With the holidays just around the corner, have you prepared your website for a boost in traffic? This year, holiday online shopping is expected to surpass e-commerce sales in 2016 by 18-21%.
Whatever your product or service is, you need to prepare your website for heavy visitor spikes. There are several things you can do in advance to guarantee potential customers will be able to browse your website quickly and conveniently.
1. Use Full-Page Caching To Save Resources And Handle The Traffic
Caching is a common method for handling intensive website traffic. Basically, it stores the static elements of your site such as images, CSS files and HTML pages in a cache on the server’s memory. When a visitor comes to your site and clicks on a particular page, the content gets pulled directly from the cache. This makes the delivery much faster and reduces the load on the server.
With so-called full-page caching, the pages of your site will get stored in your server's memory, not only specific elements. This process will help your site handle the increased traffic much more efficiently. Without full-page caching, every click by every visitor on every page sends a request to your website database that it needs to process.
Luckily, there are different tools out there that provide full-page caching that you can take advantage of. Useful plugins that offer that option include WP Super Cache, WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache. All of these plugins cache website pages on the hard disk. An alternative that could make web loads even faster is if your plugin can cache web pages directly onto the Nginx web server. An example of this is SiteGround's SuperCacher, which is available for all websites hosted on their servers.
2. Take Advantage Of Object Caching If You Have Huge Databases
If you own an online store, membership sites or something similar, consider adding another caching layer. Object caching is great for sites with big databases and many logged-in users because it reduces the server load that's caused by your database interactions.
The two most popular and effective tools for object caching are Redis and Memcached. To configure your website to work with one of these two services, first check if your application has the functionality to work with them. Then you can request more information from your hosting provider on how to easily enable them.
3. Use The Latest PHP 7.x To Make Your Site Faster And Lighter
To make your website even faster and lighter, if it’s running on PHP, then update to its latest stable version -- PHP 7. It is greatly improved in terms of speed, resource usage and even security. PHP 7 is super fast -- up to 400% faster than version 5.2 -- so don’t miss out on taking advantage of this amazing improvement.
Before moving to PHP 7, note that some additional plugins or themes that haven’t updated their code to work with PHP 7 may cause errors or break your site. Тo upgrade your PHP version in the safest way, first create a staging copy or make a backup of your website. The next steps depend on the way your host has solved this procedure.
Depending on your situation, you have different options for installing PHP 7. You can use cPanel, a plugin, or ask your hosting provider to do it for you. It's possible that your hosting provider may refuse to upgrade your PHP version due to compatibility concerns, but there are a lot of hosting companies that put extra effort into making their clients' sites faster, more efficient and secure.
So make sure to host your site with a company that supports the newest PHP versions and tests how the most popular applications (WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal) perform with the new software.
4. Use A CDN To Keep You Site Alive Even When The Main Server Is Down
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are solutions that also offer caching to speed up your site, but a lot of them provide another great and less-known option: the so-called “keep alive” or “always online” feature. Even though you may be using a great hosting solution, sometimes unexpected circumstances might occur.
Hardware issues, system overload or data center problems can cause a server outage. In such a situation, the “keep alive” option will basically keep showing a cached version of your site, even if your main server is down. If your site gets a constant stream of traffic, this setup will guarantee that your visitors will be able to browse your site even in the worst-case scenario.
5. Enable Autoscaling To Ensure Your Site Will Be Up In Case Of Traffic Spikes
If you’re on a cloud platform and have an option to enable automatic scaling, it would be a good idea to do so. When you upload new items to your online store or when you run a limited-time campaign, it’s possible that your site could see sudden traffic spikes.
In times like these, autoscaling can automatically add more resources to your cloud account if needed, thus helping you scale your server resources temporarily and avoid downtime during the shopping madness. The autoscale option is perfect for handling massive traffic peaks. It's important to note that you may pay more at the end of the month, but your site will be up and running throughout all of your holiday promotions!
The crazy holiday traffic can cause a lot of stress for many website owners. To avoid it, use these applicable ideas and start preparing your site as early as possible. You can have peace of mind knowing that your site will be ready to handle all of the traffic.
