Peak season readiness: how to predict and prepare for a traffic spike

Is your site ready for peak season? For many users, there’s nothing more frustrating than a website that crumbles under the weight of a traffic surge. The great news is that most peak traffic periods, from global holidays to big sales events, are predictable, giving you time to prepare. 

An anticipated spike in visitors is the perfect opportunity to optimize your site—boosting sales, increasing conversions, and delivering a delightful user experience. Start by analyzing broader market and consumer data in your industry—think ecommerce trends or digital economy reports. 

Then, use an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare to uncover insights into your site's unique traffic patterns and seasonality. (And while we could go on about how powerful Contentsquare is during seasonal spikes, stick around—we’ll dive into some tips and tricks in the next chapters.)

If your goal is an optimized site that survives and thrives during peak seasons, this guide will show you exactly how to achieve it. 

We explore

• 3 ways to predict seasonal traffic surges

• 4 issues that come with increased traffic

• 9 best practices for preparing and improving UX during peak season

3 ways to predict seasonal traffic surges

We know the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the busiest in the United States. But, get this: holiday ecommerce transactions alone reached $241.4 billion in 2024, an estimated 8.7% growth year-over-year (YoY). 

If you’re participating in Cyber Monday, or any other holiday sale, we cannot stress enough the importance of a pleasant user experience in increasing your conversion rate. A crashing website tends to ruin the moment for shoppers, and you don’t want that happening just because your site can’t handle traffic spikes.

Let’s be clear that while peak season such as the one experienced during holidays may cause a massive surge in traffic, your site can experience spikes throughout the year. That’s why it always makes good business sense to anticipate and get ready for such events.

1. Connect the dots

Virtual waiting room firm Queue-it found that holiday season traffic grew 12% YoY in 2024. So if you have access to your traffic data from last year, you can check if the surges corresponded with holiday sales. 

If you’re from the US, you can also cross-reference this list of holiday shopping events ranked according to the highest conversion rates:

• Cyber Monday

• Black Friday

• Small Business Saturday

• Day before Thanksgiving

• Thanksgiving

• Veteran’s Day

2. Create a baseline

Sometimes, a reason for reaching peak traffic may not be a holiday sale. A regular ol’ marketing campaign can also create such an impact (think of a viral meme, an influencer call-out, or a TikTok video driving traffic to your site). 

In 2023, Beauty brand P.Louise utilized TikTok Live for a live shopping event, which resulted in $2 million in sales within just 12 hours, with a total of 96,000 products sold during the live stream alone! 

So to better predict high-traffic events, you should first look at past data (like Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Benchmarks 2025) and determine your steady-state traffic. Then, plot the points where traffic surged and see what coincided with them. Is it a seasonal event (like a holiday-related campaign) or a normal business event (like a demand-generation activity)?

3. Monitor site performance

When you use tools to monitor UX, you can spot trends as they arise. For example, you learn through Session Replay, one of Contentsquare’s powerful tools, that many visitors are using a particular feature during a holiday sales event, causing a slowdown. Using this insight, you can then predict when the demand will rise again and prepare a solution to nip the problem in the bud.

💡Pro tip: be sure to check out the following chapters of this guide if you want more detailed use cases and actionable tips on how to use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool before, during, and after a traffic spike.

What site owners miss out on if they don’t maximize high-traffic seasons:

• Losing new and repeat customers to competition

• Missing great opportunities to convert as many people as possible

• Earning a bad rap—and the ire of the internet community—due to unfulfilled user expectations

4 issues that come with increased traffic

After identifying traffic spikes, you can start preparing for them and the potential issues they may cause. Problems may differ from one business to another. But there are common factors to consider when planning for an onslaught of traffic.

1. Overwhelming your server

Servers contain the data that make up sites, web pages, and apps. Each time a user accesses a web page, a request is sent to a server to download a copy of the web page to a browser (like Chrome and Safari) located on the user’s device (client). 

These servers can only handle a certain number of requests. A sudden spike in traffic can cause it to max out its resources and fail to serve more requests. To users, this translates into something like a new website melting down in the first five minutes.

The good news is that, in some cases, you can avoid this issue by simply upgrading to a server that can accommodate your estimated increase in traffic.

2. Targeting the wrong audience

Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. And by they, we mean the people who will buy and find value from your product. So, focus on quality over quantity. It’s absolutely more productive to attract 20,000 relevant visitors than 200,000 non-relevant ones. 

3. Becoming vulnerable to security issues

Racking up more visits can boost your brand’s popularity. But while this is a desirable effect, it can also attract the attention of cybercriminals, especially if your success has become widespread.

