A website with thousand of views per day is the dream of every business owner.

A surge in website traffic it’s generally a good news because it will likely generate more leads and may eventually convert them into sales. However, sometimes a sudden traffic pick can cause your website to fail due to the large amount of requests. Imagine you’re promoting your product, you’ve spent lot of time and energy working on it, sent a Mailchimp newsletter to thousand contacts: the time you’ve spent working on the website should finally pay you off, but instead, your website suddenly crashes forcing the visitors to leave without even completing the purchase. A real fiasco! This could be avoided with a bit of planning and prior knowledge.

Let’s see the most common reasons for which a website could crash:

• Website too large that contains lot of code, plugins, video images, that slow down the pages and the server load;
• An inefficient code with too many requests that block the server;
• Poorly written code, which could refer to inefficient code, memory leaks, or synchronisation issues;
• A bad web host choice or bad hosting configuration that can't handle high traffic spikes.

Here’s some tips that will help you make your website handle any amount of traffic:

• Install server-side caching: many web development platforms such as WordPress build or change content on-the-fly. This means that the server gets loaded of work every time a page is requested. Caching your website will help you with that: it stores the pre-built page content for a short period of time so that repeated requests for the page don’t need to go through the whole page build process. There are tons of cache plugins out there;
• Get a better server: the host you choose should be able to meet your immediate needs. Shared hosting is fine for small/medium traffic sites. Look for a VPN (Virtual Private Server), also known as VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server). This solution offers all of the power you need for optimal performance, regardless of traffic volume. You’ll have both stability and reliability over your website. Good, professional website hosting can be achieved at a reasonable price;
• Make sure your content is rendered quickly: this is important regardless of the volume of traffic you get. Search engines and real visitors prefer websites that load quickly, so make sure you are not serving huge images. It sounds simpler saying it than doing it, as it can be time consuming to implement.
• Use a Content Delivery Network: if your website has lots of static resources then try using a CDN to distribute the files to various servers around the globe. This will ensure that your files are served from the closest point to your visitors location and will remove the need for your server to do the work.
• Try compressing your web page content: deliver your web pages as compressed (zipped) files and leave the unzipped to the visitor’s browser. This could really reduce the load on your sire and deliver your content quicker.
• If you have a database-driven website such as WordPress, make sure that the number of concurrent database connections is high enough to cope with your expected traffic. Every time someone visits a website on one of these systems it results in database calls. Usually, there are limited number of concurrent connections allowed. If this is exceeded the visitor will get a rather brief and unfriendly “Too many database connections” message. Increase the setting for the number of concurrent database connections as much as you can.

Of course, depending on your time and budget, these steps are good practice recommendations for any website - even if you get 100 visitors a day, isn’t it best to deliver the pages they want as fast as possible?

Caring about your website optimisation is good for SEO purposes too. In fact, search engines might rank you higher too. Will your business’s website be prepared when users begin to flood in? Ensure that your website can stand up to the high traffic spikes and prepare for success.