Prepare WordPress for High Traffic: A Step-by-Step Guide

Everyone hopes for a surge of traffic to their site. However, how should you respond when that wish is granted and your site experiences a sudden influx of visitors?

Without proper preparation, your site could slow significantly or even crash, negatively impacting your business.

If you’re organizing a major marketing campaign or introducing a highly anticipated product, preparing for a traffic surge is essential.

At CanadaCreate, we prepare for high-traffic events by building our site on robust infrastructure. We also use a CDN, implement a firewall, and optimize for efficiency.

This guide details the types of events that can cause high traffic. Crucially, it provides tips to prepare your website for such spikes.

Defining a High Traffic Event

A high-traffic event isn’t about the gradual growth of website visitors over time.

It refers to a sudden, significant spike in traffic that far exceeds normal daily or weekly averages.

Consider your website like a store. On a typical day, you have a steady flow of customers. A high-traffic event resembles a flash sale where many customers attempt to enter at once.

This overwhelming influx of website visitors is what we mean by a high-traffic event. It can strain your website’s resources, including processing power, memory, and bandwidth.

High-traffic events involve a swift, often unforeseen spike in concurrent website users. This surge can strain your server, causing sluggish performance or downtime if you’re unprepared.

High-traffic events fall into two categories: planned and unplanned. Planned events are those you initiate, such as:

• Running a social media contest
• Running a popular giveaway
• Creating a viral TikTok giveaway
• Holding a holiday sale

Unplanned events occur without warning, perhaps from a prominent news mention, influencer endorsement, or a Reddit post going viral.

Regardless of whether a high-traffic event is anticipated, readiness is crucial. Neglecting preparation can lead to lost revenue and reputational harm.

Before exploring solutions, assess your website’s present capacity for increased traffic.

How Much Traffic Can Your Website Handle?

To prepare for high-traffic events, first determine your website’s existing traffic capacity and usual visitor volume.

Ideally, you consistently monitor your website’s traffic. If not, begin immediately.

How Much Traffic Do You Typically Get?

Begin by choosing a recommended website traffic analysis tool. Subsequently, monitor traffic data at least weekly to spot trends and establish a typical visitor activity baseline.

On CanadaCreate, we utilize MonsterInsights for traffic analysis. It translates Google Analytics data into accessible reports, offering visual representations of sessions, pageviews, and related metrics.

We also employ All in One SEO‘s Search Statistics tool, favored for its ease of use and direct data retrieval from Google Search Console.

Refer to our guide on tracking website visitors on WordPress for instructions on using it.

How Many Visitors Should You Expect During a High Traffic Event?

Having a solid understanding of your website’s normal traffic flow provides a baseline for predicting visitor numbers during a high-traffic period. While not precise, careful assessment allows for a sound estimate.

It is prudent to overestimate rather than underestimate potential traffic volume to adequately prepare your site for the anticipated surge.

Use your traffic analysis tool to pinpoint prior traffic peaks related to events like marketing initiatives, seasonal deals, or media coverage.

Examine the highest traffic levels recorded during these prior occurrences to gauge your site’s performance capacity.

Determine the times of day and days of the week when traffic is typically heaviest. This will help you predict potential surges during a planned event.

If the data is available, check the historical number of concurrent users. This can help you determine how many simultaneous users to plan for.

Then, estimate the added traffic resulting from your planned marketing campaign or email promotion.

Estimate potential traffic by multiplying your audience size by the anticipated click-through rate (CTR). External promotions by other entities can further inflate visitor numbers.

Consider this scenario: You’re emailing a product announcement to 100,000 subscribers.

• If you have a 20% open rate and a 5% click-through rate, that’s roughly 1000 visitorslanding on your site in a short timeframe, mostly within a couple of hours post-email.

• Supplementing this with social media promotion to 10,000 followers, yielding a 2% engagement rate, brings another200 visitorswithin a compressed window.

Predicting the impact of unforeseen traffic spikes, like a Reddit front-page feature or a major news outlet link, is notably challenging.

For these unexpected instances, anticipate a significant traffic surge and incorporate a safety margin. Preparing for 200 concurrent users with a server capacity of 300 offers a stronger safety net.

How Many Simultaneous Visitors Can Your Site Handle?

With an understanding of your typical traffic and projected high-traffic event volume, assess your site’s performance under pressure via stress testing.

Stress tests mimic high-traffic scenarios to pinpoint your site’s breaking point—the maximum concurrent users before performance suffers.

Refer to our guide on stress testing a WordPress website for more details.

We conducted a stress test on a sample site using Loader.io’s free plan; the results appear below.

The green line illustrates simulated website visitors, climbing steadily to 250 concurrent users.

The blue line displays the site’s response time. It’s rapid up to approximately 150 visitors, beyond which performance declines, reaching its slowest point around 200 simultaneous users.

This suggests the site approaches maximum capacity near 150 users.

Knowing your site’s breaking point aids informed optimization decisions. Apply the tips below to boost website performance.

Retest after improving performance to gauge your site’s new traffic capacity. Optimization and testing are continuous.

