Code freeze
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In short
A period before and during peak season when a team stops changing its site, so nothing new breaks while traffic and revenue are highest.
What it means
A code freeze is a window in which no theme edits, new apps or tag changes go live, usually set to cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays. Teams freeze because changes cause most outages. Google's site reliability team found that roughly 70% of its outages came from changes to a live system.[Google, Apr 2016] (opens the source) Freezes differ. Some teams freeze everything, including app installs; others allow configuration changes in tools already live, with sign-off.
On your store
Your developer announces that nothing ships from mid-November until January. The code clean-up and extension rules you planned for Black Friday now have to be live before that date.
Why it matters
Anything you want in place for peak, from ending old codes to extension rules, has to be decided and shipped before the freeze, which moves the real deadline into October.
Sources
- 1Google, “Site Reliability Engineering: Introduction”, Apr 2016. sre.google (opens the source)
Read next
Related terms
- Discount code leakWhen a discount code reaches shoppers it wasn't meant for, through voucher sites, coupon extensions or sharing, and lands on orders it wasn't priced for.
- Discount stackingMore than one discount on the same order, such as an automatic sale plus a code, so the combined reduction is deeper than either one alone.
- Coupon extensionA browser add-on that finds discount codes for the store a shopper is on and tries them at checkout, often earning affiliate commission on the order.
