It’s usually a cause for celebration to see your website traffic increase in volume; website traffic spikes, however, are another matter entirely. Sudden surges and spikes slow down your website’s response time—and in worse cases, cause it to crash entirely.
Website traffic spikes should be a happy problem to have, however, without a quick and proper resolution, this can permanently decrease your website’s visitability. Slow response times and constant crashing will push your visitors to look for more stable websites. In order to avoid this, knowing a bit about the proper ways to resolve and ease the strain on your website will help a lot.
Here are four simple ways to properly handle website traffic spikes and ease the load on your website’s servers.
Get a Better Website Hosting Plan
The initial problem of creating a website for your business was finding an appropriate web hosting service to handle it. While finding the cheapest web hosting plan seemed appropriate at the time, a little bit of foresight will tell you that it won’t last. As your website grows and gains more constant visitors, you will realize that the initial plan won’t cater to the increase in volume.
Getting a bigger and more scalable web hosting plan is the quickest solution to this. Another would be to choose a service that has dedicated servers for your website—shared servers will definitely slow your response with increased traffic. The best plans are those that offer cloud hosting as these can really speed up load times.
Install a Caching Plugin
Caching is one of the easiest and most crucial methods to quicken load times and relieve server stress. When there are numerous actions your server has to do whenever someone visits, caching will help by remembering and saving them in succeeding visits.
To do so, try installing a caching plugin on your website to compress HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. Caching will save a lot of power and memory for servers—which would free up and lower much of your visitors’ waiting time.
Optimize Your Website
Going through with the aforementioned tasks will only help your website a certain way. Poor website optimization will still bog down the loading and server response times—so fixing this will help your website a great deal.
Avoid using large images and videos for your website—compress these as much as possible. Smaller files load quicker so a little tweaking can resolve slow response times. Also, your web developer can shorten and simplify the codes used for your website; after all, longer texts also take a longer time for servers to “read.”
Avail a Load Balancing Software
The most effective solution to ease server stress during website traffic is by utilizing load balancing software. Through this, you receive the best speed and reliability by distributing traffic across numerous servers.
While many would argue that server load balancing is only necessary for high traffic websites, thinking and planning ahead will help you avoid server crashes from happening.
By planning ahead and taking note of these four tips, you can avoid server crashes and downtime due to website traffic spikes. From here on, an increase in your traffic won’t be a problem, it will just be a thankful result of optimizing your website.
Load Balancing Software Company
The best way to avoid a server crash due to traffic spikes would be the use of a server load balancing software. At Resonate, we use software load balancing to grant your website the reliability and scalability it needs to always run smoothly. Get in touch with us today and see what service best fits you.