Hello, this is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies. I want to talk a little bit about high traffic websites. We host and maintain quite a few high-traffic websites and they have different considerations versus low-traffic informational or brochure sites.
First thing I want to focus on is where the site is actually hosted. It’s really important that if you have a lot of traffic to your website that your site is probably not hosted on an expensive shared hosting platform like GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc. Their servers are really not configured properly for high-traffic websites so it’s really important to find a service or a server that’s really configured and set up to properly maintain and host a site that gets a lot of traffic. One of the considerations is that if the traffic spikes, that the server can handle that spike without causing any performance issues or worst case scenario, causing the website to go down.
Second thing that we find is important when you have a high-traffic website is security in general. We follow a pretty strict security protocol with all of the sites that we maintain and it’s particularly beneficial for high-traffic websites.
It’s really important to have a pretty strict security protocol when you’re maintaining a high traffic website. First thing is making sure that everything gets updated – the plugins, themes and code – very frequently because if the website’s unstable in any way shape or form and it goes down, you could lose a lot of business because the amount of traffic that goes to your website, it’s important to have a regular high frequent backup as well. We definitely recommend taking a backup of the entire site including the database every single day.
Monitoring is very important as well, making sure the site is getting monitored frequently, security monitoring and performance monitoring. The other thing is making sure, if something did happen to the website, you have a team that’s prepared and ready to deal with it right away. If something happens to your website and you have to search a web a development company and let’s say they’re busy or you don’t have that resource already vetted, it can be really difficult to get someone to take care of it quickly and who knows how long you can be down.
Lastly, if you’re making a lot of changes to a high traffic website, it’s important that those changes, especially if they’re slightly more complex functionality changes, are done properly. Typically, what we recommend doing are making those changes on what we refer to as like a “development” or a “staging server” and making sure everything’s functioning well and implemented well. Then you can push to the live server versus doing all these changes in a live server because if you’re getting a lot of traffic and your site goes down because of that, it obviously can be a big issue.
If you do have a high-traffic website, it’s a different beast or a different animal than a low-traffic website and it should be treated differently and maintain and hosted differently.
We have a lot of experience in hosting and maintaining high-traffic websites so if you have any questions on this, please feel comfortable to give us a call.
