If you are reading this article, there are two situations, either you are facing a big problem in managing your event users and you came to Google to find a solution, or you are planning to prepare your site for a big event and you don’t want to face such a problem. Anyway, we went to this topic to provide some clear and simple solutions to solve this problem.
Stay with us and prepare your WordPress site step by step to host as many users as possible at the same time.
Table of Contents
Managing high traffic volume on WordPress sites
First, it is necessary to get acquainted with the concept and philosophy of the high-traffic event. If you are facing high user traffic right now, I suggest you don’t read this section and go directly to the solutions from the next two titles.
What is a high-traffic event?
In simple words, high user traffic in an event means that your website experiences several times the normal traffic in a short period, such as a few minutes or seconds.
The traffic measure is measured based on the average number of users of each site in small time units (every minute or hour). For this reason, an exact number cannot be considered to measure it. But usually, for sites with a shared server, it may be a lot, or for sites with a dedicated server, it may be a few thousand users in a short time.
Now the question is, when will we encounter a high-traffic event? This is the specialty of data analysts, and they prepare a report, not precisely, but rather an estimate and guess. However, there are only a few situations where your website may encounter a high volume of users:
- The first mode is to publish one or more articles and news related to a popular topic at a certain time. Because users are interested in it, they come to the website to see that content. It is up to you whether you publish articles and news with a pre-planned schedule or not.
- The second mode occurs after the implementation of advertising campaigns. If the campaign is successful, the number of site users will be higher than the previous average in a certain period.
- The third mode is hacking or attacking the infrastructure. In such a situation, thousands of requests may be sent to the site’s server at the same time, and this issue will cause the service to drop or stop.
Why is high traffic volume dangerous for a WordPress website?
The problem is very simple. When the volume of users on a server that was set up for 1000 people per month suddenly reaches 1000 people per minute, it is quite natural that the performance will suffer. The system does not allow more people to enter or kick out those who are active on the website.
When we say dangerous, the reason is the same: such an event will lead to user dissatisfaction, inability to operate the site, drop in sales, or perhaps the website’s activity will stop, etc.
Ensuring the security of WordPress websites is one of the most important concerns of SEO experts. Hacker attacks and site downing severely damage SEO.
How to prepare a WordPress site for high traffic volume?
Now that you are familiar with the term high user traffic on the site, it is time to read the ways to optimize your WordPress website to host more users.
1. Clear the site server of useless information
Now it’s time to move. Go to the contents of the magazine or store pages. Delete or optimize extra or bulky images. Add video and optimize any content that takes up too much server space. Finally, this house should be ready to receive many guests.
2. Choose minimal designs for your website design
It does not matter whether the form of the content is minimal or the format of the website. It is better to use more non-glamorous designs. A site has strange fonts, and different features in its corners, or the site is full of clickable ads; if the selection of each and also their implementation is not principled and the features are not practical, then all those features are more destructive than effective and profitable.
3. Use a CDN to process data
Now it doesn’t matter in which geographical region the server of a site is located. And users want to see that site from thousands of kilometers away or a hundred meters. Using a CDN ensures that the user will access the content of the site as quickly as possible from any geographical distance.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. This technology forms the content distribution network around the world. It reduces the time and place distance between the sender and the receiver of information and acts like an intermediary to help the user communicate better with the website.
If you use a reliable and stable CDN on a site that is going to experience a high-traffic event, the speed of the site will increase. As a result, the user experience and the number of site users also increase.
4. Remove non-functional and mostly decorative plugins
One of the features of a WordPress site is the presence of plugins, each of which does strange things. One turns everything you draw into a site like a drawing book, one check SEO, one adds animation to pages, and…
I suggest that if you have a big event coming up, remove the extra and unnecessary plugins. Every plugin takes a part of website speed, takes up storage space, and messes up almost everything.
5. Get help from static pages
In WordPress websites, there are plugins whose job is to create static pages. These pages speed up the page loading process because they do not have dynamically changeable content and their information is already stored.
In fact, by using this system, the need to constantly connect to the server is reduced. This reduces the traffic load on the server side and you can have more users on the website at the same time.
The most famous plugins for creating these pages in WordPress are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache.
6. Optimize JavaScript and CSS codes
One of the most important tasks to increase the speed of the WordPress site is to optimize the codes according to Google’s instructions. There is a common term among programmers that says: so-and-so code is dirty or clean. The cleaner the code structure of your site, the better its performance in data loading speed, communication with the server, and data processing. You can use various optimization tools to find bugs in the site’s code.
7. Optimize the site based on TTFB
Time to First Byte or TTFB for short is a measure of site speed. This metric shows you how long it takes for each byte of information to reach the user’s browser from the server and appear.
There are different methods to measure TTFB. For example, GTMetrix or Pingdom will show you the data loading speed in milliseconds. If the number is 500 milliseconds or more, your site is too slow. And if this number is 200 or less, the site speed is good.
There are various ways to slow down the site, such as using a suitable host, using a CDN, keeping PHP codes up to date, and optimizing the database based on the amount of information.
8. Use a suitable server to host the site
Now everyone has realized the importance of hosting services. It is very important and undeniable to choose a suitable host (host) for the website that can manage and respond to a large number of users and a high volume of traffic.
Two things are very important in hosting services for high-traffic events: First, your hosting service has auto-scaling. The second issue is hosting support.
When the volume of users increases and the performance of the site is disrupted, naturally, 24-hour support is needed to control the situation with effective communication.