When you are running a high-traffic website, it is essential to maintain an optimization that allows traffic to move smoothly. Thousands of visitors will see your site daily, and it must be able to support those numbers. Every person that is visiting your website and everyone online is in a hurry. They are expecting their content to load quickly and perform smoothly. If a page takes longer than three seconds to load, around 50 percent of viewers leave the site. When your website’s loading slows down during high traffic, your website’s visitors have dropped up to three quarters. Sales are also dramatically affected when load times struggle. Before any of your customers purchase anything, they are already leaving your page.
Optimize Your Site for High Traffic
Your users are expecting fast load times, and with every delay, you are losing customers and revenue. The approach you take to your high-traffic website needs to be smart to ensure you are running at peak performance. Here are a few vital tips when it comes to high-traffic websites:
1. Upgrade Your Hosting
The same hosting plan that your business was using as a startup cannot handle new traffic. Their bandwidth is lacking, and if you are using too much of the server, the host can penalize your site.
Two options that are available to you are Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and a dedicated server hosting plan. High-traffic websites need to be able to handle visitors by either dividing a single server into multiple virtual environments or customizing your hosting environment.
2. Improve Page Speed
Depending on the design of your website, it can be slowing download times and driving users off-site. Here are some ways that you can simplify your site’s design:
• Clean up any scripts that run on the page
• Optimize any media that is uploaded
• Make image dimensions static
• Load your media one by one and not all at once
• Reduce any plugin uses
• Do not use redirects if possible
• Fix broken links that give 404 errors
While updating the design of your high-traffic website, it is vital to keep your mobile users in mind. If they can’t access the page, then you are losing more customers.
3. Deliver Content Where It Should Be
The users that are visiting your website could be spread across the globe depending on your audience. By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), your high-traffic website can optimize any content for any visitors. A CDN is a collection of servers that can be spread around the world which cuts back on latency for your users. To speed up the delivery, you can compress the files your site is sending to its visitors.
4. Leverage Browser Caching
Cutting down requests between the browsers accessing your site and your servers will assist in the loading speed of your pages. When visitors view your webpage, their browsers are storing components of your page which include the content and scripting. Caching this information will improve the efficiency of your high-traffic website.
5. Boost Your Security
The internet is full of possible data breaches and attacks that can decimate your webpage. Keeping your website’s security up-to-date is extremely important. Installing reliable security software and changing your default CMS settings will cut back on the risk of automated attacks.
High-Traffic Sites with CloudMellow
CloudMellow can provide you with a safe and optimized, high-traffic website. Our team is dedicated to creating webpages that run smoothly and provide enhanced user experience. Contact us today to create a truly beautiful and optimized website for your business.