Prepping Your Website For High Traffic

When you’re growing a successful website of any kind (e-commerce, blog, etc…) you want to be prepared for a surge in traffic. This might occur with a big sale, media exposure, or a highly anticipated announcement. Are you ready for a high-traffic event or will your servers crash as soon as users visit? Here’s what managed IT services  can do to help you ready to welcome a new flow of visitors.

Triple-Check For Vulnerabilities

Nobody is immune to cyber crime. Damage from cyber crime is projected to reach $6 trillion each year by 2021, and that’s not just on high-traffic and big-money sites. You need to be sure that any vulnerabilities are patched as part of security management to protect yourself and your site visitors — especially if you handle their personal information like credit card numbers.

Look For Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks are areas of your site where traffic can really get slowed down. Common bottlenecks include long running queries, pieces that aren’t scaling, and underutilization of the browser’s cache. Setting up a waterfall chart to track any potential bottlenecks before, during, and after the high-traffic event can help immensely.

Lots of Images? High Quality and Compression Are Key

If your site has a lot of images and a lot of visitors attempting to view those images, your load time can drag and visitors will bounce quickly. Make sure your images are as good a combination of high quality and compressed as you can get to keep things efficient.

Set Up A CDN

A content delivery network, or CDN, creates faster load times by moving a bunch of static content on your website to off-site servers worldwide, and ideally closer to your customers.

Vary Your Capacity Accordingly

With higher traffic, you should aim for a higher capacity and scaled-up resources. Make sure everything is scaled back accordingly once the high-traffic event has ended. You don’t need to be going full steam ahead all the time.

It’s a lot, right? It’s hard work being successful! Luckily, that’s what managed IT services are for. If you need a hand optimizing your site for an upcoming surge in traffic, call us at RDE Tech to see how we can help.

 

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