Sudden rise in traffic is an excellent chance for the site. It might happen due to a viral article, a successful advertising campaign, a product launch, posting something on social media, or some news about the site.
But the trouble comes in the fact that while a website that does a good job under regular conditions might not fare as well with the presence of hundreds or thousands of users at once, due to increased processing, memory usage, PHP workers, and query load on the database.
It should thus be realized that planning for an increase in traffic does not simply involve increasing bandwidth. You should cut down the tasks performed by your server, stress test your site in real conditions, keep track of your server’s performance, and create your scale up and recovery strategy beforehand.
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How Does a Traffic Spike Overwhelm a Website?
A sudden rise in the number of traffic will lead to the creation of more concurrent requests which need to be handled by the website and server.
In case of a WordPress website, an uncached request can result in the execution of PHP code, database querying, plugins, themes, and other application level processing. As soon as multiple requests come at once, these processes are going to compete for resources such as CPU, memory, database connections, and PHP workers.
This process will be greatly assisted through caching of this previously created content rather than having to create a new page every time there is a visitor. WordPress in particular recommends such measures as caching.
This implies that survival of a site during a traffic rush is based not only on how many visitors there are, but also on how many requests come at one time and how complex these requests are.
Preparation of Your Website for a Major Traffic Surge: How?
1. Enable and Confirm Page Caching
Page caching should be considered one of the very first steps to be carried out prior to a traffic spike. The page cache is designed to store the rendered page and serve it to next users without forcing WordPress to run the whole app stack again.
This may greatly decrease PHP and database processing. But just having a caching plugin is not all there is to it. Check to make sure the cache is being created and delivered properly.
WordPress explains page caching, object caching, opcode caching, browser caching, and server caching as separate types of caching with their respective objectives.
2. Determine the Traffic You Are Likely To Receive
First, establish the amount of traffic that you will receive and where you think it is coming from.
Consider the following information:
- Maximum hour traffic
- Sources of traffic
- Expected concurrent users
- Popular landing pages
- Regular daily users
- Duration of the traffic surge
- If your users will be browsing other pages
Whereas a campaign that will produce 100,000 visits in several days will create a different challenge from 100,000 visits that come over the course of just a few hours, do not plan on a monthly level of traffic alone. Concurrency and peak request are more helpful in such situations.
3. Look at Your Hosting Resources
Prior to receiving any traffic, assess what resources your hosting account/server has available.
Key factors are:
- PHP workers
- Memory usage
- Database connections
- Entry processes
- CPU usage
- Bandwidth
- I/O usage
- Disk space
- Network throughput
If you are already utilizing most of the available resources on your website under regular traffic conditions, any surge in the number of visitors will easily take your website beyond its limits.
It is now the time when you should talk to your hosting company and find out whether your existing package can be upgraded.
4. Optimize Images and Static Content
Large images use bandwidth and can cause page load delays, especially if multiple people are accessing the same web pages at once.
Prior to a traffic surge:
- Use appropriate image sizes
- Optimize large images
- Use WebP/AVIF if supported
- Eliminate unnecessary JavaScript/CSS
- Strip unnecessary media
- Browser caching of suitable static content
The data transfer requirement is therefore reduced since not all data needs to be passed to the visitor.
5. Set up a CDN in Front of Your Website
Content Delivery Network helps you lower the number of requests to your origin server. Resources like images, CSS, JavaScript files and all other cacheable resources can be served from edge servers which are nearer to your customers.
There are some types of CDN configuration where even HTML pages are also eligible for being cached. This is important during an outbreak since any request served through caching is essentially a request which does not have to use the resources of the origin server.
For instance, CloudFlare says about their CDN service that it caches contents at data centers in various geographic locations, and also gives guidelines for controlling caching.
It would be wrong to take it for granted that using CDN will automatically cache all the content. You have to review the cache rules, cache state, expiry time, and exclusions before the traffic spike happens.
6. Load Test Website Before Surge Occurs
Another helpful thing you can do is run a load test on the website prior to actual users visiting the website.
Load test employs traffic control for assessing the site’s performance as the number of users increases.
Measure:
- Response time
- CPU usage
- Requests per second
- TTFB
- Error rate
- Memory usage
- Database load
- Worker PHP usage
- Cache hit rate
The task at hand is not merely to find out how many visitors your site can sustain. The purpose is rather to find the limit after which there is a performance deterioration and to know which resource turns into a bottleneck first.
Tests should be conducted in the staging environment whenever possible; otherwise, the tests should not be aggressive on the production site.
7. Review your WordPress Plugins and Features
All the elements of a WordPress website do not consume the same quantity of resources.
Some plugins query the database, some initiate scheduled operations, others request data from APIs, or process PHP code while loading pages. Prior to an important traffic-related incident, detect unnecessary or resource-intensive plugins or features.
Profilers can also help you find out which part of WordPress consumes most of the processing time. For instance, the wp profile command in WP-CLI can provide you with the time and cache ratio of different parts of a WordPress request.
This means that less data needs to be transferred to visitors and hence will cut down on unnecessary work for the server and network.
8. Optimize the Database
Traffic spike can reveal some database problems which are not evident during normal traffic.
Look for:
- Too many auto loaded options
- Poorly optimized queries
- Slow database queries
- Extra plugin tables
- Too many post revisions
- Too much transient data
- Not enough database resources
Object caching will help reduce database lookups as a result of storing frequently used data objects in a cache. Object caching is recognized separately by WordPress from page caching.
