When you create a website, you expect people to visit it. After all, you’ve spent all your time, effort, and money building a great-looking online showcase for your business or personal brand. It would be a shame if no one paid attention to it.
However, too much attention can have negative effects. A large increase in visitors can also cause your website to crash.
But how can you predict or prepare for sudden spikes in website traffic?
This guide explains the steps you can take to ensure your website doesn’t crumble under the weight of a sudden influx of traffic.
Achieve the scale you need as traffic spikes
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What causes a sudden spike in website traffic?
A web traffic spike is a significant, sometimes unexpected, increase in Internet activity on a website. If we were to compare this to a physical location, it would be like a supermarket that suddenly has far more customers than usual, even during peak shopping periods.
More visitors can mean more visibility and profits, but a spike in traffic can have a negative impact if your website isn’t ready. These include poor customer experience, negative reviews from visitors, and stressful times for everyone involved.
A spike in web traffic can be the result of a planned action on the part of the website owner, or it can be completely unexpected. Here are some of the most common causes of web traffic spikes:
- successful marketing campaign: If your business’s online or offline promotional efforts include mentions or links to your website, you can see a spike in web traffic from ad conversions. The size of this spike depends on the success of your campaign.
- news coverage: In some cases, you or your business may be in the news and your website traffic may skyrocket. This can occur with both traditional news sources (radio and television) and online media (news websites and social media).
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website’s content to improve your search engine rankings will increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase your traffic.
- malicious bot attack: A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack uses a network of compromised systems to overwhelm a target by flooding it with Internet traffic.
Can my website crash under heavy traffic?
Increased internet traffic can cause your website to crash if it is not properly protected. This can happen in several ways. For example, your website may run out of bandwidth because everyone is sending and receiving data at the same time.
This scenario is possible if your hosting plan has bandwidth limitations. Once the limit is reached, you will no longer be able to access the website.
Another possibility is that the sudden increase in traffic may overload the hosting server’s hardware. The read and write speeds of your server’s processor or hard drive may be too slow.
This slows down loading times as visitors wait for the server to process their page requests. The website may also become unresponsive.
Slow loading times can frustrate your visitors, leading to lower conversions and higher bounce rates. In fact, a 2022 Portent study found that e-commerce websites that load in one second 2.5x higher conversion rate A website that loads in 5 seconds.
How to prepare for a spike in website traffic
Taking appropriate measures to deal with surges can benefit you from increased visibility or protection from dangerous attackers, depending on where the traffic originates.
Use content delivery networks
A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of servers that caches web content to make it more accessible to end users. When traffic spikes, multiple servers share the load and these servers are built to handle the increased traffic.
Most CDNs also offer protection against DDoS attacks from bots that can cause traffic spikes. This feature makes CDN a good investment for the welfare of her website. There are several CDN services available that offer different features and add-ons, such as Cloudflare and Fastly.
You can also choose a hosting provider that offers CDN access. For example, Nexcess provides access to Edge CDN powered by Cloudflare with fully managed hosting plans.
cache content
Caching involves creating a temporary data store for web content and using it to reduce network requests and improve performance. Therefore, when a visitor makes a request to her website from her browser, the web server can send the cached content instead of using system resources to recompile various web page components.
Caching significantly reduces resource usage. Therefore, the server will be able to handle more page requests sent to her website.
If you are using WordPress for your website, you can use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
Some web hosts, such as Nexcess, Built-in cache along with the package.
Integrate load balancing solutions
A load balancer can be physical hardware connected to a network as part of a web host’s infrastructure, or it can be an application running on network hardware.
Load balancing solutions are similar to CDNs in that both use a network of servers to improve performance. The difference between the two is how they improve performance.
CDNs use geographically distributed servers, while load balancers typically use clusters of servers in the same location or in close proximity. Also, while CDNs focus on delivering web content between servers, load balancing servers primarily direct network traffic.
Load balancers are great at managing network traffic, making them ideal for handling large numbers of HTTP requests during traffic spikes.
Usually available with enterprise hosting packages.
Optimize media files and other content
Photos, videos, and other forms of media make up a significant portion of a website’s content. It seems logical to have the highest quality media on your website, but doing it the wrong way can affect your website’s performance.
Optimizing your images and videos is a great way to prepare for heavy traffic, as they can slow loading times if they aren’t properly optimized.
