19 Expert Tips for WordPress Development Site Traffic Surge

Magicminds

Magicminds Team

Posted On: 22 Jan 2024

9 min reads

Tips for Scaling Your WordPress Development Website to Generate High Traffic

Wondering how you scale a WordPress website for higher traffic? Let’s decipher the most impactful ways to scale your WordPress-powered site for higher traffic.

Oh, by the way, you must get help from dedicated developers for WordPress scaling.

#1 Prefer a Reliable Hosting Provider

We can’t overstate the importance of having a reliable WordPress hosting provider. Being the backbone of your WordPress site, a trustworthy hosting domain determines whether the site can generate improved and meaningful traffic or not.

We’ve jotted down a few crucial aspects here that you must consider while selecting a hosting provider.

Strong security
Storage space and bandwidth
Better uptime rates, and
Complete support.

Moreover, you must concentrate on these features for improved traffic:

Enough PHP workers to maintain traffic spikes
Maintain backup regularly at least 6-7 times a day, ideally hourly
Extensive RAM must be allocated to the site for handling crucial memory-hungry processes that take place in the background.

#2 Select a Suitable Hosting Plan

Once you decide on the hosting provider, you must proceed with the hosting plan. Now, you can take a vertical scaling plan that offers tiered plans and more resources that users can easily opt for or upgrade for.

Otherwise, you can prefer a horizontal scaling plan that is best suited for handling higher traffic, separating the server into multiple layers, including a proxy layer, front-end server, image layer, database layer, and more. Choose any hosting plan as per your requirements.

#3 Have Balanced Scalability

When it comes to maintaining a balanced WordPress scalability, you must balance between vertical and horizontal scaling. Having said that, although both of these methods have pros and cons, opting for both of them together is an ideal choice for handling increased traffic.

Moreover, vertical scaling is simpler to implement, and horizontal scaling brings more flexibility while handling suddenly increased traffic. Many users prefer vertical scaling due to non-network overhead, adding processes between servers while interacting with each other.

#4 Have a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Getting huge web traffic for your WordPress website? That’s awesome. However, it might add strain on the server while slowing the page loading time.

Don’t worry! CDN is at your rescue mission. A CDN stores static files, including image copies, in multiple servers globally. This results in smooth and easy local access to the site’s content, avoiding downloading the server every time.

Additionally, CDN decreases your server and visitor’s browser’s distance, offering security, blazing speed, and resilience. This removes long delays while improving the overall user experience. This is particularly useful in handling extensive traffic due to any event or product launch time.

Besides, an ideal hosting provider ensures having CDN in the hosting plan as it lowers the page loading time by almost 43.2%, which is surprising, right?

#5 Upgrade to the Latest PHP Version

Being the server-side coding language, PHP empowers the WordPress content management system while ensuring new PHP versions are released without any failure. Utilizing the latest PHP version means you’re protected from any vulnerabilities while quickening and smoothening the website’s running process.

Plus, the added advanced features are enough to enhance the site’s functionalities. However for coding and troubleshooting, get help from a dedicated WordPress developer who can easily check the PHP version through these following steps:

Go to the site’s wp-admin
Navigate to Tools > PHP Engine > Modify
Choose the new PHP version.

#6 Opt for a Lightweight Theme

If you’re wondering how to scale WordPress, going for a lightweight theme is your answer that streamlines the WordPress theme development process. A lightweight yet intuitive theme is your gateway to a faster and smoother website with enhanced user experience, ensuring visitors can easily navigate to the site and view their required information.

Till now, you must have understood that poor coding or unnecessary features can increase their size and, thus, weigh down your WordPress website while restricting its web traffic handling capabilities.

Therefore, we’re asking you to go for a clear and concise theme code or prefer a theme that aligns with your site’s pages. This will not only optimize the site’s performance but also will help maintain advanced functionalities, avoiding being too cost-consuming.

#7 Use Solid State Drives (SDDs)

Solid state drives (SDDs) are typically far more reliable, secure, and faster than HDD or hard disk drives. Take, for example, the website as the library and the hosting provider as the librarian. So, the more quickly and efficiently the librarian finds the book and brings it back to the borrower, the more satisfaction it provides.

