How to Run a High Traffic Website Successfully

About 90% of people use the internet to find local businesses. Unfortunately, conversions can drop by up to 20% of your site takes too long to load. If you’re attracting a lot of traffic to your website, you need to keep up with the site’s performance.

Otherwise, would-be customers will leave and find a site that offers a smoother user experience.

Here are six tips you can use to boost high traffic websites. With these tips, you can improve your site’s performance with your visitors in mind.

Instead of losing customers, you can attract more than ever before.

Give your site the boost it needs with these tips today!

1. Talk With Your Visitors

Before you start making changes to your high traffic website architecture, take the time to consider your visitors. Who are they? What issues are they experiencing on your website?

What changes can you make to improve their user experience?

You might want to consider creating a poll, which you can post on social media or send through an email campaign. Otherwise, consider a few of the expectations almost all website users have.

First, you’ll want to make sure your site works well on desktop and mobile devices. A lot of people search for answers while they’re out and about. If your site lags behind on mobile devices, it could cost you customers.

You can check to verify your site is mobile-optimized by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Google also has a tool you can use to check your website’s load times. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to determine what’s slowing your site down.

This tool can give you valuable insights into the performance of your website.

You might find specific components of your website are slowing down the speed. For example, maybe an old plugin or uncompressed files are causing lag times.

Don’t forget to check your Google Analytics, too. You might find valuable information, such as which pages are causing the most problems. Do customers leave specific pages faster than others?

Do certain pages attract more traffic at specific times of the year? For example, you might need to start preparing your website for the holidays to handle seasonal traffic.

This information will help you make informed changes to your high traffic websites.

2. Check Your Plugins

Now that you know what to look for, let’s review some of the common problem areas.

First, take a look at your plugins. Are any old and outdated? Upgrade the plugins you use.

Delete any that you’re not using.

Consider installing a caching plugin, too. Caching can help improve your website’s speed.

Each time someone visits your site, the process requires a lot of memory and power. Caching the process will help the server recall that previous action. Instead of starting all over, caching can reduce load times by pulling up the same content.

You can install a caching plugin on your website for your CSS files, HTML, and JavaScript.

3. Compress Your Images

Huge image files could cause problems with your website’s performance, too.

By compressing images, you can reduce how long it takes for your site to process. Otherwise, bigger files will require more time to load.

Before you build high traffic website plans, consider the images you plan to use. Will you have numerous image files across your site? Do you require numerous pages, too?

If you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that can optimize your images for you. These plugins can reduce your file sizes, allowing images to load faster than before!

4. Use Minimalistic Design

A webpage that takes one to 10 seconds to load has a 123% chance of mobile users bouncing. In other words, visitors will leave your site without clicking around. A high bounce rate could impact your search engine ranking.

As a result, consumers might have a difficult time finding you on search engines like Google.

Your website’s overall design can have an impact on your site speed and search engine ranking.

Every component on a web page needs an HTTP request between your server and the visitor’s browser. When there are more components, the page can take longer to load.

Using minimalistic design can help you remove unnecessary components to speed up the site.

First, try to use a lot of white space. Trim down big paragraphs and long sentences. Headings and bullet points are a great way to improve readability.

The longer people stay on your site, the better for your search ranking.

Combine your CSS into one file. Get rid of as many redirects and broken links, too. Broken links can frustrate visitors.

You can also reduce the number of plugins on your site, compress your images, and clean up scripts that have unnecessary characters.

These changes should speed up your site.

5. Optimize Your Content for Locals

Are you currently using a content delivery network (CDN)? If not, you might struggle to handle high traffic on your website.

A CDN uses numerous servers spread throughout the world. Pulling content from one server, on the other hand, can restrict how quickly content will reach certain visitors.

Instead, a CDN can cache files across various servers, then deliver them to the location closest to each site visitor.

In other words, you can speed up how quickly visitors see your site content!

6. Upgrade Your Hosting

Are you currently using a shared hosting plan? That works while your site is small and not attracting a lot of traffic. For high traffic websites, however, a virtual private server (VPS) or private hosting can make all the difference.

If you decide on a dedicated server, your website will have its very own server. With a VPS, on the other hand, your server is divided between various environments.

These options will allow you to customize your hosting environment as you see fit.

The best server for your high traffic website depends on your RAM and bandwidth needs.

Give Your Site a Boost: 6 Tips for Optimizing High Traffic Websites

Don’t let your website lag behind. Instead, use these six tips for optimizing high traffic websites. With these tips, you can improve your site’s performance with your users in mind.

Instead of losing potential customers, you can handle more visitors on your site than ever before!

Looking for more business-related tips and tricks? We can help. Explore our latest business guides today to get started.