Never conduct a risky database clean up prior to an event if there is no tested backup strategy.
9. Monitor Before The Traffic Comes In
The monitoring should happen beforehand and not after when the website starts to fail.
Monitor:
- Uptime
- Traffic volume
- Memory (RAM)
- CPU
- HTTP 4xx/5xx errors
- Response time
- PHP workers
- Database performance
- Cache performance
Make baseline measurements under normal traffic conditions so that you can identify any abnormal behavior easily.
For instance, if you have a regular CPU usage of 40%, which suddenly spikes up to 95%, you have grounds for claiming a resource problem, and not just a guess that the website runs slowly.
10. Verify your Backing Up and Recovering Strategy
Before you do anything else, make a new backup. At the very least, you need to be able to restore:
- Database
- Configuration
- Themes and Plugins Settings
- WordPress Files
- Media Uploads
The backup is only worthwhile if you have the ability to restore it. This way, if the traffic incident is important for your business, then ensure that you can restore it before the spike.
Secondly, decide on the action you would take in case your website crashes.
11. Create a Scaling Strategy
If you foresee more traffic than what you usually have, then you need to come up with a plan for how you will scale before the surge in traffic.
For your site, depending on the nature, you can scale in one or many of the following ways:
- PHP workers scalability
- Scalability to a VPS server
- CPU and RAM scalability
- Multiple app server scalability
- Cloud-based scalability
- Load balancing
- CDN scalability
- Database scalability
The simplest case of WordPress blog may suffice a bigger hosting package as well as improved caching. The complicated site with plenty of dynamic traffic may require a more distributed architecture.
According to the documentation on the official WordPress website, the efficient system can employ extra servers and load balancer for traffic distribution across web servers.
What if the Traffic Spike Is Underway?
There can sometimes be a lack of time to do detailed planning. If the traffic is already growing fast, work to reduce the load on the origin server.
1. Caching: Ensure that essential public pages are being cached properly.
2. Enable or Enhance CDN Delivery: Take static and cacheable assets off the origin server.
3. Reducing Unnecessary Processing: Disable processing of unessential functionalities which consume server/database resources.
4. Server Monitoring: Find out whether CPU utilization, Memory usage, PHP workers, databases, or some other resource is approaching its maximum.
5. Scale the Hosting, if Required: If the server is really running low on resources, scaling might be faster and easier than trying to do extensive coding during the traffic event.
Don’t make several big changes at once. Should something go wrong, you won’t be able to pinpoint the source.
How Much Web Hosting Do You Need?
There is not any such formula that says “100,000 hits require 8 GB of RAM.”
The website having 100,000 page views that are cached can put much less burden on the server as compared to those having 100,000 dynamic page views.
One good way of looking at traffic capacity is:
Traffic load -> Concurrent requests -> Cache performance -> PHP performance -> Database load -> CPU and RAM load.
The idea is to find out where this bottleneck occurs.
The hosting for a WordPress site that gets a lot of traffic should be measured by the resource usage and peak load rather than the estimation provided by the hosting company.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
1. Waiting for the Traffic to Come
Once the errors start occurring, it might already be too late to do anything.
2. Thinking About Bandwidth Only
Even if the site has enough bandwidth, it might still go down due to lack of CPU, memory, PHP workers, or connections in the database.
3. Assuming that CDN Will Solve Everything
CDN will cut down on origin traffic but uncached and dynamic requests can still go to your server.
4. Only Testing Your Homepage
Test your landing pages, your article pages, search feature, forms and other resource-consuming features.
5. Major Changes Without Backup
Improvements won’t be effective when your new configuration has not been tested and ends up messing up the site.
6. Ignoring Mobile Speed Optimization
Your sudden increase in traffic may include mobile users. Test your site on mobile devices and connections along with testing for desktop.
Traffic Surge Prep List
Prior to the anticipated surge in traffic, make sure that:
- Peak traffic and concurrent user estimates were made
- CDN delivery was configured
- Backup and recovery mechanisms were set up
- Caching was enabled and validated
- Image and other static content optimization took place
- Limits on your hosting resources were checked
- Important web pages were tested for performance
- Plugins which consume lots of your resources were examined
- A scaling strategy was prepared
- Database performance was evaluated
- Performance was monitored
- People responsible for website emergencies were identified
Conclusion
Making a website ready for high visitor traffic is mostly about lowering unnecessary overhead and ensuring that the server can cope with the maximum load.
Caching, CDN Delivery, database tuning, optimized WordPress configuration, Load testing, Monitoring and Scalable Hosting are some ways that a sudden spike in traffic will not create any issue with performance or availability.
By recognizing your bottlenecks sooner, you will have a greater number of ways to solve them. Instead of letting a viral post or marketing effort reveal problems with your website, ensure that you are ready to handle the influx of traffic before it happens.
Prepare Your Website for Its Next Traffic Spike
Your marketing campaign is supposed to attract new visitors, not limit your website by its hosting capacity.
HarmonWeb provides various hosting services to cater to varying website workloads, with choices that would allow you to accommodate expanding websites requiring additional resources and scalability.
Choose a host that will be able to cater to your current needs while being ready to face any traffic increase in the future.