To do this, you can lower the resolution of your images and videos, or switch to newer formats that are more suitable for your website, such as WebM or WebP.
WordPress allows you to use plugins to compress and optimize images without sacrificing quality.For example, TinyPNG has Bulk optimization Ability to reduce all images on a website at once.
There are also plugins Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Files to improve site performance.
Implement enhanced security measures
Some traffic spikes may be caused by malicious attacks on your website. Hackers can compromise many internet-connected devices and use them to form a botnet. Hackers can remotely control this botnet and flood websites with network traffic, overwhelming the target’s infrastructure.
Dedicated security solutions can help mitigate this type of attack by detecting, filtering, and alerting you to unwanted internet traffic so you can take other measures.
For example, a WordPress security plugin such as solid security pro and Sucuri reduce the risk of these attacks overwhelming your WordPress website.
These plugins monitor incoming connection requests, identify attack patterns, and block all related traffic while alerting you to the risk of attack. It can also scan and detect malware and other malicious code that hackers can use to compromise your website.
Choose a hosting solution with faster storage
The type of storage included in your hosting package can become a bottleneck during high-traffic times. Here we’re talking about hosting solutions that use mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) instead of newer solid state drives (SSDs).
HDDs are cheaper and are more likely to be used in more affordable hosting options such as shared plans. However, it is much slower than SSD.
In normal everyday traffic conditions, you may not notice this speed difference. However, if you have increased traffic and are using an HDD, that may be contributing to the slowdown.
If you’re not sure what type of drive your hosting provider uses, please contact our support team. If you’re using an HDD, you can switch to a host like Nexcess that uses an SSD to eliminate potential bottlenecks.
Request a capacity increase from your hosting provider before it spikes
In some cases, actions such as flash sales can increase the number of visitors to your website. If you anticipate a spike in traffic, you can request more hosting capacity in advance.
Choosing a hosting plan that is easily upgradeable will make this process more manageable. Some hosts may allow your website to temporarily handle additional bandwidth. For example, Nexcess offers 24 hours of free autoscaling each month.
If you expect your website to experience a spike in traffic for a long period of time, upgrading your hosting package may be the best solution. Also, check if your hosting provider allows you to downgrade your package once traffic returns to normal.
Monitor website traffic and performance
Being able to detect traffic spikes quickly means you have more time to react to prevent downtime. This does not necessarily mean that someone tracks all web activity for his 24 hours.
You can track your website’s performance using a monitoring solution. Some web hosts, such as Nexcess, offer built-in monitoring tools. You may also use third-party monitoring tools such as Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic.
Schedule promotional activities
Marketing efforts can cause traffic spikes. Therefore, it is important to consider whether your website can handle the extra traffic.
Marketing and technical teams can work together before a campaign launches to ensure that spikes don’t cause performance issues. Web teams can scale up their hosting infrastructure during a campaign and implement other tips on this list.
When running an email marketing campaign, avoid sending mass emails to all your customers. Instead, stagger your email sending times. Many marketing platforms support this. This makes your site unaffected by customers checking deals and products on your site at the same time.
Alternatively, marketing teams can run targeted campaigns that more effectively capture the attention of the right audience, rather than casting a wider net.
Perform a load test
Load testing (also known as stress testing) helps you understand the limitations of your website. As part of that, it helps reproduce high traffic scenarios. This helps define a threshold of what your website can handle before its performance starts to degrade.
Although the results are helpful, load testing can cause problems with your hosting provider. So please check the terms and conditions or contact our support team to find out what is allowed.
A popular tool for load testing is loader.io. This allows you to simulate multiple simultaneous connections to your website. You can monitor results in real time and see when performance degrades.
This will tell you how much load your website and hosting plan can handle and whether you need to upgrade.
Finally: 10 tips to prepare your website for a surge in web traffic
When it comes to managing your website, you can either love or fear traffic spikes, depending on whether you’re prepared to handle them or not. It’s best not to wait until a spike occurs before taking steps to prevent dire consequences.
With a hosting plan with the right features, proper security monitoring and countermeasures, and a properly optimized website, you should be able to handle the surge.
Hosting plays a very important role in preparing for spikes in web traffic. You can have peace of mind when you choose a hosting provider like Nexcess that takes care of many of these tasks for you.
See why Nexcess is one of them. The most trusted name in hostingand Choose a fully managed hosting plan for your website today.