This article is sponsored by Cloudways
Traffic is typically high during product launches and sales. If you are not prepared to handle the overload, your website may crash. This can lead to a loss in revenue and reputation damage.
You can prevent website crashes and maximize availability by designing your website specifically for these events. You can, for example, switch to a cloud-based web hosting service that is scalable or optimize/compress images to save bandwidth.
This article will discuss six ways of designing websites for high traffic events such as product drops and sales.
Compressing and optimizing images is a great way to reduce the size of your images.
Choose a web host that is scalable.
Use a CDN
Leverage caching
Stress test websites
Refine the backend.
Let’s get started!
How to Design for High-Traffic Events
Take a look at these six tips for designing websites that can handle high traffic without worrying about crashes or other performance issues.
1. Compress and Optimize Images
Optimizing and compressing images is one of the easiest ways to design a site that can handle large volumes of traffic. Images are usually very large files, so they take a long time to display and parse. They can also be a big drain on bandwidth, resulting in slow loading times.
Compressing and optimizing your images will allow you to free up space on your server and reduce the load. Resize images to make the physical size smaller. You can do this by using the built-in applications on your operating system.
You can also use advanced image editing software such as Photoshop or GIMP, or online optimization tools like Tinify.
Image format is another important consideration. Many designers rely heavily on JPG and PNG. However, adaptive modern image formats such as WebP can reduce image weight and provide a better UX.
Consider installing an image optimization plug-in or an image CDN that will automatically compress and scale images. You can also implement lazy loading. This prioritizes images that are above the fold, and delays those not immediately visible.
2. Choose A Scalable Web Hosting Service
Upgrade your web hosting service to avoid website crashes.
When you sign up for web hosting, you are allocated a certain number of resources. This can have a negative impact on your website’s performance, especially if you are using a shared hosting service.
Upgrade your web host to ensure that you have enough resources to serve visitors who flock to your site when there is a high traffic event. If you are not prepared, your site may crash or your host might upgrade you to a more expensive plan.
The best solution is to use a scalable host such as Cloudways Autonomous.
This is a fully-managed WordPress hosting service which automatically adjusts web resources according to demand. This allows you to handle sudden traffic spikes without having to monitor resources or compromise on speed.
Cloudways Autonomous allows you to host your website on multiple servers, instead of one. It uses Kubernetes and advanced load balancing in order to distribute traffic between these servers. Kubernetes can spin up additional pods based on demand (think of pods like servers), so there’s never a chance of overloading a single server.
Hackers can also target your site during high-traffic events, such as sales. In high-stress situations many sites become more vulnerable and unstable. Cloudways Autonomous offers DDoS mitigation as well as a web application fire wall to improve the security of your website.
3. Use a CDN
As you might expect, high traffic volumes can have a significant impact on the security and stability your site’s networks. This can lead to website crashes if you don’t take the right precautions when designing your site for these events.
A content delivery network is a great solution. You’ll get access to a collection of strategically-located servers, scattered all over the world. You can reduce latency, and increase the speed of your content delivery, regardless where your customers are located.
When a user requests a website, the content will be delivered from the server closest to their location. A few extra servers can also prevent a server from crashing in high-pressure situations. Cloudflare, one of the most robust CDNs, is included with Cloudways Autonomous.
You can also find caching or optimization plugins that give you access a CDN. Some tools, like Jetpack, include a dedicated CDN for images that is designed to automatically optimize visual assets.
4. Leverage Caching
It can take a while for a user to request a website because of all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that is contained within. Caching can help you combat this problem.
A cache is a temporary storage area that keeps copies of web pages (once they have been requested) on hand. The cache will serve all subsequent requests, allowing users to access content faster.
The cache is mainly used for static content, such as HTML, which is easier to parse than dynamic content like JavaScript. You can find caching technology that accommodates both types of content.
When designing for high-traffic events, there are several caching mechanisms that you should consider. Edge caching, for example, is used to cache static assets such as images, videos, and web pages. Database caching allows you to optimize server requests.
Server-side caching is a good choice if you expect fewer simultaneous sessions. You can even implement browser cache, which will affect static assets based on HTTP headers.
There are many caching plugins that you can use to add this functionality to a site. However, some web hosts have built-in solutions. Cloudways Autonomous, for example, uses Cloudflare edge cache and integrated objects cache.
5. Stress Test Websites
Stress tests are a great way to prepare your website for peak traffic.
You can then see how your website performs under different conditions. You can simulate high traffic events to find out the limits of your server. This allows you to avoid resource drain and website crashes.
You may have used speed testing tools such as Pingdom to assess the performance of your website. These tools do not help you understand the impact of high traffic on performance.
You’ll need a dedicated tool for stress testing like Loader.io.
You will need to create an account to use this service. Then, you can download the file of your choice and upload it via FTP to your server.
Then, you will be given three different tests. After your test, you can look at the average and maximum response times and see how they are affected by more clients.
6. Refine the Backend
The final step in designing websites for high traffic events is to refine WordPress’ back end.
Install plugins, activate themes and add content in the admin panel. The more features you have on your website, the slower it will load.
It’s a great idea to delete old pages, posts and images. If you have access your database, then you can remove any archived material.
It’s also a good idea to remove any plugins that you don’t need for your website to work. You can also delete any tables left behind by uninstalling plugins through the WordPress dashboard.
When it comes time to choose a theme, you should opt for a simple design with a minimalist layout. Themes with a lot of widgets built-in or that rely on plugins from third parties will likely slow down your loading time. The lighter your backend, the faster it will load.
Conclusion
Sales and product drops are great ways to increase revenue. However, these events can cause traffic spikes which can affect a website’s performance and availability. You’ll need to design sites that can handle a large number of server requests all at once in order to prevent website crashes.
Upgrade to a scalable hosting service, such as Cloudways Autonomous, to accommodate fluctuating traffic volumes. You can then adjust your server resources based on demand. You’ll also get access to caching, a CDN and an SSL certificate. Get started now!