WordPress Tips

You never know what might prompt a spike in website traffic. And it may not be a temporary surge, but a permanent increase in traffic volume.

For an ecommerce site, it might be a rave review from a celebrity endorsement or a reputable product review site.
For a news site or a blog, it may be a post or video that has gone viral.

For a business website, it may be that word-of-mouth is spreading about the excellent service your customers receive.

Whatever the reason that your brand and website receive a major boost, you need to be able to handle the swelling traffic as well as sustain it. Just a few seconds of wait time may cost you the attention and business of potential new customers. And if you sustain a full website outage, the damage may be considerable. Just look at your analytics to see what the trends say about how many new visitors and sales you could lose for every hour your site remains down.

If your site is gaining traction, or if you expect it to, it’s time to begin scaling your WordPress site to be prepared for the heavier traffic. Over the next few posts, we’re going to give you some tips on how to do this as well as improve performance, tighten security, and improve UX.

Tips for Scaling WordPress

It’s your primary objective: your website becomes a major hit and happy customers just keep flowing in. It must be how people feel with their video goes viral or a photo is shared and shared again.

Breaking the internet with viral videos and quotable tweets is good. Breaking your website is not. A broken website, a slow loading website, a timed-out server, or any other type of disruption, is bad for business and damaging to a good brand reputation.

Of course, you expect that by using WordPress this wouldn’t be a problem you’d have to deal with. While WordPress is capable of managing high volumes of traffic, everything around it needs to be configured properly to handle a boost in traffic. There are a number of things that could compromise all that amazing traffic coming to your site that you need to be careful about monitoring and managing.

In order to handle major increases in traffic and keep visitor enthusiasm high, your WordPress website must scale or be ready to scale at a moment’s notice. Here is the first of several tips that will help you scale your WordPress site and keep it from crumpling under the pressure of heavy volumes of traffic:

Get a Hosting Plan with Vertical Scaling

When referring to web servers, vertical scaling generally refers to hosting providers that offer tiered plans that you can easily and quickly upgrade as your traffic or needs change. If you are unsure if your current web host is unable to handle a surge in traffic efficiently, check the list of available resources on your specific plan and compare to others.

Will bandwidth, storage, or even visitor quantity limits keep your site from confidently handling the traffic? If so, then explore your other hosting plan options. If those won’t do the trick, then it may be that you need a new type of hosting. While shared hosting is great to start, more traffic means you need more access to server resources and only something like VPS hosting or a dedicated server can help with that.

Next week we will take a look at horizontal scalability. You want your business to grow. Don’t let your website hinder that growth. If you have any questions, give us a call at NOYO Web Development. We offer free consultations with no obligation.