The appeal went out. Now the site has to hold.

When the flood appeal email went out to eleven thousand supporters, Grace’s small relief nonprofit got a year of traffic in an afternoon — on the cheapest shared hosting a grant would cover. The donation page crawled at precisely the moment generosity peaks and patience doesn’t.

Nonprofits run on volunteer webmasters and zero budget; “upgrade your server” isn’t advice, it’s a donation ask in the wrong direction. Static caching is the honest fix: the appeal page doesn’t change per visitor, so no visitor should cost a PHP request.

The free tier of xSpeed Cache covers all of it — page cache, prewarming, image conversion. The next appeal, the site held, and the only thing that spiked was the total.

Using xSpeed, prepare my nonprofit’s site for a donation appeal going out tomorrow: cache every page, prewarm the donate page and the appeal landing page, lazy-load images, and confirm the site can serve heavy traffic from cache on our shared hosting. Show me the cache hit rate when you’re done.

What happens: The appeal lands on static HTML; the donate button is the only thing doing real work.