Campaigns with traffic spikes sometimes catch you by surprise and appear at the most unexpected moments. Whether it’s a product launch, a sale, a presale, or an influencer campaign, there’s always a short window when everyone visits your website and makes quick decisions—buy, subscribe, or leave. In those 24 hours prior, marketing and IT departments become one entity focused on ensuring traffic doesn’t impact the results.
For every campaign, the visible part is handled by marketing through creatives, posts, ads, emails, or landing pages. Meanwhile, the invisible aspects like performance, security, availability, or failure recovery fall under the IT department’s responsibilities. The interesting part is that when everything runs smoothly, no one talks about the infrastructure. When problems occur, infrastructure becomes the headline.
Is everything ready for the launch?
A few hours before launch, it’s common to do a final review of banners and test whether promotional codes are correct or if UTM parameters are properly set. If all that’s in order, there’s only one thing left: ensuring the message reaches the end-user, and they decide to buy.
On the other hand, IT often operates in checklist mode: Is monitoring in place? Are there traffic limits? Can the server handle it? What happens if the database crashes? Do we have a backup plan? In many companies, that moment ends with the most dangerous phrase in the digital world: “Let’s not touch anything.”
This is where it becomes clear if the hosting environment is prepared for spikes or if the campaign will rely on praying that everything holds up. In a platform like WordPress.com, much of that anxiety disappears because the platform comes pre-configured: CDN and caching are ready, security, and scaling are designed to absorb traffic surges without the team needing to manually adjust resources. The focus remains where it should be: on messaging, links, and the customer experience, not infrastructure tweaks.
Campaign launch
The clock starts ticking. Visitors arrive from ads, social media, and newsletters. At this point, marketing monitors metrics: clicks, CTR, conversions. Meanwhile, IT watches a different set of metrics: request spikes, latency, server load, 500 errors, queues, alerts.
When the website loads slowly or crashes, people don’t wait and leave. And if the site goes down, all the planning falls apart, while users see an error. Here, infrastructure decisions determine the success of the campaign.
In WordPress.com, spikes are automatically absorbed: the network delivers pages quickly, and the platform adjusts resources without permission. No need to upgrade RAM, turn on caches last minute, or improvise. The campaign runs more smoothly because the technical part is on autopilot.
Changes that can turn critical failures
In the middle of the night, someone makes a change: a text, a button, a plugin, or a configuration. Sometimes it improves conversions. Other times, it causes an issue. And during a launch, breaking something isn’t just an anecdote—it could be the first step toward losing a significant number of sales.
In such situations, quick action is crucial. Having the ability to revert is the most important. With real-time backups, if a change goes wrong, it can be rolled back with a single click to the point before the error and the campaign continues smoothly.
Post-launch analysis
The next day, the team reviews results: sales, leads, cost per acquisition, top-performing pages, traffic sources. There’s often an oversight: if the infrastructure did its job, no one had to open an urgent ticket or stay up all night worrying about the server. It all happened thanks to an infrastructure capable of automatically handling traffic spikes, like what WordPress.com offers.
During traffic surges, infrastructure isn’t a technical expense; it’s a business insurance. It allows you to convert visits into revenue, protect your reputation, and prevent a brilliant campaign from failing due to an invisible bottleneck.