that matter most… it thrives. Our platform is built to deliver the speed, resilience, and security that modern digital experiences demand.
Whether you’re preparing for a massive campaign, launching a new product, or expecting a surge in global traffic, Fastly helps you create experiences your customers will actually remember: fast load times, zero frustration, and consistent performance across every device and region.
This is your moment to get ahead, not just to keep up.
If you’re ready to strengthen your infrastructure, improve reliability, and deliver truly world-class experiences:
📞 Schedule a personalized demo to see how Fastly can help you move faster, scale smarter, and save significantly on infrastructure costs, all while giving your users the exceptional experience they expect.