16 Tips on Scaling a WordPress for High Traffic Websites

WordPress is the most preferred CMS, but that doesn’t mean it is scalable or ready to handle a sudden surge in traffic and maintain 100% uptime. To scale a WordPress website for high traffic requires configuration and optimization across the CMS. Possible reasons for increased traffic on WordPress websites include viral content, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, Ad campaigns, eLearning website, Contest/Giveaways, or Discount Deals. If you fail in scaling a WordPress for high traffic, it could turn your website’s success into failure.

You need to test your website to check its performance under high pressure, identify problem areas causing low speed and opt for a reliable host provider. WordPress themes and plugins should properly in a moderate amount of traffic strain. However, sudden traffic spikes can push server resources to their breaking points. You should avoid the problem of overloaded servers with resources.

Bottlenecking Traffic

The best way for scaling a WordPress website is to avoid ‘bottlenecks’ that cause a sudden surge in traffic. It mainly occurs as a result of overloading server resources. When scaling WordPress website for heavy traffic, make sure that request sent to your WordPress website requires the use of minimal resources and efforts to render and serve. For this, a good level of caching is required.

It is one of the simple ways to load your page faster and easily create a WordPress website in a fast way. Another reason for bottlenecks can be your database. A tool called HyperDB is used to spread web traffic across different databases and servers. However, the drawback is that this tool has some limitations. The best way to go is to switch to a better plan from WordPress managed host.

Tips Scaling WordPress Sites When Traffic Soars

1. Opt for a Lightweight WordPress Theme
2. Opt for the Hosting which offer Vertical & Horizonal Scalability Plan
3. Make Settings in MySQL/MariaDB
4. Add CDN to the Server
5. Put Cache & Optimization Plugin to Use
6. Use Security Plugin to Safeguard Website
7. Use Backup Plugin to Secure Data
8. Optimize Database
9. Maintain a Healthy Limit on MySQL
10. Check and Fix Broken Links
11. Host Important Media Only
12. Prefer Lazy Loading
13. Use Optimized Images
14. Opt for SSD Drives
15. Automate Scanning and Reporting
16. Use a Safe, Secure & Reliable Payment Gateway

1. Opt for a Lightweight WordPress Theme

If the WordPress theme you are using for your website is poorly coded or piled up with unnecessary features and code, it can harm your website. It might weigh down your website and limits its ability to handle a large amount of web traffic. Therefore, you should clean up the theme code or use a theme that addresses your page speed and scalability requirements. 7 Fastest WordPress Themes: Hello Elementor, Astra, GeneratePress, Neve, OceanWP, Customify, Twenty Twenty

>> Related read Best Fastest WordPress Themes For 2023

2. Opt for the Best Hosting Provider

There are different types of web hosting services offered in the market: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, & Managed VPS hosting. Opt for the right hosting plan that meets must-have requirements like PHP version 7.2 or greater, HTTPS support, MySQL version 5.6 or greater MariaDB version 10.0 or greater.

When to opt for Vertical Scaling Hosting

Vertical scaling refers to hosting providers which offer tiered plans that can be upgraded easily as and when required. It might happen that sometimes your WordPress website needs more resources to handle website traffic. CPU and RAM are two important hardware resources that play a crucial role in handling traffic spikes. If you feel that storage, bandwidth and visitor quantity limit your website from controlling the traffic, you should explore other hosting plan options.

If your website attracts a lot of traffic, it requires more access to server resources; therefore, VPS hosting or a dedicated server will help you achieve this. You can get a reputed hosting like Cloudways that provides a vertical scaling feature where the plan or server size can be easily scaled with a single button click. This helps in handling and managing millions of traffic numbers on your website.

When to opt for Horizontal Scaling Hosting

Once your WordPress website traffic starts booming, you will notice that vertical scaling via hosting plans is not enough, especially if all of a sudden your website traffic is high and then the next day it gets in control. In this scenario, you should go for a hosting plan with horizontal scaling. 

Horizontal scaling separates your website into various layers. By using service-oriented architecture, you can create this. By separating the front-end server, database server, proxy layer and image layer, you can quickly scale resources for important backend parts which need it.

>> 5 Best WordPress Hosting: WP Engine, SiteGround, Bluehost, Hostinger, Kinsta

3. Make Settings in MySQL/MariaDB

You should make adjustments to MySQL and MariaDB settings to ease the tension caused by a high amount of traffic and database requests that come from it. MySQL indexing and query caching are ideal for the same. Download HyperDB plugin from WordPress, which will prove helpful in configuring the database and optimizing it for top performance.

4. Add CDN to the Server

CDN technology when you want a blazing speed for your WordPress website. If website traffic is coming from all over the globe, it becomes necessary to have a CDN. It proves helpful in decreasing the distance between your visitor’s browser and your server. The best thing about CDN is that it offers a range of features like speed, security and resilience. As per the information shared on kinsta.com, they were able to decrease page loading time by about 43.2% which is really surprising!