Now that you have a better understanding of your website’s traffic capacity, let’s explore the steps you can take to prepare your WordPress site for a high-traffic event:

1. Choose a Scalable Hosting Plan

Your website’s capacity often depends on your hosting package. With limited traffic, you can select a small, budget-friendly plan.

However, for sites expecting high traffic, choosing a scalable hosting plan is crucial to handle the load.

Selecting the correct hosting is about anticipating growth. If planning marketing campaigns, your plan must accommodate increased traffic.

Our comparison of the fastest WordPress hosting includes in-depth speed and stress tests for popular providers. We utilized Load Impact (k6) and other tools for detailed results.

To help you understand the potential of different hosting options, we’ve also explored how much traffic WordPress can handle with various hosting types.

Here are the key takeaways:

• Shared hosting plans are budget-friendly and common. They typically support over 100 concurrent users and 10,000–100,000 monthly page views but may struggle with sudden traffic surges.
• Managed WordPress hosting represents an upgrade, with providers handling updates, security, and backups. Optimized for speed and reliability, these servers can manage over 400,000 monthly visits.
• Cloud hosting uses resources across numerous servers. With redundancy, your site remains available even if a server fails, and it can handle millions of monthly page views, making it ideal for sites with fluctuating traffic.
• Cloud hosting solutions, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, provide highly scalable environments suitable for handling billions of monthly requests; while typically excessive for smaller websites, this option is well-suited for sites anticipating substantial pageview growth.

Is it time to upgrade your hosting plan?

If your current hosting arrangement imposes restrictions on visitor numbers or available resources, upgrading warrants serious consideration, particularly if you’re on a shared hosting plan.

Upgrading your hosting plan lets your website tap into extra server resources; this is crucial for efficiently managing elevated visitor numbers during traffic surges, resulting in improved performance and the ability to accommodate greater traffic volumes.

Managed WordPress hosting often represents an optimal solution for rapidly expanding websites, offering the capacity to manage virtually any required traffic volume, where costs scale with the necessary hardware.

For example, we recommend SiteGround’s managed hosting, which leverages the Google Cloud platform, ensuring both rapid speed and high reliability for its servers.

It is important to remember that managed WordPress hosting involves a higher cost compared to shared hosting.

Consult our comparative guide on the best managed WordPress hosting options for further details and our top recommendations on this subject.

At CanadaCreate, we’ve experienced the importance of selecting the correct server capacity; scaling prematurely can result in needless costs, while delaying scaling can lead to downtime.

It is best to adjust your plan when your website starts to struggle or when you plan a large marketing campaign. By carefully balancing our server needs with our growth, we have ensured our websites remain fast and reliable.

To further understand your hosting needs, see our guide on how to determine the ideal size of a web server for your website.

2. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

One of the most effective ways to prepare your WordPress website for a high-traffic event is to reduce the load that each visitor places on your server.

Instead of generating each page every time it is requested, which requires significant server resources, you can use caching to save static versions of your pages.

These static pages can be quickly displayed to new visitors instead of generating them again every time a user visits that page.

A caching plugin enables this process by serving these static versions of your site to users. As a result, your site loads much faster and can handle significantly more visitors at the same time. This is one of the most effective tools you can use to prepare for a high-traffic event.

Most WordPress hosting providers, like Bluehost, Hostinger, and SiteGround, include built-in caching solutions that are enabled by default. If you’re unsure, you can contact their support team to see if caching is active for your site and how it is configured.

While built-in caching can be helpful, a dedicated caching and performance plugin like WP Rocket offers more control and optimization options.

WP Rocket is easy to use, automatically setting optimal configurations for most sites while providing advanced customization options. This plugin enhances site speed and effectively prepares for high traffic.

For more information, read our comprehensive WP Rocket review.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a robust method for preparing your website for increased traffic. A CDN comprises a global server network delivering static content.

Distributing static content—images, JavaScript, CSS—across multiple servers significantly lessens the burden on your primary WordPress server.

Rather than depending solely on your server, a CDN caches static content on geographically diverse servers. When a visitor accesses your site, the CDN serves content from the nearest server, accelerating load times.

The ability of a site to manage large increases in traffic is improved greatly by resource distribution.

In addition to decreasing server load, a CDN considerably speeds up response times by delivering files from locations nearer to users. This is especially helpful during high-traffic events, ensuring site speed and reliability.

At CanadaCreate, we’ve experienced the benefits of a CDN firsthand. We use Cloudflare and previously used WP Rocket’s CDN on CanadaCreate.

This has allowed us to improve our user experience, reduce the load on our servers, and ensure fast content delivery to our global audience. It has also resulted in a smoother browsing experience and more satisfied visitors.

We also highly recommend Bunny.net as another excellent CDN option. It is known for being easy to integrate with WordPress, even for absolute beginners, and offers a wide range of advanced features and good performance.

4. Optimize Your Images and Videos

Poorly optimized images and videos are a major reason why websites slow down and can’t handle many visitors at once. If you want your website to be ready for a big event, then you need to make sure your media files are optimized.

To begin, focus on image optimization. Large image files can slow down your site. You can compress large image files to reduce their file size without a significant loss in visual quality.

