How To Manage Traffic Surges and Keep Your Site Running Smoothly

For the success of your business, you need to manage your website’s performance quite effectively. In online business, all websites have to see fluctuations in traffic. This includes both sudden surges and times of low activity.

However, these dynamics of traffic can get influenced by your business strategies. So, it is vital to effectively handle the varying levels of website traffics all the time. During peak time, rapid surges in website traffic can be quite challenging for the effective performance of your website. Thus, your site may face some problems like slowdowns or crashes. It means your website may also suffer certain kinds of slow-downs or crashes because of server overload. All of these can be harmful to your online presence. So, it is important to get rid of this issue and deliver optimal user experiences consistently. Hence, let us discuss some vital tips to manage traffic surges.

A Traffic Surge: What Is It?

A traffic surge in is actually a sudden increase in the numbers of visitors. It usually occurs during some major moments. Those can be flash sales, Black Friday, or incidents like exclusive product launches. These spikes not only show the huge amount of customer interests but also work as a test for the infrastructure of the site. Yes, it may crash your website if you fail to protect it in a proper manner although such high web traffic is good.
However, there are some traffic spikes that may result from the actions of website owners. But some are quite unexpected incidents. Some common causes of spikes in web traffic can be:

1. News coverage: In some situations, your business may end up in news, this may led to a spike for your site. 
2. Marketing Campaign: If your successful online activities include the links of your website, then you may experience a spike in your web traffic.
3. Search Engine Optimization: If you can optimize the content of your site successfully, then your site may experience this sudden spike in traffic. 
4. Bot Attack: A DDoS or distributed denial of service attack may b the reason. It usually uses a network of several compromised systems. With those, they can direct large amounts of internet traffic toward a target and overwhelm it. 

Website Crash: Can It Happen Due To High Traffic?

Yes, high traffic may cause a website to crash it you cannot not protect it in the right way. Moreover, this may happen in multiple ways. For instance, it can overwhelm the hardware of the hosting server. The read and write speeds of the hard drive may be quite slow. This will result in slow loading times for your visitors because they have to wait for the server to handle their requests. Moreover, it may even make your website unresponsive. 

So, to get rid of all these issues, you must carefully manage the traffic surges of your website and ensure that your website runs smoothly. Now, let’s discuss some tips to perform this task.

Tips To Manage Traffic Surges of Your Website

If you can handle a surge with the right measures, you can enjoy benefits like staying protected or increased visibility. So, let’s see how to do this.

• Cache Your Content

Caching includes the task of making a temporary data store of your web content. It can even use it to improve performance of your site and reduce network requests. So, whenever a visitor sends a request, your web server can send the cached content. They work like this rather than using your system resources. Thus, it can recompile the various components of a webpage. 

With proper caching, you can reduce resource usage to a great extent. Thus, your server will easily handle more page requests. 

• Use a CDN

Content Delivery networks are usually networks of servers that are geographically distributed. Thus, these can cache web content and even make it more easily accessible to end users. Multiple servers try to share the load during a traffic spike. Hence, these servers are developed to successfully handle the increased traffic. 

Most kind of CDNs even offer protection against malicious bots attacks. These DDoS attacks from bots may result in traffic spikes. Thus, CDNs can be a good investment to ensure the effective performance of your website. 

• Optimize Media Files

Videos, pictures, and some other forms of media usually create a notable amount of the content of a website. It is obvious that the best quality media is required for the website. But, performing the task in the wrong way will definitely affect the website’s performance. 

Images and videos that are poorly optimized may slow down load times. Thus, if you optimize them properly, you can prepare your website for heavy traffic. 

You can do the job by reducing the resolution of videos or images. Moreover, you can switch your videos and images to newer formats that will work perfectly for your websites. Those formats may be WebP or WebM. 

While using WordPress, the images can be optimized by using a plugin. You can easily compress them without sacrificing quality. Other than that plugins can be used to minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript files. This is how you can enjoy improved performance of the website. But that’s not all—using plugins minimizes your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. Here’s how you can have the full benefits of better loading performance, especially when offered by managed WordPress hosting solutions that incorporate their optimization tools.

• Utilize a Load-Balancing Solution

A load balancer is a specific type of physical hardware. This can be connected to the network as a part of the infrastructure of your web host. It can even be an application that can run on some network hardware. 

These solutions called load-balancing are a lot like CDNs. The reason is both can use a network of servers in order to improve performance. However, their difference is that they try to improve performance in different ways. 

A CDN uses servers that are geographically distributed. In contrast, load balancers use a bunch of servers in close proximity. In addition, CDNs focus on correctly distributing web content between their servers, while load-balancing servers try to direct network traffic. 

• Implement Improved Security Measures

Some website may face traffic surges, thanks to a malicious attack. Hackers try to compromise several internet-connected devices and then use them to develop a botnet. Then, they can control this botnet remotely to flood a website with a huge amount of network traffic. This may overwhelm the infrastructure of their target website. 

So, to mitigate these types of attacks, you must use a dedicated security solution. That solution can help you by detecting unwanted internet traffic and alert you before time. For better support, there is WeWP, with which you can get your managed shared hosting solutions that possess advanced security features. Hence, you can be able to take important measures to prevent the attack. 

For instance, there are a few reliable security plugins that you can use to reduce the risk of these attacks. For better assistance, you can contact WeWP.

• Monitor The Traffic and Performance of Your Site

Just by detecting a traffic spike really fast will give you enough time to react to prevent downtime. However, for this, you don’t have to keep track of all web activity 24 hours. 

For this, you may use some foolproof monitoring solutions to track the performance of your site. 

• Perform Some Load Testing

Timely load testing will help you to find out the limits of your website. This will help you to define the actual limit of what your site will be able to handle.

Who to Trust?

Now, as you have already known, managing traffic surges of your website is a vital task. Hence, you will need a highly efficient tool or professional to help you with this task. Hence, you can trust WeWP. It is one of those companies that can offer you some optimize solutions to protect your website from all kinds of threats and traffic surges. 

Conclusion

Hence, during the task of web traffic management, it becomes very important to manage all unwanted surges carefully in order to effectively manage traffic and ensure the quality performance. You must not wait to take the right steps until your website face a spike. You can rely on a professional or trusted company like WeWP to take care of your website in the best possible way.