>> Top 5 WordPress CDN services: Cloudflare, Bunny.net, Sucuri, KeyCDN, StackPath

5. Put Cache & Optimization Plugin to Use

Caching content helps in reducing the number of HTTP requests between browsers and servers. To scale WordPress website, it becomes necessary to minimize HTTP requests. Using caching plugins, you can create copies of your web pages and show them to all future users without fetching live versions of all the files. With this plugin, you can increase the page loading time up to 5 times faster. Make sure that your caching plugin offers CDN integration too.

There are specific technical ways for reducing these requests, while other methods are available in the form of best cache plugins for WordPress like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

The main reason to reduce requests is to minimize and host only essential information you need on your WordPress website. An add-on for caching and optimization of files is Hummingbird which helps you serve the purpose.

6. Use Security Plugin to Safeguard Website

It is imperative to add a security layer to your WordPress website pages to help scale WordPress for high traffic websites. Using a reliable best security plugins, you can safeguard your website and prevent threats like hacking, spam, malware, SQL injections, etc.

Some of the best WordPress security plugins like Wordfence, Sucuri Security, Defender etc., help your web page handle security threats safely. If you have the budget, then you can choose premium security plugins that comprise advanced security features.

7. Use Backup Plugin to Secure Data

By using a backup plugin, you can scale WordPress for heavy traffic websites in an easy way. No matter how many careful steps you take to keep your WordPress website safe and secure, there can still be several possibilities that can crash down your website. If such a situation happens, you should find ways to address this problem and restore it quickly. Therefore, it is essential to use a backup plugin to scale your WordPress website.

>> 6 Best WordPress Backup Plugins: UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, BlogVault, Jetpack, Duplicator, WP Time Capsule 

8. Optimize Database

The content present on your WordPress website is stored in a database. Therefore, it is vital to make sure that your database is configured correctly and optimized. It will minimize the chances of the weak link in your scalability chain that relates to your database.

Keep focusing on hardware and software by using a databases like MariaDB or MySQL by properly sizing and configuring it.

9. Maintain a Healthy Limit on MySQL

You can share a lot of data in MySQL, but you should be careful about it, as when you overextend its limits, it can compromise your website speed. It is suggested to put a specific cap on auto-loading queries. The good maximum limit is 200 to work with. Be mindful of your Options table as each column has a capacity of 4GB, but a word of caution would be to hit the same limit repeatedly can also degrade your website performance.

10. Check and Fix Broken Links

If present in your WordPress website, broken links can cause significant damage to user experience and SEO. If your website receives enormous traffic, you cannot make your visitors reach these obstacles. Therefore, for this reason, it is suggested to keep a process in mind to check broken links and fix them then and there to avoid issues at a later period. Make sure that every link in your website functions correctly and guides the user to their desired web page.

> Best SEO plugins and tools to find broken links: SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Broken Link Checker Plugin

11. Host Important Media Only

Visual content or media plays a pivotal role in web design these days. Therefore, it makes sense to host only important media for scaling WordPress website for high traffic. Visual content which takes a long time to load can lose the attention of your visitors; however, besides this, there can be other reasons for it. For this reason, you should host only necessary media on your WordPress website. You can use services like YouTube or Vimeo to host videos and embed them successfully on your WordPress website.

12. Prefer Lazy Loading

You should remove any type of heavy video from your WordPress website; you should bring some solution to these images. For this, it is advised to prefer Lazy Loading, which is usually an excellent place to start as it will serve images to your users only when they reach those web page portions.

13. Use Optimized Images

Using the lazy loading feature will help avoid the delay caused by the loading of images, but it will not stop server requests at all. As per Kinsta.com, images make up about 34% of a web page’s overall weight, which is why it is suggested to use optimized images in your WordPress sites.

You can use WordPress image optimizer plugins like Smush Pro, EWWW Image Optimizer, Optimole, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, Imagify, which helps in resizing and compressing images for faster loading time.

14. Opt for SSD Drives

It is better to have an idea regarding what your web hosting plan uses drives. If it uses HDD or hard disk drives, then it can cause a problem. It is better to switch to SSD Drives, which are reliable and fast and secure compared to HDD counterparts.

15. Automate Scanning and Reporting

It is almost impossible for WordPress developers to be practically present everywhere. You require automated scanning and reporting for your website to create a unique presence in the developer’s arsenal of tools. It will improve your website performance, help in monitoring security, SEO and keep you informed every time any significant change happens. Top WordPress Security Plugins includes iTheames Security, Wordfence, Defender, WPScan, Sucuri etc…

16. Use a Safe, Secure & Reliable Payment Gateway

It is essential to have a reliable WordPress payment plugin that is secure and well-tested. It will ensure that there will be no issues whenever customers buy your products at any given time and make payments at your website.

>>Learn more about Best WooCommerce Payment Gateways for Your Store.

Over To You!

Whether you are looking for a developer to scale your WordPress website for high traffic or searching for custom WordPress development services, Samarpan Infotech will be your perfect choice. Hire our expert WordPress developers to get solutions for any WordPress-related issues.

Pro Tip: Never compromise with WordPress website issues at any cost and any problem should be addressed immediately to avoid complications in the future.