How To Scale Up A WordPress Site From Heavy Traffic?

WordPress is the most popular CMS platform used today. When you use WordPress for a high-traffic website, you need to take care of some things that deal with high traffic volumes. While WordPress is capable of managing large volumes of traffic, everything around it must be properly configured to handle an increase in traffic. There are several things that can compromise all the incredible traffic that arrives at your site and that you should be careful with supervision and administration.

In fact, your WordPress site must be scaled up in order to keep visitor enthusiasm high and to handle major increases in traffic too. In this blog, we will discuss how you can start scaling your WordPress site in order to prepare it for the increased traffic. Here we will see a number of ways to do this keeping concerns for improved user experience, security hardening and improved performance of the overall site.

Here is the list:

1) WordPress Hosting

By scaling resources and managing server settings, you may require to offload the work to dedicated WordPress developers. Hosted WordPress hosting services are always a good option. While it may cost more than a standard hosting plan, WordPress managed to host providers to help alleviate the pressures of scaling a WordPress site while keeping a strong track on monitoring, security and performance.

2) Broken Links

However, the broken links are not a big problem in terms of site performance and security,so, it is better to believe that they will damage the user experience and, consequently, the SEO. As your Wordpress site receives more traffic, you can not allow visitors to reach these obstacles, so make sure you have a process to check for broken links and fix them at the time.

3) CDN technology

CDN technology is very useful when you want incredibly fast speeds for your WordPress site. When you want to scale specifically, especially if the traffic comes from around the world, then a CDN will become the absolute necessity since it will shorten the distance between your server and the browsers of your visitors.

4) Limits on MySQL

You can store a large amount of data in MySQL but you must be very careful with the way you do it, because exceeding its limits could compromise the speed of the Wordpress site. First of all, put a limit on automatic load queries. Over 200 is a good maximum to work with this. Moreover, keep in mind your about the Options table. Each column in the table can contain up to 4 GB, but repeatedly reaching that maximum limit could also damage the performance of your site.

5) Lazy Loading

If your Wordpress site is not loaded with the weight of videos, then you need to do something for the images. Here comes the lazy loading. It is a good way to start and quickly scale up your WordPress site. Top WordPress developers use lazy loading that will serve images to visitors when they reach those parts of your web pages that are not a second sooner.

6) Caching and Optimization Plugin

You can do anything to minimize requests from the HTTPS server on your WordPress website which is ideal. By doing that, the number of files that are transmitted between the server and visitors is reduced, will keep the load times low even as traffic increases. An add-on for caching and optimizing files like Hummingbird will handle it for you.

7) Media

Media or visual content of your WordPress site plays a crucial role in web design these days. Therefore, you need to host only necessary media if you want to scale your WordPress site. You will surely lose your visitor’s attention quickly if you don’t employ any media to the site. However, there can be some other reasons to lose their attention. Visual content that takes too long to load. To avoid the hassle of waiting to see some of that, you should only host the files on your site that is absolutely necessary. In simple words, if you can host videos using services such as Vimeo and Youtube and then embed them on your Wordpress site.

8) Backup Plugin

By using a backup plugin, you can easily scale up your WordPress site. It doesn’t matter how much precautionary steps you are taking in order to keep your WordPress site in line and how much care you are doing to your server to keep it up until snuff, anything can happen to it which can crash down all this. And if this happens, then you are quickly required to find easy ways which can curb this problem instantly and can restore it. Snapshot Pro is a good example to check out if you don’t even install backup and restore plugin for your WordPress site.

9) Payment Gateway

As we know that more the traffic more the money you can earn. So, you should use a reliable payment gateway if you want to scale up your WordPress site from heavy traffic. In fact, it is required to keep your WordPress site updated during the traffic surges and to defend yourself from vulnerabilities. Before you reach this point, you must have a reliable, secure and proven payment gateway to ensure there are no problems if a customer or more customers want to buy your products at any given time.

10) Scanning and Reporting

It is not possible for WordPress developers to present everywhere at once. Therefore, you need an automated website scanning and reporting to be present in every web developer’s arsenal of tools. This will enhance the performance, ease the burden of having to monitor security, great SEO and keep you informed everytime of the major changes if took place. Some of the popular automated scanning and reporting tools are mentioned below:

- Security scanning: This is to ensure that new vulnerabilities can be caught up and kicked out quickly when they’re detected.

- Google Analytics: It lets you know about the traffic spikes and also analyze the behavior of the visitors, sources of the traffic and assess the visitor journey on the site.

- Performance scanning: It keeps track of the issues with uptime availability, security threats, blacklisting in Google and more.

- Speed testing tools: It is to detect if there is any slowdown on your WordPress site.

11) Security Plugin

A security plugin to your website helps in scaling it up when heavy traffic soars. It protects your site from all types of threats including malware, spams etc. Defender is a perfect example to this which comes with built-in scanning and monitoring as well as protective security measures like blacklisting and two-factor authentication that ensures your WordPress site is totally secured.

Conclusion:

This is a perfect time for your WordPress site to scale up. To preserve those higher volumes, you must ensure that visitors trust you to provide a high-quality experience at all times. In order to get this job done, you need to scale your website along with this traffic to ensure a truly optimized experience in terms of performance, security and more. By hiring top WordPress developers from reputed and reliable WordPress development company like ValueCoders, you can easily scale your WordPress business site.

ValueCoders is a leading software development company in India having a dedicated team of WordPress developers who have successfully delivered more than 4200 projects to 2500+ satisfied customers since 2004. Feel free to Contact Us!

How To Scale Up A WordPress Site From Heavy Traffic? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.