Too much web traffic is not something that many businesses have to complain about, unfortunately – however having more traffic is something that most website owners are always working for and spend a considerable amount of time and money trying to generate traffic. It makes complete sense as for the majority of websites; increased visitors means increased profits. But what happens if you do get a huge amount of web traffic all at once? Sometimes this can do more harm than good to your business – especially if you are unprepared.
If you have a dynamic website then your software and databases might be unable to support high use as each time a visitor loads a page or makes a request, your dynamic scripts not only have to serve the appropriate pages, but your database also has to allow access. Having too many users often means that the scripts are unable to handle the load.
If you use a shared hosting plan like many small businesses do, with a large high-traffic website, you will quickly exceed the boundaries of your hosting plan. This may result in excess charges and downtime. Then, of course, there are your customers and users whose experience and support might suffer if you can’t maintain the same level of service when your traffic increases. So, how can you handle website traffic spikes.
Get a better server
It’s important that the server you have does the job you need it to. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, then shared hosting is fine. However, if your goal is to get more traffic, then you need to be prepared for this and have a bigger box with more memory, better systems software, and dedicated resources will be best. Look at a cheap VPS so that you can achieve good, professional website hosting at a reasonable price;
Make sure your content is rendered quickly
Even if you’re not getting a high volume of traffic, it is important that your content is rendered quickly anyway to offer a better user experience. Search engines and visitors favour websites that load quickly, so make sure you aren’t serving huge images as they’re really not necessary and can slow everything down.
Compressing your web page content
You could try delivering your web pages as compressed (zipped) files and then the visitor’s browser can do the unzipping, this could really reduce the load on your site and deliver your content quicker.
Whether you have a lot of traffic or not, these steps are good practice recommendations for any website because surely you want to deliver your pages as fast as possible every day and give your visitors the best user experience possible.