At CanadaCreate, all of our authors follow a rigorous process when uploading images, including proper sizing and compression of all files. They size each image with the right dimensions and then reduce image file size using a variety of graphics tools and techniques.

This process ensures that every image is ready for use on the web and doesn’t cause performance issues.

Using these optimization techniques can often reduce image file sizes by 70% or more, with little visible loss in quality.

Smaller files result in faster download times, reduced server load, and better user experience. This is a critical factor when dealing with a high-traffic event.

For more detailed guidance on optimizing your images for the web, see our step-by-step guide on how to optimize images for web performance without losing quality.

Additionally, if you’re hosting videos directly on your site, then consider using third-party platforms like YouTube or Vimeo and then embedding them in your content.

This approach drastically reduces the load on your server by utilizing the robust video infrastructure of these dedicated platforms. This ensures smooth playback without impacting your website performance.

Once you optimize your media files, the load on your server will be dramatically reduced, and your site will perform more smoothly during high-traffic events.

5. Get Expert Help

As you have seen, preparing your website for a high-traffic event involves a few technical steps.

The last thing you want is for a successful marketing campaign to be undermined by a website that can’t handle enough visitors. Imagine the frustration of customers facing slow loading times.

That’s why many website owners look for professional help. Whether you’re short on time, prefer to focus on other aspects of your business, or simply feel overwhelmed by the technical details, our WordPress maintenance service can provide you with peace of mind.

Our team of WordPress experts can optimize your website performance. We focus on preventing slow loading times and downtime, ensuring your site runs smoothly even under high-traffic conditions. This allows you to focus on what matters most: growing your business.

Explore our maintenance plans now and discover how we can help you get a worry-free website.

Extra Tip: Defend Against Harmful Traffic Surges

While increased traffic often signals greater interest in your offerings, be aware that not all spikes are beneficial.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a harmful surge where hackers overwhelm your site with bogus requests, intending to crash it. Such attacks employ numerous bots to flood your website with traffic.

This can result in considerable financial losses, reputational damage, and dissatisfied customers. Therefore, safeguard your website from these attacks proactively.

Since these harmful requests are undesirable, you should block them before they impact your site. Employing a website application firewall offers the most effective method for filtering suspicious traffic.

At CanadaCreate, we know the value of a website firewall. We previously used Sucuri and successfully blocked 450,000 WordPress attacks in a three-month period. While we now use Cloudflare, both offer outstanding website security.

So, don’t forget DDoS attacks while preparing your website for high-traffic events. They can be extremely harmful to your business, and a firewall is an important step in protecting your website.

Refer to our tutorial on how to stop and prevent a DDoS attack on WordPress for detailed steps.

Frequently Asked Questions About High Traffic Events

Preparing your WordPress site for high-traffic events can raise many questions, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. Here are the most common questions we get from business owners about handling traffic spikes and keeping their sites running smoothly during important events.

1. How much traffic can a standard WordPress site handle?

A typical shared hosting plan can usually handle around 1,000-2,000 visitors per day without issues. However, during traffic spikes, you might see problems with as few as 100-200 simultaneous visitors. The exact number depends on your hosting provider, site optimization, and the complexity of your pages. That’s why it’s important to upgrade your hosting and optimize your site before any major event.

2. How far in advance should I prepare my site for a high-traffic event?

We recommend starting your preparations at least 2-3 weeks before your event. This gives you enough time to make changes, test everything thoroughly, and make adjustments if needed. Last-minute preparations often lead to missed details that could cause problems during your event.

3. What’s the difference between a CDN and caching, and do I need both?

Caching stores copies of your pages to serve them faster, while a CDN (Content Delivery Network) serves your content from servers closer to your visitors. Both help reduce server load and improve speed, but they work differently. We recommend using both for maximum protection during high-traffic events.

4. How do I know if my site can handle the expected traffic?

The best way is to run load testing using tools like Load Impact or GTmetrix. These tools simulate multiple visitors accessing your site simultaneously and show you where it might break down. You can also monitor your current traffic patterns and multiply by your expected increase to estimate the load.

5. Should I notify my hosting provider about my upcoming event?

Absolutely! Most hosting providers appreciate advance notice about traffic spikes. They can sometimes provide temporary upgrades or monitor your site more closely during the event. Some providers even offer special event hosting packages for situations like this.

6. What should I do if my site crashes during the event despite preparation?

First, don’t panic. Contact your hosting provider immediately and have a backup plan ready. This might include temporarily redirecting traffic to a simple landing page or using a maintenance mode plugin. Having a communication plan for your audience (like social media updates) is also crucial to maintain trust during any downtime.

Expert Guides for Handling High Traffic in WordPress

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to prepare your WordPress site for a high-traffic event.

You may also want to see some other guides related to WordPress traffic:

• How Much Traffic Can WordPress Handle? (+ Expert Scaling Tips)
• How to Check Website Traffic for Any Site
• How to Stress Test a WordPress Website (Step by Step)
• How to Track Website Visitors to Your WordPress Site
• How to Determine the Ideal Size of a Web Server for Your Website
• When Do You Really Need Managed WordPress Hosting? Best Managed WordPress Hosting Compared

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