WordPress Tips

The key to operating an enterprise level WordPress website that can handle a large amount of traffic without risking downtime is an elastic architecture. This is the capability of operating the website across many machines simultaneously. Your website must exceed a single server in order to reach enterprise level scalability.

WordPress Excels at Elastic Architecture

When traffic increases, you can secure more machines to maintain operations of your website. When traffic dips down a bit, you can conserve resources by turning off the excess capacity. Your website can be scalable only with an elastic architecture.

This is the only method to ensure that your website is highly available and not subject to any one server’s uptime. This capacity is referred to as horizontal scalability, based on the way architecture diagrams are drawn. The cluster model allows you to add additional PHP application servers, also known as web heads, in addition to more replica databases to expand your enterprise level website’s capacity to serve pages. This is a fundamental element to elasticity. As a graphic, the architecture appears to expand horizontally.

With this style of architecture, you can add capacity horizontally in addition to relying upon any of the PHP servers to take up the load should one go down. Similarly, if a database fails a replica can easily be promoted to the new master. This is how you avoid any single machine from becoming a single point of failure. This is the definition of high availability.

While any architecture has some practical limitations, this model is the method by which most web applications scale, including WordPress. Horizontal architecture successfully pushes individual WordPress websites into the millions, billions, and more page views.

In today’s marketplace, best-in-class architecture lets you expand or contract on demand. This is the key component for elasticity. If it takes your website days to bring a new box online, that may be fine for a small-to-medium business, but not a global, enterprise level site.

Challenges

The most common challenges to operating an elastic, horizontally scalable, and highly available architecture are:

Shared Media: One of the best features of WordPress is its media management – documents, images, videos – that enhance posts. Typically, these are housed in the upload are of wp-content, but these uploads must be available to all PHP App servers. NOYO Web Development uses a variety of excellent open source tools as an option to overcome this challenge.

Load Balancing: You need to evenly distribute traffic across the available PHP App servers. You can use a cloud-based load balancer, open source tools, or hardware such as an F5 appliance.

Consistency: A typical challenge for clusters is the lack of consistency. If not all servers at each layers have the same configuration and characteristics, this will compromise elasticity and create bugs that are incredibly difficult to find and fix. In addition, changes to the app itself, such as a WordPress core update, must be deployed routinely and with consistency. This requires plenty of planning and coordination. These challenges may be resolved with a variety of open source and cloud tools.

If your goal is to take your local business global, you need to plan in advance for scalability. NOYO Web Development has the expertise and experience building and scaling enterprise level websites that become part of the driving force of growth for your organization. Contact us today to learn more.