Why Everything Breaks the Day Traffic Shows Up
The day you finally launch something you've spent months building. Or the day something you shipped a while ago suddenly gets shared around and traffic shows up out of nowhere. Somehow, that's always the day things break.
The reason is simple. A site that normally sees a handful of visitors a day suddenly gets hit with several times, sometimes tens of times, that traffic within a few hours. Server settings that never mattered, response times nobody thought twice about, error pages nobody bothered to fix. All of it gets tested at once, right then.
The timing is what makes it painful: this is usually the exact moment the most people are seeing your product for the first time. Whether they came from Product Hunt, Hacker News, or just a link someone shared, you only get one first impression. If the page is slow or throws an error, most of them won't come back.
So here's a checklist to run through before traffic hits, whether that's a launch, a promotion, or an unplanned wave of attention. Go through it once and make sure nothing's missing.
The Checklist (12 Things)
Stability
- ☐ Your site loads securely over HTTPS, and that certificate (SSL) is valid for at least another month
- ☐ Your domain isn't close to expiring (easy to forget right before launch)
- ☐ You've tested whether the site holds up under a sudden traffic spike (just ask your dev team: "have we load tested this?")
- ☐ You've confirmed with your dev team how to roll back if something breaks after a deploy
Monitoring & Alerts
- ☐ You'll get an automatic alert if the site goes down
- ☐ You've set a threshold for catching it when the site gets noticeably slower
- ☐ You've actually sent a test alert to confirm it works (it's surprisingly common for alerts to be "set up" but never actually arrive)
- ☐ Whoever's getting the alert will actually be reachable that day, not asleep
User Experience
- ☐ Your 404 and error pages show something helpful, not a blank white screen
- ☐ Your dev team has confirmed the system can handle a burst of requests in a short window (ask: "do we have rate limiting set up?")
- ☐ You've confirmed with your dev team that any placeholder values or test passwords have been swapped for real production values
Everything Else
- ☐ Your analytics tool (Google Analytics, etc.) is actually tracking visits and signups correctly
How to Check All of This Without a Headache
You don't need to learn anything new for most of this. Some of it you can check yourself. The rest is just a quick question to your dev team.
SSL and domain expiration, and whether your site is up, are things a URL monitoring tool like ours can check directly. You can register one URL for free and see its status right now, then move to a paid plan later if you need to keep an eye on more than one.
For anything that involves touching code, like load testing, rate limiting, or checking environment variables, just ask your dev team: "can you confirm this for me?" Most of these take them just a few minutes to answer.
Error pages don't need a tool at all. Just type in a URL that doesn't exist and see what shows up.
For alerts, whatever you're already using (Slack, email) is fine. What actually matters isn't the tool, it's whether the person getting that alert can actually see it the day traffic spikes.
Check It Once, Then Let It Watch for You
A few of these don't need to be checked by hand every time. One tool can keep an eye on them for you.