Last month, Jaggards experienced one of the biggest spikes in website traffic they’ve ever seen. A global surge in interest around precious metals pushed their online platform into extreme load conditions – the kind that normally break WooCommerce sites.
Traffic didn’t just increase – it tripled in a matter of days.
The site suddenly had to handle:
- Huge surges in concurrent users
- Constant price updates from external APIs
- Larger order volumes
- Buyers refreshing data rapidly
- Increased demand on checkout and cart logic
These weren’t normal usage patterns.
This was a stress test.
And the platform needed to hold.
The Challenge: WooCommerce Under Extreme Load
Unlike typical eCommerce stores, Jaggards operates more like a real-time trading environment:
- Dynamic product pricing tied to live gold/silver markets
- Custom API integrations
- High-value transactions
- Client dashboards
- Verification workflows
WooCommerce can handle these – but only with the right engineering and hosting setup.
During the surge, we began seeing:
- CPU saturation
- Worker queues filling
- Price update processes running more frequently
- Cache invalidation happening faster than normal
This was a clear signal: the hosting environment needed to scale immediately.
What EUX Did: Rapid, Zero-Downtime Scaling
To keep the site online and fast, we executed a coordinated performance upgrade with Kinsta:
1. Increased Hosting Resources
We scaled the hosting plan so the server could support higher concurrency, more PHP workers, and greater resource capacity.
This directly improved:
- Response times
- Cart performance
- Checkout stability
2. Redis Object Cache Tuning
Redis became a critical performance layer under the new load.
We optimised:
- Cache retention
- Object caching for product data
- Cart and session caching
This greatly reduced database stress.
3. API & Cron Optimisation
Because price updates were hitting more frequently, we ensured:
- Cron events remained stable
- API calls were batched properly
- No duplicated processes ran during peak load
4. Real-Time Monitoring
For the duration of the surge, we actively monitored:
- Worker queues
- Cache hit ratios
- API response times
- Database CPU
- Peak concurrency
This allowed us to stay ahead of potential bottlenecks.
The Result: Zero Downtime, Stable Performance
Despite a 3x increase in traffic, the site:
- Stayed online
- Remained fast
- Processed orders without issues
- Continued delivering real-time price updates
- Handled checkout load smoothly
Exactly what you want during a market spike.
Most WooCommerce stores would have slowed to a crawl or crashed.
Jaggards didn’t – because the infrastructure and engineering were ready.