Similarly, just like an organized and systematic library can cater to its visitors better, the hosting provider that prefers SDDs over HDDs can ensure improved and better visitor satisfaction. Let’s take a look at the benefits of using SDDs:

SDDs reduce the chances of breaking down and data loss.
SDDs can efficiently read and write data quicker than HDDs.
They are more eco-friendly due to their less power and heat generation features.
SDDs can quickly and smartly manage requests, making them efficient in handling high traffic.

#8 Optimize the Code and Images

You must practice using optimized code and images for WordPress scaling. For coding optimization, ensure that your code is error-free and unused code or feature-free. This improves loading time while using optimal code. Besides, updating from plugins and themes to everything is always a great choice for optimized code, ensuring your site’s security.

Additionally, unused and huge-size images or videos can take more than enough server space and weigh down the site significantly. For optimized images, use optimization tools and plugins that can easily compress or reduce image file size without compromising the image quality, enabling you to ensure faster page loading time.

Now, for example, you can prefer Imagify, which compresses images automatically once they are uploaded to the site, saving you time and providing optimized images for the site while maintaining quality.

#9 Lazy Loading

Lazy loading ensures you avoid any delay due to the image loading process. In fact, images can weigh down the site by 34%, and that’s why using lazy loading is important. This makes your website load faster and smoother than ever while lowering hosting costs and enhancing user experience.

#10 Optimize Database

We recommend you not to overcrowd your WordPress database that stores site data, such as themes, posts, and plugins. If you’ve been using the WordPress site for quite a while, chances are there that the database is piled up with spam, deleted comments, and post revisions. Further, a bloated database takes time to load, thus affecting the site’s performance.

Removing unnecessary data means you will optimize an efficient site while getting rid of the expired food items from the pantry. Fortunately, if you install WP Sweep or WP-Optimize plugins, clearing out unused data from the database is never a daunting task. Utilizing these two plugins makes your site optimized and runs super smoothly while enhancing overall performance.

#11 Have Caching

For WordPress scaling, caching reducing HTTP requests is essential, and caching does the same in minimizing the HTTP numbers between the browser and server.

Utilizing caching plugins, you can create a static copy of the web page and display it to future users, eliminating the need to bring all the live file versions. This is significantly impactful in handling dynamic content while increasing page loading time 5x than previously.

#12 Enhance Security to Safeguard WordPress

Cyber vulnerabilities can wreak havoc on your WordPress website, leading you to lose visitors and revenue. So, we can’t overstate how important the security of your site is.

For maintaining WordPress security, opt for a hosting provider that comes with robust and unshakable security measurements in the plan. Your hosting provider must include DDoS protection, malware detection and removal, hardware firewalls, etc, to safeguard WordPress.

Furthermore, having security plugins, such as JetPack and Sucuri, is important for adding a double layer of site protection while preventing the site from any vulnerabilities, malicious attacks, etc.

#13 Always Have a Backup Ready

Never forget to back up your website to save it from any vulnerabilities, malicious attacks, data breaches, and more. For backing up, you can copy and save files and the site’s data in a secure place from where you can restore them easily.

Regular backup can save you from the hassle and tension of data loss and the website rebuild process in case of catastrophe while having peace of mind that your site’s data is secured.

#14 Opt for Safe Payment Gateways

We can’t stress enough the fact that for eCommerce websites, more traffic means more revenue. However, this can only happen if you provide your visitors with simple and effective checkout options alongside secure payment gateways.

Ensure to have reliable and trustworthy WordPress payment plugins, including Amazon Pay, Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, Square, etc., for securing and private payment process, ensuring customers are having a good experience while going through the checkout.

#15 Fix the Broken Links

Broken links are nothing but URLs that display an error message due to server issues, incorrect addresses, and back-end misconfigurations that hamper your user experience and crawlers to index the site. Certainly, you can’t afford your visitors to face such issues. Therefore, you must identify and fix the broken links on the spot.

