How to Prepare for an increase in Web Traffic

Introduction

If your website is expecting significant growth in web traffic, you must have questions on how to optimize your website traffic to get optimal performance. The article includes answers to some of these questions.

I know you’ll contact your web hosting provider’s support team and let them understand that you’re expecting an increase in web traffic that needs an inspection.

Before that let’s understand the Do’s and don’t of the increase in Web Traffic

There are several effective strategies to boost your website traffic.

Do:

  • Create High-Quality Content: Creating high-quality content means a lot for gaining traffic on the website. Engaging content helps users to solve problems and this allows to gain traffic naturally on the website. It is suggested to focus on long–term content, evergreen topics, and relevant keywords.
  • Optimize for Search Engines (SEO): Prepare a list of relevant keywords that people will use to locate information like the best SSD web hosting provider in the USA. Use them properly throughout your content and website structure.
  • Embrace Social Media: Promote your content and engage it with your audience on social media platforms. Share valuable content, run contests, and participate in relevant online communities.
  • Build Backlinks: Get other high-authority websites to link back to yours. This increases your website’s credibility and improves search engine ranking. There are many ways to achieve backlinks, such as guest blogging and creating link-worthy content.
  • Utilize Email Marketing: Build an email list and send regular newsletters or updates to keep your audience engaged and informed about new content or offerings.

Don’t:

  • Stuff Keywords Unnaturally: Focus on creating valuable content, not keyword density. Keyword stuffing makes your content clunky and can hurt your SEO.
  • Neglect User Experience (UX): Make sure your website is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and loads quickly. A bad user experience will drive visitors away.
  • Ignore Mobile Optimization: A significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices. So, it’s necessary to make it responsive and develop a seamless experience on all devices.
  • Buy Low-Quality Traffic: Focusing on short-term gains through buying traffic from unreliable sources can hurt your website’s reputation and won’t convert into loyal visitors.
  • Neglect Analytics: Track your website traffic using analytics tools to understand what’s working and what’s not. Go through this data to refine your strategies for continuous improvement.

By following these Do’s and Don’ts, you can develop a sustainable strategy to attract more visitors to your website and achieve your online goals.

Steps to manage the traffic on the website:

Enable statistics

Don’t forget to turn on the website statistics to allow you to view and monitor changes to your website’s traffic.

Update your software

Keep your software updated. For example, a WordPress user will keep an eye on updating the WordPress version, Plugin versions, and Theme version.

Enable caching

If your website consists of dynamic content or is database-driven (i.e., WordPress, Joomla, ZenCart, and so on), you may want to add some form of “caching” add-on. Check the particular application’s support page for more details and suggestions.

Optimize Databases

You can monitor database size via phpMyAdmin or SSH. On the left side > Databases list.

  1. Select your database from the list > center panel > you’ll see the list of tables.
  2. Display the Overhead column to the right.

If you come across any numerical values, those tables can be optimized. In the example above, only those tables are selected.

You can tab on the Check All link on the bottom left, which selects all tables.

  1. At the bottom of your table list, tab on With Selected dropdown menu.
  2. From the dropdown menu, tab on the Optimize table.

However, optimization may take time based on its size. Once it is done, the page displays the query that was run along with a success message > “Table does not support optimize, doing recreate + analyze instead” message as it is just informational.

Remove unused software

Even if the plugin or theme is not active, it can still lead to a security risk. If you’re not using a theme or plugin, make sure to delete it from your web server. Plugins and themes are located in the following directory. Don’t overlook changing the username to your Shell user.

/home/username/example.com/wp-content/

In the Wp-content folder > move to /plugins or /themes directory and delete anyone that is not in use. A similar applies to extra installs of WordPress.

Last, if you are not using any other applications such as Joomla, Drupal or Moodle then remove them for easy going of the website.

Prevent Spam

If you have kept a common option for users to receive comments then make sure you’re using a plugin to prevent spam comments.  For example, WordPress’s Akismet is perfect to use it.

Consider safety contact forms

Design your Contact Us form scripts in such a way as to avoid vulnerability issues.

Optimize media files

You want to replace large graphics, files, movies, and so on with less-resolution versions.

Throttle or disable your site

Due to some reason your increased traffic causes problems to the server, it’s necessary to support to “throttle” your site (restricting the number of simultaneous visitors or maximum throughput, or the like) or possibly even disable it.

If it is required to throttle your website for some reason, the support team will reach out to the owner of the account with the details. If there is a problem with your website that you can sort, it’s mandatory to inform support with details of what you did to fix the problem. Then, support will remove the throttle in place.

Upgrade plan

Upgrading your plan is the best option to manage the traffic. Contact your web hosting provider and ask for suggestions per your decided traffic.

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