Introduction
The holiday season is a busy and impactful time for lots of businesses. We want to make sure your team is set to handle your success. This guide includes some common areas to check on in preparation for holiday-driven boosts in traffic:
Checklist
Critical
All teams launching a website on Vercel should be aware of the items below. They have a high impact on the reliability and performance of your application. Click to expand each item.
Add Vercel WAF Custom Rules to enhance your website security for Black Friday
The Vercel WAF feature allows blocking, redirecting, bypassing, and logging incoming requests using rules based on headers, URL patterns, host, geo-location information, cookies, etc. Please visit the following link for more information on creating and configuring your Vercel WAF Custom Rules.
Logs and Monitoring
Monitoring allows you to visualize and quantify the performance and traffic of your projects on Vercel.
Logs tab allows you to view, search, inspect, and share your runtime logs without using any third-party integration.
Log drains allow you to centralize and forward log data from your Vercel applications to a third-party provider. Review the Vercel Marketplace to find an integration or configure a log drain using specific endpoints.
Notifications allow you to receive updates via dashboard and email. These notifications include information about your account, deployments, domains, integrations, and usage.
Serverless Function considerations
To get the best performance, set the region of your Serverless Functions to be the closest to your data endpoints. For more information, check the following link.
Managing deployments
As part of your runbooks you might consider how to quickly perform a rollback or a redeploy as part of your mitigation process. Keep in mind that these actions can be performed via the dashboard or the Vercel CLI tool.
Skew protection is an opt-in service you can use to maintain consistency between client sessions occurring between deployments. A user could experience unexpected issues when using features only available in the previous deployment. With Skew protection, clients will temporarily receive responses from the initial deployment to prevent being affected by deprecating changes introduced by the latter deployment. For more information on supported Frameworks and specific use cases, visit the Skew Protection’s documentation.
Recommended
Track client-side errors
With Log Drains, you will be aware of any errors in your Serverless Functions. However, on the client side, we recommend using a tool like Sentry to detect whether users are encountering any issues.
Use the `www` subdomain instead of the root domain
Depending on your website and SEO history, this can be a big ask. However, there are reasons why we recommend the www subdomain instead of the root domain. If you point your domain to Vercel using a CNAME record, we can change the underlying IPs to better suit your specific needs. That is not true with the root domain, which can only use A records unless you use a DNS provider that supports ALIAS or CNAME flattening.
Therefore, using the www subdomain as your main point of entry is recommended. The root domain should redirect to the subdomain with a permanent code. Please refer to our docs for further information.
```markdown
# Ok
example.com (serves the application)
www.example.com (308 redirect to example.com)
example.com contains A record with value 76.76.21.21
www.example.com contains CNAME record with value cname.vercel-dns.com
# Better
example.com (308 redirect to www.example.com)
www.example.com (serves the application)
example.com contains A record with value 76.76.21.21
www.example.com contains CNAME record with value
example-enterprise.vercel-dns.com
```
Frontend Observability
It is great to see how your deployment is performing in real-world devices. By enabling Vercel Frontend Observability tools, you will receive useful data directly in your Vercel dashboard.
Web Analytics provides comprehensive insights into your website’s visitors, tracking top pages, referrers, and demographics like location, operating systems, and browser info.
Vercel Speed Insights provides you with a detailed view of your website’s performance metrics, facilitating informed decisions for its optimization.
Git provider is down, can I continue to deploy to Vercel?
Learn about the Vercel CLI or API and how you can continue to deploy to Vercel even when your git provider is down.
If you have time
Paging tools or automated incident response
A core component to site reliability and reacting fast is to act on notifications or alerts that derive from your observability and monitoring tools. Consider setting up a paging service or any other automated incident response service that works for your operation.
Customize 404 and 500 error pages
If something goes wrong, your users should see a branded page explaining the error or issue. You can check on how to customize the 404 on your framework in this article.
If using NextJs, consider using `next/image`, `next/script` and `next/font` components for improving site performance.
next/image will deliver optimized images based on the user’s screen viewport, instead of using the same asset for every request.
next/script can ensure scripts like Google Analytics are loaded in conformity with the best-practices of the framework.
next/font will automatically optimize your fonts (including custom fonts) and remove external network requests for improved privacy and performance.
Conclusion
During this Black Friday, we invite you to expand your toolset by trying our latests features like Vercel WAF custom rules. We believe that part of delivering the best Dev Experience to our community is to provide the means and resources our users need to prepare for traffic spikes in a secure and performant fashion.
If you have any questions or comments, add them to this discussion thread 