The ultimate goal of a website is to attract a huge traffic and show what it has “in store” for its visitor. If you own a WordPress website, then you must be trying every SEO technique and other strategies to get a high influx of visitors to the site. But, have you ever thought that what could happen if you suddenly get a huge inflow of visitors? Your site may even crash.
What Happens To A WordPress Website When It Suddenly Gets A Huge Traffic Inflow?
Your WordPress site can handle a certain amount of traffic well, but, if the traffic increases suddenly overnight, your web server might not be prepared for it and it may lead to site crash or an extremely slow down.
The visitors coming to your website may not be able to check the site and the site might become temporarily unavailable.
This is why it’s important to make your site ready for the sudden traffic spikes so that it can handle all the traffic efficiently and cater effectively to all the users’ requisites.
How To Prepare The WordPress Website For The Sudden Traffic Surge?
There are certain warning signs which can help you anticipate a surge in the traffic inflow to the website. But, even if you are not expecting a traffic surge you should always be prepared for it.
You never know that when a post from your blog goes viral, or when a bigger blog or more popular site links to one of your posts. Here are the top ways in which you can prepare your website for the sudden increase in traffic and can ensure that if traffic increases all of a sudden, your WordPress website will not slow down.
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Using a caching plugin
One of the best ways to optimize the site’s performance and decrease its loading time is by using caching on it, and it can easily be facilitated by a caching plugin. These plugins create a local copy of the site and necessary files on the user’s computer to decrease the pressure on the server, especially during the peak traffic. The caching plugins ensure that the requested content is delivered to the website visitors as soon as they request it.
Also, these plugins minify the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML while compressing the images. So, the transmission of the compressed files becomes easier and faster. As a result, the site loads faster and can also handle the requests from multiple sources while performing efficiently during traffic surges.
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Maintaining The Security Of The Website
The hacking attacks on the sites have become very common, and the sites which often fall prey to these attacks are the ones which have loopholes in their security arrangement.
While a hacking attack may not bring the entire site down, but, they can certainly affect its performance and create issues with the intermittent uptime. Sometimes, the virus or malware attacks on the site also make it slow.
So, when the traffic increases to the site, the already slow site may crash anytime and leave a negative impact on your users. This is why, it’s important to focus on the security of the site and ensuring that it cannot be accessed by anyone in an unauthorized manner.
You can use diverse security plug-in to make the site completely secure and inaccessible by hackers.
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Optimize the images on your website
Optimizing the images is another way of preparing the website for traffic surge. Typically, when you are preparing your WordPress website for the sudden increase in the traffic, it’s very important to identify the bottleneck areas or those aspects of the sites which can create a problem when the traffic increases.
A site looks cool with the dynamic content flowing lucidly over the website’s pages or attractive animations, but, these can increase the time taken by the website to load. Moreover, when the traffic increases, these can affect the website’s performance dramatically. But, at the same time, you cannot compromise with the image quality.
The best way to optimize your images and other graphical content without affecting its quality is by using the “Smush”. Approx 1 million WordPress website’s are currently using Smush and it is one of the latest plugins to win the “Torque’s Plugin Madness Competition”.
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Choosing The Right Web Hosting Provider
One of the most underlying ways to ensure that your site does not become slow during the peak traffic hours is by using a reliable web hosting provider.
There are many WordPress hosting providers who offer cheaper plans and often lure the customers with their pricing plans. However, when it comes to reliability, most of the cheaper shared hosting providers fail to deliver the adequate site speed, bandwidth and reliability.
Thus, while choosing a hosting provider, don’t just focus on comparing the prices, but, ensure that you are getting good site speed which is capable of handling your peak traffic without affecting the performance of the website.
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Use CDN
One of the ways to make your WordPress website blazing fast is by using the CDN (Content Delivery Network) service.
A CDN service is somewhat like a hosting plan which sits atop your web hosting plan. While a web hosting plan enables your website to be accessed by its visitors and holds the contents of the website on a server, a CDN service also works in a similar manner. A CDN service helps your global audience to access your website from the servers which are located near to their physical location. This way, website’s loading time can be reduced significantly and a CDN service is extremely helpful in helping your website maintain optimum performance even during traffic surges.
Since each user will access your website from a server located near to them, the global traffic will get divided to the different servers and thus, the chances of a site crash down during the sudden traffic increase are very less.
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Use Performance and Load Testing To Stress Your Site and Evaluate Its Capability
Apart from testing your website for the caching issues, it’s important to carry out performance and load tests on it with a stress-testing tool.
These tools create virtual traffic surges for the site and let you check how well your site can perform under the pressure. Once you are able to evaluate your website’s real performance. You can make necessary changes to your web hosting, CDN, and other plans.
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Indulge in Web Performance Monitoring
While traffic surges are not a regular scenario and they occur once in a while, like sometimes some of your posts goes viral or when you are offering some lucrative discount/offer, but, it’s always wise to stay prepared for it always so that you don’t lose your visitors during a sudden traffic increase.
When you have reached a point where you cannot entirely predict the traffic of your site or if your traffic is increasing and you are worried that how far the limits of your hosting plan can be stretched, it’s the ideal time to start using a web performance monitoring service. These services not only help you keep a check on the uptime issues, but also enable you to watch the actual user experience on your website. Also, these services notify you as soon as they spot a potential issue.
Conclusion
When you own a website, it’s important to keep it in the best state so that whoever tries to visit it gets the best user experience. By optimizing the various aspects of the website, you can ensure that your users enjoy the best “user experience” even if the traffic is at its peak. It’s important to ensure that the sudden traffic surges don’t crash or slow down your website.
At the same time, it’s also vital to keep a post-crash plan prepared so that if the site is affected by the traffic surge, you know what you need to do to bring the site back on track again in the shortest possible time.
