Question: My WooCommerce store completely collapses during discount campaigns (many simultaneous users at checkout), even though static pages are cached via Cloudflare. How do I solve the CPU problem?

Answer:

Cloudflare is doing exactly what it is supposed to do - and that is precisely why it cannot help you here.

Cloudflare caches static pages at the edge and delivers them without ever touching your server. For your homepage, category pages, and product pages, that works brilliantly. During a discount campaign, those pages hold up fine. The problem is that checkout is none of those things.

Checkout is dynamic, session-specific, and deliberately excluded from any page cache - by Cloudflare, by WooCommerce, and by every caching layer in between. Every single user hitting your checkout during a campaign lands directly on your origin server. No edge cache. No CDN buffer. Just WordPress, executing in full, for every concurrent request simultaneously.

And here is where the real CPU problem begins.

Each of those checkout requests triggers a complete WordPress bootstrap. Every active plugin loads. Every hook registers. Every service container initializes. If you have 40 active plugins, all 40 execute for every checkout request - regardless of whether those plugins have any relevance to the purchase flow whatsoever. Your SEO plugin loads. Your slider loads. Your social sharing buttons load. Your cookie consent manager loads. All of it, simultaneously, for every user trying to complete a purchase.

Multiply that by hundreds of concurrent users and you have not a checkout problem - you have a structural execution problem that scales linearly with traffic and has nothing to do with your Cloudflare configuration.

Scaling the server helps - more PHP workers, more CPU, more RAM. But scaling hardware to compensate for unnecessary code execution is an expensive solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place. You are paying for work that delivers no value to any user.

The correct approach is to reduce what executes per checkout request, not to provision more capacity to execute unnecessary code faster.

LiteCache Rush addresses this directly. Rush intervenes before the WordPress bootstrap and constructs a minimal, request-specific plugin set for each incoming request. During a discount campaign, every checkout request loads only the plugins the checkout actually requires - WooCommerce, the payment gateway, and the essential supporting components. Nothing else is handed to WordPress. Nothing else executes.

The CPU load per request drops. The number of requests your server can handle simultaneously increases. Not because the hardware changed, but because each request stopped carrying the dead weight of your entire plugin stack.

Cloudflare protects your static pages. Rush protects your checkout. Together they cover the full picture - but only Rush can address what happens when real users complete real purchases under real load.