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A sudden surge in website traffic is every store owner's wish.
If you're currently trying to increase traffic to your website through social media as well as search engine Optimization (SEO) as well as other marketing strategies there's a chance you've seen steady growth in your traffic throughout time. But what happens when your business receives a sudden increase in customers?
Are you able to handle it? If it isn't, then you might encounter a number of problems that can cause your website to be unable to make the sales and damage your brand:
- Your site's performance may suffer and your pages may take longer to load
- Your site could shut completely offline
- Users may experience issues at check-out and also with their cart
So, to avoid all of these, it's important to be aware of when a spike might happen and learn how to prepare your eCommerce website for a surge in traffic.
Are you able to predict the time when your site will see a surge of customers?
There are many reasons However, there are some typical causes:
- An established website may mention or links to your site.
- The product or service you offer is advertised by a social media influencer.
- It is possible to publish material on a popular or popular topic.
- You have seasonal products that are more popular during the holidays or during a specific season.
- Your website is "viral" through social media.
- The company you represent is mentioned in the media (e.g. being featured on Shark Tank)
Any one of these things could increase the traffic on your site, but imagine if a few of them happen simultaneously. If you do not want to miss out on sales then you must prepare in advance.
How to Prepare Your Online Store for an Increase in traffic
When it comes to creating your site for a surge of customers think about the following areas: tech tweaks, testing, and the inventory.
Tech Tweaks
1. Check with your hosting company.
The first thing you need to take a look at the hosting plan you have chosen for your site. There are many hosts that limit the resources that your website and traffic can make use of, especially when you're using the shared hosting plan (meaning you have shared server space with other users). If you're expecting a rise in traffic to your website, it might be time to change from a shared hosting plan to a more powerful plan and reliable, such as Cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting plans that include load balancers can be a great alternative to think about, however in case you're uncertain or aren't sure where to begin, speak to your web hosting service provider and ask the options they have for you. The ideal solution to your problem will depend on the traffic you're currently receiving and how much you expect the number to rise.
Ask them about what happens when you reach your resource limit. Some hosts will move you to a higher-tiered plan to accommodate for extra traffic and then charge users for the extra traffic, which is a better option than hosting companies that take your site down completely when it's using up too many resources.
2. Make sure your website is updated.
It's important to update your site constantly, however it becomes especially important in the event of a sudden influx of new customers.
Upgrade your themes and plugins, as well as your PHP version. Contact the hosting provider you use to inquire about which version you're employing and ask that it be upgraded to comply with WordPress requirements.
Important: Always create an archive of your existing site prior to making these modifications. If you need to upgrade the version of PHP use the no-cost PHP compatibility Plugin Checker to verify that your plugins, themes, and resources are compatible.
3. Use an Utilize a Delivery Network (CDN ).
A CDN stores your website content on servers in multiple locations across the globe. Every time someone visits your website, the content is loaded from the nearest available server and is then delivered faster. The process may seem complicated but the visitors of your site will gain from this speed boost in particular if you're serving a a global audience.
All in all the solution works to handle the possibility of a surge in website traffic because one "outage" doesn't stop users from being able to visit your site, since there will be "copies" across multiple servers.
4. Install the Caching Plugin.
Another option to stabilize the performance of your website is through caching. This reduces the amount of "communication" between WordPress as well as your databases through making a static, temporary HTML page.
So instead of WordPress running to your database to get information--especially in times of high traffic-- it can serve your customers the cached version of the page instead, which results in faster load times, and better performance.
A few caching plugins to take a look at include:
Testing
1. Perform a website performance and Speed Test:
A baseline measurement of your website's speed and efficiency is crucial particularly if you're planning on an influx of visitors.
Another way to determine how fast your website is by using a free software such as Page Speed Insights developed by Google and GTMetrix. These two options can analyze your website and give you recommendations on how to improve speed. Examples:
- Make use of browser caching (explained earlier)
- Make use of a CDN (explained above)
- Minify CSS, HTML, and other scripts (can be accomplished using the caching plugin listed above)
You can also run an evaluation of the performance of your plugin using the no-cost P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin. If you decide to use this plugin, be sure to remove it from your system after using it because it can take up many resources in the long run.
By checking the performance and speed of your website and making necessary adjustments to increase your score, your site will be better prepared to handle a wave of visitors.
2. Run a Stress Test:
After you've got the technical side of your website optimized then you are able to run a "stress check" to ensure that the site is able to cope with an increase in visitors.
How do you accomplish this?
Use a load testing Tool which will "fake" the appearance of a surge in visitors to your site, and see how it performs. When you test this by testing with various quantities of traffic, it can pinpoint the volume that your site can take without making a huge impact on performance.
- Important Note: Before making this change, ensure that your database is optimised and your server has been properly configured, and you have adequate backup options.
- We recommend that you perform the stress test using your staging website rather than your live site. Be aware that in order to obtain the most accurate information about your site's capabilities the environment you are using for staging must be set up identically as your live website.
- Conducting a stress test can become a bit difficult, so it's best done by experienced and skilled website developers. Below is a great article to guide you to learn further about the requirements and ways to begin.
Inventory
When you are you are preparing for the possibility of a flurry of traffic, think about the inventory you have.
Though you may not know the exact time when a spike occurs or how big it'll be, it's always better to be in a position to prepare rather than not take advantage of an important possibility.
Take a look at the sales you made during your last peak in traffic. This will help you get an idea of what you should anticipate when it comes time to stock.
After that, check the inventory setting.
- Are you looking to show the quantity of products available to clients?
- Do you wish that they have the ability to buy products that are backordered?
- Are you set up with notifications up to let you know when stock is running low or sold out?
Conclusion
Overall an increase in website traffic can be thrilling! But it's also difficult if your site isn't prepared for it.
So whether your website gets a little traffic spike, or a big surge of visitors, you must understand the options prior to time in order to put the right strategy in place.
Since you aren't able to predict every time a surge might take place, it's recommended following the latest the best practices for maintaining your site's content as well as backed up and optimized to speed.