Get Black Friday-Ready with Umbraco Cloud
The features that'll help you stay calm when things peak
Your busiest month shouldn't be your riskiest
Black Friday isn't a single day anymore. For many businesses, the whole of November is peak season, and shoppers who have a bad experience rarely give you a second chance. The same peak also hides bots, scrapers, credential attacks, and DDoS attempts. So getting ready means two things at once: staying fast when everyone shows up, and staying safe while they do.
Handle the peak (without paying for it all year)
Until recently, the answer to more traffic on Umbraco Cloud was a bigger plan. With Load Balancing, you can now scale out instead of only up: run your site across several instances and share the traffic between them.
For the business, that means two things: Your site keeps up when the campaign lands, and if one instance drops out, the others keep serving, so sales keep coming in. You choose how many instances to run, and you can add extra instances for the busy weeks and remove them when traffic settles.
Load Balancing uses Dedicated Redis, a managed cache that sits next to your application. It keeps track of sessions (your visitors) in one centralized place. Redis also pays off on a single instance, where it can work as a second-level cache that cuts boot time and takes load off the database. Even if you're not ready for Load Balancing, it's worth a look.
Planning to use Load Balancing this November? Load Balancing is available on Professional and Enterprise plans with Dedicated Resources, and your project needs Umbraco 17.5 or later. Check both now, so you're not finding out in the middle of Black Friday week.
Explore the scaling options Read the Load Balancing documentation
Pay for the capacity you need, and know what you're getting
We've reworked the Dedicated Resource tiers into four clear sizes, from Extra Small to Large. A size now means the same thing on every plan that offers it, so you can compare like for like, budget with confidence, and (for agencies) explain the options to clients without a spreadsheet.
My advice: size up (or out) a week before the big push, and scale back down when it's over. If you plan to run a load test first, contact our support team before you start, so they can help you get results you can trust.
Keep attackers out while your customers get in
A slow site costs you a sale. A breach or an outage during Black Friday is the nightmare you want to avoid at all costs. When traffic peaks, you want to be sure it is the good kind of traffic.
On Umbraco Cloud, security is a core part of the platform, so your team doesn't have to buy, build, configure, and run it on its own:
Web Application Firewall filters malicious requests before they reach your site, with Cloudflare-managed rulesets included for custom hostnames.
DDoS mitigation absorbs volumetric attacks automatically, so a flood of fake traffic doesn't take down your campaign.
Managed challenges help stop scraping, spam, and credential attacks, and let you challenge suspicious traffic without blocking real shoppers.
Secrets Management keeps API keys and credentials out of your code.
Enterprise authentication support, so access to your projects follows your organization's login rules.
Security is also about the things you don't want to think about during the busiest week of the year:
Automated security patching keeps the platform and CMS up to date without last-minute work.
Point-in-time restore gives you a safety net if something does go wrong.
Managed TLS certificates keep every connection encrypted, on default and custom hostnames, with no setup.
For compliance teams and procurement, Umbraco is ISO 27001 certified and runs on Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare Enterprise. You also get a choice of hosting region for your project. It all works on a shared-responsibility model: Umbraco runs and secures the platform, while you or your partner keep full control of the solution you build on it.
Nobody wants to watch a dashboard all night
Knowing what's happening on your site is half the battle. The Traffic and Performance dashboard brings Cloudflare and Azure data together in one place, so you can see how traffic affects CPU and memory, track your plan usage, spot platform events, and see where your visitors come from. If a wave of traffic from an unexpected region shows up, you can act on it, for example, by switching on managed challenges.
But you have better things to do in Black Friday week than stare at graphs. With Notifications & Alerting, you hear about it when something needs your attention, before your customers notice. Subscribe to events like DDoS attacks and deployment status, and send notifications by email or webhook to wherever your team actually looks: a shared inbox, a Slack channel, or your incident tool. You can set it up at the organization and project level, so the right people are always in the loop, whether it's your own team or a client's.
Set up Alerting and Notifications Explore the Traffic and Performance dashboard
Upgrades on your schedule, not in the middle of your sale
And a new feature has landed just in time for the busy season. Automatic upgrades keep every project on Umbraco Cloud current without anyone lifting a finger. Until now, they ran on our timetable. With Scheduled Upgrades, the timing is in your hands.
For each project, choose one or more windows in the week when upgrades of Umbraco CMS, Forms, Deploy, and Cloud packages may run. Pick a quiet hour for a busy site, a weekday morning when your team is around to check the result, or whatever suits your client. You keep the security and stability benefits of staying up to date, without surprises during a campaign. For most of you, "not during Black Friday week" is a good place to start ;)
See how this new feature works:
Learn how to set your upgrade windows
Show your best side, even during a restart
Even with the perfect plan and setup, restarts can happen. Deployments, upgrades, and recovery can be necessary. Let’s look at what you can do in these scenarios on Cloud to provide the best experience for your visitors: Readiness Gating holds visitors back until your site has warmed up and is ready, so they get a working site instead of slow pages or errors. There's nothing to configure on Umbraco 13 with the latest Umbraco.Cloud.Cms package, or on Umbraco 17.6 and later.
And if visitors do see a maintenance page, custom error pages make sure it's your own branded one, set per hostname.
Let's make sure you're ready for Black Friday
If you only do one thing this month, get a handle on the traffic you expect and ask whether your current setup would handle it. Then work through this list:
Check your capacity. Look at your expected peak and pick the right Dedicated Resource size, or plan for Load Balancing.
Check the requirements early. Load Balancing needs a Professional or Enterprise plan with Dedicated Resources and Umbraco 17.5 or later.
Talk to support (or your partner manager) before you load test, so you get results you can trust.
Review your security settings, including firewall rules and managed challenges.
Set up alerts so the right people hear about problems first.
Lock in your upgrade windows with Scheduled Upgrades.
Upload your branded error pages for each hostname.
Get that right, and Black Friday becomes a good month for the business behind the site, not a stressful one for the team running it.
Not on Umbraco Cloud yet?
If you host Umbraco yourself, everything above is something your team has to buy, build, configure, and maintain: the firewall, DDoS protection, CDN, patching, scaling, and monitoring. That is a lot to manage, even in a quiet month.
On Umbraco Cloud, that operational foundation is managed for you by the team behind the CMS, so your developers can spend their time on the experience your customers see. If you're planning a new project or perhaps need to move an Umbraco project off version 13, which reaches end of life on December 14, 2026, it's a natural moment to take a look at all that Umbraco Cloud has to offer. Not only for Black Friday, but all year round.