In her Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: How to Prepare for a High Traffic Event session at WordSesh 2022, Tiffany Bridge discussed what happened when a rescue dog website went viral.
And drove an immense amount of traffic to the site, causing the site to crash.
On an unlimited hosting plan, the site owner Christine was recommended by her web host to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan.
Bridge, a product manager for WordPress ecommerce at Nexcess, explained how turning to a more expensive hosting plan is not your first step in resolving issues with traffic spikes from a viral site.
Rather, you can anticipate sudden traffic surges on your site by looking at and working on:
- Site optimizations
- Temporary changes
After making those changes, then consider whether you want to throw money at the issue.
Bridge’s presentation was recorded and will be available to WordSesh members.
Here are my takeaways from her talk.
Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: How to Prepare for a High Traffic Event
- Anyone can experience a sudden surge in traffic on a website, it can happen unexpectedly. Perhaps your site was mentioned on national news or had a shoutout on social media.
- Which is what happened to Christine when she created a dog rescue adoption website for Hank, a puppy Christine was fostering in Houston
- Once word spread about her site, traffic increased rapidly. As Bridge explained, traffic increased by 99,900%.
- And the site kept crashing. Christine’s web host recommended upgrades, expensive upgrades, including a dedicated server.
- If you’re able to anticipate a traffic surge ahead of time with site optimizations, you can keep your site up and running. But when you’re not expecting it, your site can bog down and crash.
- Optimizations benefit your site every day: pages load faster when you decrease page weight of assets on a page
- Always be optimizing for performance
- Run tests for your website pages on WebPageTest or Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Both are free online tools that allow you to test your pages on different browsers and devices
- Don’t only run tests on the home page, run tests on key pages of your site: product pages, landing pages, membership subscription, etc.
- Tool reports will highlight specific issues with performance, whether it’s a big 8MB image or a slow-loading JavaScript
- For images, consider installing image optimization plugins like Smush or TinyPNG (there are many other image optimization plugins you can use). Test them to find which ones work best for your site.
- For site performance, consider a content delivery network (CDN) and caching
- A CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers that store your images, files, JavaScript, CSS, etc. so they are served rapidly, no matter what location
- Caching takes your content for a page, that is usually created dynamically in WordPress, and serves it as a static file. Which means your site doesn’t have to query the database every time a page loads.
- For the rescue dog site, one of the main issues was the visitor statistics plugin. Which consistently wrote to the database, causing the site to slow down.
- With thousands of visitors to your site, it’s time to take a close look at analytics, broken link checkers, and related posts plugins which could impact performance. (Personal note: I always recommend deactivating broken link checkers after you’ve run the checker.)
- During a traffic surge, consider deactivating those plugins. Or use services/plugins that offload the feature to an external service (The Jetpack plugin does with both analytics and related posts, using WordPress.com servers).
- Keep your plugins and theme lean and updated
- Avoid buying a kitchen-sink theme from places like ThemeForest. Themes with a bundle of features like a slider, animation, built-in page builder may be good to get a site up quickly, but they don’t scale well when your site gets bigger.
- Keep testing. Whenever you make a change on the site, when you add a plugin, change a configuration on the site. Consider what’s most important on your site.
- For the dog rescue site, the most important item was the adoption application. If there’s content on your site that doesn’t support conversions, remove it. Even it’s temporary.
- What to remove? Replace sliders with a static image, turn off animations, disable comments on your blog. Once the traffic surge subsides, consider what to bring back.
- Other things to consider turning off for a short period: malware scan and backups. (Don’t turn them off for long, perhaps only a couple days.)
- Making optimizations and improving performance means you’ll spend less money to solve the problem, if you decide it’s time to spend money
- One option to consider: Cloudflare for $20 (U.S. dollars)/ month. You can keep it for a month and cancel, when your traffic spike decreases
- If you’ve decided to look at more expensive hosting plans, know that plans are limited by three factors: disk space, bandwidth, and concurrent PHP workers
- Find out if your plan could be upgraded for a short period of time. Or whether you can pay for additional resources a la carte. Always best to ask.
