What happens when too many people are on a website?
There happens to be a number of visitors entering into a website from various sources. However, not all traffic entering the website is the impact of the work done on the website. The main goal of having a website is to gain traffic which could better lead to conversions. The traffic can be from search engines, website development, or any marketing efforts.
When there is high traffic to the website, the server may get overloaded with too many data and requests which may affect the website's performance and also result in slow website loading. The website's bandwidth may be exceeded and entering the website becomes difficult. When too many users visits a website, it may get stuck and result in a poor user experience as the website will be slow loading and take time to access any content in the website.
How To Manage Website Traffic?
A website that receive a lot of traffic is challenging to maintain its performance. The website could get stuck by too much traffic from different IP addresses reaching it. At times there can be a sudden increase in the website traffic. There will be some systems developed with less server size and low capacity to handle the traffic. In such cases, a sudden increase in traffic will be harder to manage for the website owners. You have to implement certain strategies for handling traffic issues inorder to avoid the situation of users experiencing slow loading times, broken links, or server errors.
- Regular Monitoring of website metrics
- Optimize content
- Using content delivery network
- Scale server resources
- Caching and database optimization
You have to regularly monitor the key metrics leading to high traffic such as page load time, server response time, and error rate. You can find any errors or irregularities in the performance of the website with these metrics. There are various tools like Google Analytics and Pingdom available to monitor and receive alerts if anything goes wrong.
Another way to manage high traffic entering the site and scalability issues is by optimizing the content on the website. The size and number of files like images, videos, scripts, and stylesheets that the website loads are to be compressed using various methods such as compression, minification, caching, and lazy loading. These help in optimizing the website thereby reducing the bandwidth and server resources that take more time to load and enhances user experience.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that are interconnected to help in distributing content across different servers. CDN reduces the distance between the user and the nearest server and speeds up webpage load times for data-heavy applications. You can reduce the load on the server and improve the website performance and security with the help of CDN. Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or Akamai are some services available to activate CDN for your website.
Your server can be scaled without affecting its performance or availability to manage the huge traffic on the website. Vertical scaling and horizontal scaling are used to scale server resources. More servers are added to the infrastructure like cloud services in horizontal scaling. AWS, Google Cloud, or DigitalOcean are some major tools to scale the server resources.
Caching means storing copies of files in a temporary storage location that are accessed frequently. The location or the cache can be a browser, server, or a CDN. Caching helps in improving response time and performance and reduces the number of requests sent to the server or database. Caching can be implemented to the website using various tools like Redis, Memcached, etc.
Database optimization is another way to handle traffic issues. It is done by using indexes, and partitions to improve the structure, design, and performance of the database. It reduces the size of the database thereby increasing the speed of requests made. MySQL is used to optimize the database.
