Seasonal demand spikes — what’s the Hyvä cache strategy for sporting goods?

Sporting goods is one of the spikiest verticals in e-commerce. Specific spike patterns I plan around:

• Ski + snowboard — first-snow weekend (mid-November in NA / late-November in EU) is 4–8x baseline; pre-Christmas equipment gifting is 3–5x.
• Golf — March opening-day weekend is 3–5x; Father’s Day is 2–4x.
• Team uniforms — back-to-school August is 5–10x baseline for team-sport brands.
• Fitness equipment — January New Year resolution surge is 4–6x.
• Black Friday + Cyber Monday — 6–12x baseline across all categories.

Architecture:

• Hyvä theme on Magento. Hyvä holds Lighthouse 95+ and INP <100ms even under spike load. Luma collapses around 4x baseline traffic on the same hardware.
• Cloudflare in front — full-page cache on category + CMS pages, edge-side includes for the cart pill, dynamic-content bypass on PDP. Cuts origin requests 70–85% during spikes.
• Pre-warmed caches — cron-triggered category page hits 2 hours before the spike window so the first real visitor hits a warm cache.
• Capacity headroom — auto-scaling app servers (AWS / Cloudways), 3–5x baseline replicas pre-scaled before known spike windows. Database read replicas for reporting dashboards.
• Capacity-based shipping promises — PDP “ships in 24h” flips to “ships in 5–7 days” per-SKU when warehouse queue depth crosses threshold. Sets honest expectations; protects review scores.

Pre-spike load test at 5–8x peak is non-negotiable. The first opening-day weekend is too late to discover the cap.