Drop day is a stampede. Cache is the door that holds.

Nadia’s streetwear label sells out in drops: a Friday-noon release, announced Tuesday, refreshed obsessively at 11:59. Her product pages carry six photos per colourway — the lookbook is the brand — and on drop day, two thousand people load them in the same minute.

The first drop on WooCommerce nearly ended the label: the site buckled at 12:01, carts hung, and the discord filled with screenshots of spinners instead of shoes. The server wasn’t small; the pages were just being rebuilt from PHP for every refresh of the same countdown.

Now the drop page and every product in it are prewarmed static HTML — two thousand refreshes cost the server almost nothing — while cart and checkout stay live. The stampede still comes at 12:00. The door holds.

We drop a new collection Friday at noon. Using xSpeed, prewarm the drop landing page and every product in the collection before then, confirm cart and checkout are excluded from caching, convert product photos to WebP with lazy loading, and verify the cache hit rate is above 95% before the drop. Report readiness Thursday night.

What happens: The 12:00 stampede lands on prewarmed static pages; the only queue is at checkout, where it belongs.