4. Experiencing sustainability issues 

If too much traffic is the result of unsustainable growth, it can put a strain on your company's resources. You may lack the team, processes, and infrastructure to deliver a delightful experience to your customers. And this translates into losing existing and even new users to competitors.

9 best practices for preparing and improving UX during peak season

Optimizing your site’s UX should not intimidate brands and business owners—or anyone without coding experience, for that matter. Some of the steps here do not require a developer’s knowledge and skills. But it would be great if you were working with one since it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation anyway.

Website optimization: an overview

Optimizing your website or app involves analyzing and implementing changes to the following aspects:

• User experience (UX)

• Accessibility

• Search performance

The process aims to increase traffic or conversions. 

Also, it takes advantage of various tools and strategies, including:

• Page speed improvement

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

• Mobile browsing optimization

1. Reduce friction

Understand how users interact with your website. In addition to looking at the traffic volume, you can take advantage of platforms like Contentsquare that provide insights into digital experiences. For example, viewing heatmaps and session replays enables you to identify areas where users get stuck. 

Leveraging these insights helps you spot significant patterns, such as an increase in rage clicks on a landing page in the last three weeks leading up to a holiday sale. 

Contentsquare Heatmaps help you spot friction points in the user experience

2. Maintain the same website layout

Change is constant, but still, humans love consistency. So use the same website layout during high-traffic seasons. And just introduce holiday sales events by incorporating relevant elements into your site’s existing theme and content.

Target’s holiday website layout showcasing its Christmas deals

3. Optimize images

Obviously, large images take longer to load on web pages. People may not have the patience to stick to your site if all your images behave this way. So, conduct a backend check. Find any image over 500KB and compress it using online tools, such as JPEG Optimizer or TinyPNG. 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool to pinpoint large, slow-loading images and track their impact on page performance. This helps you prioritize optimization efforts for a faster user experience during peak season.

Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool recommends actions to improve page load times such as reducing the size of large images

4. Upgrade your hosting plan or provider

You need a reliable digital repository for your website data: the code, text, images, and videos. If you’ve experienced crashes due to traffic surges before, it’s time to consider a better hosting provider. Ensure they have a proven track record for maintaining uptime. They should also offer services aligning with your need for storage, a content management system, customer support, payment processing, and more.

1. Enable browser caching

Caching involves storing web page resources on the browser, allowing for faster page loads. Your browser will usually store static assets, as these do not change from visit to visit. Examples would be images (photos, logos, and backgrounds), HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

2. Update plugins

Plugins are add-on software installed on your website to customize features and improve functionality. Some examples are HubSpot's WordPress plugin for marketing, OptinMonster for lead generation, Yoast for SEO, and, of course, Contentsquare for user behavior analytics.

3. Create a seamless process

Communicate to users what you want them to do next. And do it logically. For instance, sometimes, users abandon checkout because the site suddenly asks them to log in. If you want them to complete the process, make logging in as fast and painless as possible. Or remind them to do so as they’re just starting to browse your products or services.

4. Answer people’s questions

Make it easy for users to find useful information on your website. Craft accurate product descriptions, publish clear store policies, and create a Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ) section.

In addition, consider adding a live chat, allowing them to reach out directly if they can’t find the answers they’re looking for on the site.

5. Create a contingency plan

Thinking ahead of D-Day and preparing potential fixes is a must. But unexpected things can still happen. So, better come up with Plan B to address real-time issues with urgency. Brainstorm what you will do if more traffic comes in, your site crashes, a data hack occurs, or your online store runs out of stock. 

Put users at the core of your prep

The key lessons in this guide are: predict and prepare for peak traffic seasons. Ensure your site is optimized for such events to increase sales and conversions. But don’t forget that at the heart of it is the desire to delight users, so they end up buying your product or service.

Let Contentsquare help. Get to the bottom of what pains, frustrates, or brings customers joy without switching between too many platforms. Our tools provide an all-in-one gateway to historical data that allows you to pinpoint the exact issues people face on your site during high-traffic periods. Not only that, but Contentsquare is equally as useful before, during, and after a traffic surge.

You can access this critical information through our Heatmaps and Session Replay tools. At the same time, you can user our Voice of Customer (VoC) tools to launch surveys and run user testing to further understand and improve your site’s UX.

The clock is ticking. The best time to plan and prepare is now. Focus on making your site seamless, efficient, and praiseworthy.

FAQs about UX optimization for high-traffic seasons