Guiding more traffic to your website must be your goal to attract more customers to your services. Yet, a burst of traffic might have negative effects on your site’s performance.
This can overwhelm your website, causing lags or even a crash.
How do you prepare a website for a sharp traffic increase? We’ll help you figure this out.
1. Predict These Traffic Surges
Knowing that a burst of traffic is coming your way beforehand can help you prepare your website for it. Of course, it isn’t always easy to predict when these traffic increases are going to happen.
Still, there are a few ways you can find that out.
- If your website goes viral
- If you publish some content or promote products related to trendy subjects
- If your services or products are seasonal
- If another, more famous website refers to yours
2. Use a Caching Plugin
Caching plugins can improve page loading times by providing your visitors with a cached version of your website. So, your server will have less work to do, which can come in handy if many users have access to your site at the same time.
Some of these caching plugins are:
- WP Rocket
- Cache Enabler
- Hyper Cache
- Comet Cache
These plugins are available as free and premium packages so that you can pick what suits you best.
3. Utilize a Content Delivery Network
CDNs, or content delivery networks, can also help your site handle traffic surges efficiently. Simply, a CDN creates a copy of your site’s content at different servers all over the world.
Next, as a user enters your site, they download all your content from the nearest CDN location, which takes some strain off your server.
This way, the chances of your server being overwhelmed by visits should be reduced a great deal.
Some of the best CDN providers are:
- Cloudflare
- StackPath
- CacheFly
4. Switch to a Bigger Hosting Plan
Your website’s hosting plan is mainly responsible for its performance. The plan that you choose can affect your site’s speed, uptime, security, and more.
Therefore, choosing a limited plan can leave you with a smaller bandwidth and a certain amount of space. With a lot of traffic, these limits might not be enough to keep your site running smoothly.
The rational solution is to upgrade to a more robust hosting plan. This way, your site should be able to support larger traffic without lagging or falling apart.
Yes, this conversion can cost you more, but it might be worth it, in the long run, to keep your business going.
Here are some hosting services that have premium plans to handle traffic spikes.
- Bluehost
- GreenGeeks
- GoDaddy Hosting
Wrapping Up
How do you prepare a website for a sharp traffic increase? The answer to this question is easy.
All you have to do is predict when these traffic spikes will occur, then use the help of different web services to take some load off your server.
Also, it’s always a good idea to hire an expert to do load and performance testing on your website. This way, you’ll be able to check if your site can handle traffic spikes.
