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.