Additionally, prefer to use a robust WordPress plugin, such as Broken Link Checker to quickly find and fix the error.

#16 Scalable Site Integrations

Your WordPress scaling is never the end of the task. You must check whether your preferred third-party integrations are equally scalable or not. Identify if your chosen platform can manage heavy traffic through the API integration. You must monitor the external integrations for any bottlenecks.

Imagine you’re opting for a popular email marketing platform, such as SendGrid, to ensure their API can tackle the huge amount of emails you’ll be sending out. However, if you’re confused about that, prefer to hire a dedicated WordPress developer for scalable and optimized third-party integrations.

#17 Test the Website

Don’t forget to test your site regularly to find performance bottlenecks and get insights for more site optimization. You should opt for robust testing tools that easily meet web essentials, including CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), and FID ( First Input Delay). Prefer to use these tools:

PageSpeed Insights: This Google free tool can analyze the content of the web page and provide suggestions for code minimizing image optimization and browser caching.
Pingdom: Ensures real-time insights into page speed, uptime, and downtime.
GT Metrix: It analyzes the content of web pages and provides suggestions for content optimization.

#18 Prefer Pagination for Comments and Pages

Pagination is a useful method to divide the site’s content into crisp and smaller chunks for more optimized site performance. Utilizing pagination means you unlock the door for:

Improved users’ experience as they could easily find what they were opting for.
It ensures more internal linking to structure the content properly and enhances your site’s SEO, thus increasing site discoverability.
As you break down the content into manageable chunks, you can quicken page loading time.

#19 Tracking and Reporting Site Automation

Analyzing and tracking your site’s performance is essential to generate traffic for the WordPress website. For that, we would recommend you automate the tracking functionality, providing better service and eliminating the need to monitor the site 24*7. You can prefer using the below-mentioned tools for that:

Google Analytics: Enables you to track visitor’s behaviors, searched items, locations, and activities.
Site 24*7: Easily tracks the web server, site, and network performance while streamlining the spiked traffic management.
Pingdom: Provides real-time monitoring while giving an alert through email and push notifications to the site owner if any issue happens.

Popular Website Examples Powered by WordPress Development

Simplifying the website-building process alongside specific modifications has already made WordPress a standard. Let’s see who prefers WordPress for building their websites.

The White House

This is the official website of the White House, which is owned by the US government. This site gets over 14 million visitors every month, making it so popular that even Wikipedia has listed it.

The Obama Foundation

This is one of the best non-governmental websites for supporting civil society and activities. If you look at the statistics, almost 200,000/month new visitors browse through this site. Amazing, right?

Vogue

Hats off to Vogue, as the statistics are impressive, with almost 10.6 million visitors to the site who continue to stay at the 6 pages of the site for 2 minutes on average.

Sony Music

Powered by WordPress, Sony Music is among the top 10 music hubs for music lovers, working like a heaven on earth for them. Sony Music gathers around local as well as international artists in one-stop destination, attracting over 33 million listeners.

Microsoft News

Microsoft News is one of the leading sites that covers news on technology and Microsoft. Using WordPress this site is gaining popularity with over 2 million visitors every month who browse through the pages almost for 2 minutes.

TED Blog

Does this site even need any introduction? Popular public lectures across various aspects are discussed and uploaded in a particular format here. It’s no surprise over 11 million visitors worldwide spend time here every month due to its diverse lectures that catch their attention.

The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is as colorful as Disney’s movies. Think about all those beautifully presented movies. Uff, sounds exist, right? Per month, 2 million users visit this informative, attractive, and intuitive site. See visual effect rules here!

Now, It’s Over to You!

If you’re unsure about how to increase traffic on WordPress, let us tell you how contacting a WordPress website development service provider like Magicminds can be a game-changer for you. Magicminds is an expert in WordPress scaling to generate more traffic and thus revenue and recognition for you. We’ll ensure you end-to-end security while monitoring your site to avoid any bottlenecks and increase traffic. Sounds perfect, right? So, don’t hesitate to contact us and hire a WordPress specialist to get a scaled WordPress website today!