// E-commerce
Building a WooCommerce store that survives a flash sale
Jul 30, 2026 · 8 min read
The moment a store needs to perform is the exact moment most stores fall over: the flash sale. Concurrency multiplies, the cart and checkout paths - which cannot be page-cached - take the full load, and the database becomes the bottleneck.
The architecture
- ▹Full-page cache for catalogue pages at the edge; bypass only for cart and checkout.
- ▹Object cache (Redis) for sessions and expensive queries.
- ▹A queue for post-purchase work - emails, ERP sync - so checkout never waits on it.
- ▹Database read replicas and tuned indexes for the hot product queries.
With this in place, one client processed 5,000 checkouts in a single peak minute during Black Friday with zero cart loss and sub-200ms server response.