What are the common goals of every website? The answer is simple — to attract more visitors and get high traffic. In the beginning, every website is a low-traffic site. With time, based on the website’s quality of content and performance, the number of visitors increases.
Getting heavy traffic, however, has its challenges. E-commerce websites and blogs with thousands of visitors at a given time can experience slowdowns. That is because the web servers cannot keep up with the amount of traffic, impacting the website’s functionality.
As a result, the audience gets a bad experience that impacts their actions, leading to disastrous results for the website. According to Unbounce, the purchase decisions of around 70% of visitors depend on the website’s page speed.
Small businesses with expected high-traffic WordPress websites should consider this factor. Read along as we discuss the problems of high-traffic websites and share tips for getting fast WP hosting.
High Traffic Threshold and WordPress Websites
How To Ensure Fast Hosting for WordPress
Final Thoughts: Can WordPress Handle Heavy Traffic Efficiently?
High Traffic Threshold and WordPress Websites
If your e-commerce website or blogging platform is built using WordPress and has a basic hosting plan backing it, you can run into problems managing high traffic.
The problem with basic hosting plans is that you get shared servers, not a private server. That means that you do not get dedicated hosting for your website. As a result, when the server receives heavy loads, your website will experience slow site speed because of high traffic.
Sometimes, the issue of managing heavy traffic also arises because of unexpected heavy traffic. If a post goes viral or a product starts getting popular, millions of users can browse your website at a given time.
That said, can WordPress handle heavy traffic? The short answer is yes. However, you need to take some steps to ensure that your website maintains high performance and quality at the same time.
To summarize:
High Traffic WordPress
WordPress is capable of handling heavy traffic. However, the performance of your website highly depends on your hosting service and your optimization techniques. It is recommended to have a scalable, managed WordPress hosting plan to avoid disruptions.
How To Ensure Fast Hosting for WordPress
If you’re a blogger with a WordPress website, you must make your website responsive to reduce the impact of heavy traffic. Additionally, you should also focus on scaling the WordPress site to balance loads.
To improve the performance of your website, it is essential that you also focus on high page-load times, on-pager performance optimizations, plugins and get dedicated server resources to deal with traffic spikes.
Some of the best ways to manage high traffic WordPress sites are listed below.
Select a Quality WordPress Website Hosting Service
One of the major factors in managing high-traffic websites and web services is the hosting provider. Market Research Future states the web hosting solution business is expected to reach a value of $76.2 billion, which shows how vital this domain is.
Getting the best website hosting for WordPress is the first step in managing high-traffic websites. The price of the hosting package, available bandwidth, customer service and scalability are some of the key features to consider while choosing what is best for your website.
Another way to resolve the hosting problem is to get the best managed WordPress hosting for your site. That will give you the fastest hosting and save you from the hassle of day-to-day website maintenance.
Related: What is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Pick a Lightweight Theme
Another important concern for high-traffic websites is WordPress themes. If your theme is heavily loaded, your website will automatically experience slow speed and high page-load times.
The best way to resolve this issue is to have a minimalistic theme that helps improve site performance. OceanWP, for instance, has an excellent collection of lightweight themes.
There are several other themes that are both aesthetically pleasing and hold the promise of not being a burden on your database server.
When choosing a theme for your WordPress site, make sure that you do not compromise on the performance and optimization of your website, particularly if you’re expecting heavy traffic.
Reduce the Size of Heavy Elements
When optimizing your website for heavy traffic, it is also essential to consider the impact of media and interactive elements.
Images, videos, popups and other CSS elements, if not carefully managed, can slow your website down and thus impact its overall performance. Limit the use of visual content on your website and ensure your content is optimized even when you get a high volume of visitors.
By reducing the size of images and other media, you will save the database and server from overloading. As a result, you can guarantee a quality experience to the visitors.
Use a Content Delivery Network
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is another excellent way to manage heavy traffic on your WordPress website. CDN allows the content on your website to be served from the server location closest to the visitor.
With the help of that cached content, the distance between your website’s server and the end user’s browser is reduced. Additionally, it can help in distributing the load from your server. The pages, therefore, load quickly, improving the performance of your website.
Avoid Using Excessive Plugins
When it comes to WordPress websites, plugins are both useful and tempting. However, using too many plugins negatively impacts your website’s performance. Plugins contribute to the load on your database server. Even with the fastest hosting, plugins can cause slowdowns.
Make sure the plugins you choose for your website are plugins you really need. Remember to also conduct an audit of your existing plugins. That will help you get rid of the plugins that are not valuable anymore or the ones that are sitting idle.
While looking for plugins, make sure you have a caching plugin for your website. Plugins such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache help reduce slowdowns and manage high traffic easily.
Final Thoughts: Can WordPress Handle Heavy Traffic Efficiently?
High traffic on your website means success in the online world. However, you need to take steps to prevent heavy traffic from becoming a problem for you and your website.
Prioritize the fastest hosting for your high-traffic WordPress website to ensure visitors get the best experience.
Bluehost offers the best WordPress hosting for your website. Check out Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting plans to leverage its scalability and optimization features and take your online business to new levels.
4 Comments
It’s Great to manage the heavy traffic.
Heavy traffic is most bloggers dream but what made them worry a lot is usually the downtime. May i ask what plan you guys would recommend for a site having up to 2k visitors in a day?
Greetings,
Thank you so much for your inquiry, please refer to https://www.bluehost.com/ to get assistance on the best plan for your site.
Yes, in my experience WP can handle lots of traffic as long as it’s optimized and not bloatloaded with plugins.