For most companies, high web traffic is a dream, but when it is too much, your website can crash. Then you are the victim of your own success and can lose a lot of money. So how to avoid a website crash due to high traffic? And why does too much traffic crash a website?
Why does too much traffic crash a website?
A website crash is frustrating, especially on events like Black Friday or when you create a successful viral campaign. But how does this happen?
The root problem is that the traffic level you get is too high for the website infrastructure capacity over a given time frame. It means that too many systems requests by a user visiting your website exceed the processing capacity of your site. When this happens, the website performance will slow down and, for some users or all, crash entirely.
Some requests are more demanding than others which is why it is important to understand not only the amount of traffic but also the patterns of requests. When you only see your capacity in terms of concurrent users on your website, it only indirectly signals the problem of the site infrastructure.
It is similar to a supermarket where many shoppers are in different market areas. Some are at the checkout counter, with only a few cashiers. But they are enough that the line keeps moving and shoppers are happy.
Imagine when everybody in the supermarket wants to go to the checkout counter simultaneously. The number of shoppers didn´t change. But the cashiers suddenly get overwhelmed, and the customers get frustrated.
This analogy shows that high online traffic puts pressure on weak links, which serve as limiting factors on the website’s capacity. When you get a high number of visitors in a short time frame to a specific product page, for example, your site will more likely crash. It is easier to handle more users that are spread out than when all visit the same link.
Your website has to handle many different requests like loading images and browser scrips, handling search functions, syncing customer information with databases, calculating and updating prices, and remaining stocks.
Each step a customer makes will add up to the site’s infrastructure, and eventually, your processing power is fully extended, and additional requests can not be handled.
The website visitors experience slowdowns, and it will eventually crash entirely and returns HTTP error pages. While a CDN will minimize the load on static pages, it will not always solve the problem. Master databases and payment gateways have limited scalability, which makes dynamic pages like checkouts extremely database intensive. So shoppers see your product but maybe are unable to pay.
What also can happen is that your inventory system has too many requests, and you accidentally oversell. Other third-party plugins like payment systems are weak links that will fall first and get out of your control.
This altogether will cause your entire website to crash.
What are the scenarios that high traffic can crash your website?
A crash of your website or app can happen due to the following high-traffic scenarios:
1. Unexpected traffic
When you are not prepared for the traffic you get due to viral Social Media posts, primetime features, or overly successful marketing campaigns where you get unexpected traffic rises.
2. Major sales events
Events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have specific dates, which is no surprise that the traffic level will be a lot higher than on a normal day. But even if you know the exact day, it isn´t easy to predict the time when your traffic will be the highest.
3. Product Launches and release collection
If you, for instance, launch a long-awaited product or make brand collaborations or offer a limited edition, it can lead to a big traffic increase. When there is a limited amount of product available for a short time, it can lead to intense traffic spikes that can´t predict.
These are the hardest scenario to deal with, especially if you release a new product where visitors before launch is on your website waiting. This can possibly crash your site before the sale even begins.
How to avoid a website crash due to high traffic?
While website crashes happen, some can be avoided. There are a few ways how you can minimize the risk of high online traffic leading to website failure.
1. Optimize performance
Too many database requests are one of the biggest problems that lead to website crashes. It is important that you identify heavy database requests and limit the number, complexity, and size of those requests. There are many different solutions you can use to optimize your website performance:
- Compressing images makes your website faster and is also important to rank higher in search engines. What also helps is to integrate Lazy Loading via Plugin or Code, so media will only be loaded when needed.
- Using lesser plugins when possible. Often a plugin runs in the background on sites where you don´t need it. To avoids this, you can filter your plugins with the help of Plugin Load Filter for WordPress. If you have another website builder, do your research or contact your provider if you can filter plugins. Also, make sure that the plugins you are using have good coding quality and are updated, as this also can lead to crashes and longer load times.
- Optimize your theme to make your website faster. You should choose a WordPress theme that is well coded and well structured, and overall user-friendly. After all, your theme will be the first users see when they visit your website.
- Install a caching Plugin it will store pre-built content for a short period so that repeated request doesn´t have to go through the whole page build process.
- Integrating a content distribution network (CDN) helps to load files and respond to browser requests faster. A CDN is especially useful for a global audience because the data comes from the nearest server location. It makes the website load faster can, reduce bandwidth costs, and improves your site security.
- Upgrade your Web Hosting service. If you get more views, you need more web space to handle the request, which you get when you change Web Hosting package or provider. A recommended managed hosting provider would be Cloudways, where you can choose between big cloud plans like google cloud and amazon web services you also get a Cloudways CDN included.
- Run a speed test to further optimize your website. You get a lot of insight on how you can improve your website performance do; you can use platforms like Google Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix.
2. Downgrade user experience
Identify processes on your website that aren´t critical for your site, and you can either remove them before you expect high traffic or scale them back. For instance, if you use an advanced live search function that is CPU-heavy, you change to a simpler search function to free up databases for important processes.
3. Run load tests
One of the best preparations you can do for web traffic peaks is to do a load test. You send an increasing level of traffic to your site, and this is under controlled conditions. This will help you to understand how your site will perform when a large number of real users visit your site. It gives you insights into what errors you need to fix to be better prepared for the big sale.
Ensure that every buying process is working before you do a load test. Contact your hosting provider before you run this test because many providers consider unauthorized load tests as a violation of the terms of service.
You can use an open-source tool like Gatling, where you test your Html code, or cloud-based, such as BlazeMeter.
4. Managing your traffic.
You can create a virtual waiting room or online queue so your website doesn´t crash. With an online queue, you can manage your traffic and prevent your website and third-party integration, like payment gateways, from getting out of your control.
It also helps if you give early access to email subscribers, as an example.
No matter your offer, it is better to prepare for high traffic than lose profit when your website crashes.
