Many an online shop owner has had their website go down at the crucial moment. It may not have stopped working altogether, but “just” been extremely unresponsive when a large number of people visited it at the same time. Instead of the successful online sales that should have resulted from the increased traffic, there was only increased ill-will and, most likely, unused promotional and advertising resources.

Imagine that you want to present your new product to the market and you are going to sell it through an online shop. You inform all your loyal customers about this in your newsletter and offer them a coupon for an additional discount. At the same time, you launch the Facebook and Instagram advertising campaign you’ve been preparing for. Expecting a huge number of visitors at once, you already have the idea of making a lot of money in your mind, but the result is the opposite. Your online shop becomes extremely slow and unresponsive, and you get a notification about your hosting package being overdrawn.

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• Why can I experience problems with increased traffic?
• Why is smooth operation so important?
• What can be done to prevent problems?
  • Optimising your website for fast performance
  • Upgrading your web hosting package
• TABLE: Measures to keep your website running smoothly

Why can I experience problems with increased traffic?

Web hosting is a service where multiple clients are hosted on a single server. To ensure that excessive load on one website does not affect the performance of the website of another subscriber, the hosting packages are systemically separated from each other. Thus, each package has its own specific server resources, such as processing power (CPU), physical memory size (pMEM), number of concurrent processes (EP) and maximum disk bandwidth (I/O).

If the website is not experiencing problems (e.g. due to automatic updates or a bug in the software code), it will run smoothly with normal traffic. However, when there is a significant increase in traffic, if the website is not properly optimised or the hosting package is not powerful enough, the server resources will become scarce. The website becomes slow and unresponsive and may even become inaccessible.

A situation where server resources are overstretched most often occurs during a major marketing campaign. This usually involves paid advertising (e.g. on the Facebook platform) or a newsletter sent to thousands or even tens of thousands of email addresses. In both cases, the website is accessed by a huge number of visitors in a very short period of time, which can lead to a 50x increase in the load on the hosting package. This is the reason why such a marketing campaign needs to be properly prepared.

Why is smooth operation so important?

A fast and smooth website is essential as it leads to a quality user experience (UX) and more visitors. If a website is unresponsive, many people change their mind and leave the website when it loads. This is especially pronounced for mobile users who simply no longer have the patience to wait (too) long.

Online shop owners are most aware of the problems associated with slow loading and unresponsiveness, as every extra second of waiting has extremely negative consequences. Not only do fewer visitors visit a slow online shop, but the percentage of products viewed and orders placed is also reduced. For a business that relies heavily on online sales, this can be devastating.

Read more: Why do slower online stores sell less?

What can be done to avoid problems?

To ensure that your website performs optimally when traffic increases, two criteria must be met:

• the website is optimised for fast performance,
• the web hosting provides sufficient server resources.

Optimising your website for fast performance

Optimising a website for speed is a complex process with many elements:

• optimising the software code,
• setting up effective caching,
• compression of images and other media content,
• use of modern formats (e.g. WebP, AVIF),
• compressing and combining CSS and JavaScript files,
• reducing HTTP requests,
• reducing the amount of data that is downloaded when a page is visited,
• optimisation of the website architecture (e.g. amount of plugins),
• optimising the database,
• use of a newer version of PHP,
• fixing potential errors (e.g. 404 errors),
• use of CDN.

Read also: How to speed up a WordPress website?

In most cases, the measures achieved by optimising a website for fast performance are sufficient to keep the website running smoothly – even with increased traffic during a marketing campaign. It is especially effective caching that makes a huge difference, as the elements of the website are not loaded over and over again for each individual visitor, but are stored in the cache. This makes them available much more quickly and uses significantly less server resources.

Upgrading your web hosting package

Have you done a thorough speed optimisation of your website, but it still remains unresponsive when you get a large influx of visitors? Do you get a notification when you visit your website that you have reached the limit of your server resources? In this case, you will most likely need to upgrade your web hosting package or switch to another environment, such as Turbo Hosting or a VPS server.

EXAMPLE: If you have an Orange hosting package with us and you have a webshop on which you are running, you simply cannot expect it to run smoothly when you have a big marketing campaign. The Green package alone, which follows the Orange package in terms of performance, has 2x more processing power and physical memory, and offers 10x more disk bandwidth. While the even more powerful Turbo package (T1) provides 8x more processing power than the Orange package, 12x more physical memory, almost 7x more concurrent processes and 50x more disk bandwidth.

At NEOSERV, we have diversified our offerings to ensure that we can provide each customer with the type or hosting package that suits their needs. We advise you to choose:

• Web hosting (Blue or Red package) for smaller online shops,
• Turbo hosting for medium and large webshops,
• VPS hosting for webshops that require more flexibility.

TABLE: Measures to keep your website running smoothly

To help you implement measures to keep your website running smoothly during increased traffic faster, more efficiently and more easily, use the table below.

Have you ticked all the boxes for all the actions listed in the table? Then we can only wish you a successful campaign!