A charity's traffic is not evenly spread. A large share of annual giving arrives in a handful of days in December, and the donation form has to work on every one of them.
Everything else on a charity site can wait. The donation page cannot, and it is busiest on the days it matters most.
Year-end and campaign days concentrate months of donations into hours. The pages around the form are cached hard so capacity is available for the one page that cannot be.
A donation form carries a session, an amount and often a payment token. It is excluded from page caching entirely, so nobody is ever shown a form that belongs to somebody else's visit.
Monthly giving is a scheduled charge that must happen whether or not the site had a visitor. The platform runs it rather than waiting for traffic to trigger it.
A receipt that arrives an hour later reads as a failed donation. The notification chain is given room to complete at the moment of giving.
Donation records are financial and often regulatory. They are in the daily backup along with the rest of the database.
Charity traffic follows appeals, not a weekly pattern. An email to the whole list, a match announcement or a news story produces a spike within minutes.
The pattern is always the same: a quiet site, an email to the whole list, and ten thousand people arriving inside a few minutes.
One page carries the entire purpose of the site, cannot be cached, and is busiest exactly when everything else is too.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Donation page | Excluded from page caching entirely | The form carries a session and often a payment token, and a cached copy would hand one donor another donor's context. |
| Campaign pages | Cached hard at the edge | Caching everything around the form is what leaves capacity free for the one page that cannot be cached. |
| Recurring gift runs | Platform-scheduled rather than visitor-triggered | Monthly giving must charge on its date regardless of whether anyone visited the site that night. |
| Receipt notifications | Given room to complete at the moment of giving | A receipt that arrives an hour late reads to a donor as a donation that failed. |
| Appeal spikes | Planned as a burst rather than as growth | Charity traffic follows emails and news, so it arrives in minutes rather than ramping over weeks. |
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