One of the issues that growing online businesses worry about is that there will be some kind of cutoff point in user volume, after which traffic will start to slow down due to the sheer amount of data being transferred. There’s also the platform factor – will WordPress handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous visitors?
It’s not a completely irrational concern – everything does have a limit, as we find when we try to send a Happy New Year text message at 12:01 a.m. The working limits of the network get overwhelmed and the message might not arrive for some time, if at all. For 364.9 days of the year, of course, the network is fine, so it would be wrong to upgrade it for an hour’s usage.
Websites are the same when it comes to budgeting the bandwidth resources you’ll need. Most businesses will get a package that easily covers their expected traffic, plus a certain amount to cover peaks in demand, but it generally isn’t worth going too far. You can mitigate this by using cloud hosting, which effectively allows greater and smaller bandwidth to match demand hour by hour. It might cost more than a standard hosting package, but compared to the sales you could lose on Black Friday, it might be worth your while, especially if you run an eCommerce site that has frequent peaks and troughs.
So your hosting should be able to handle anything that’s thrown at it, especially if you plan in advance for expected peaks. But what about the software? If you’re using WordPress, will it too be able to cope with a surge in demand or even a gradual, steady growth? The good news is that it is a perfectly capable platform for such volumes of traffic.
Just think about how many well known websites are based on WordPress – Reuters, PlayStation, The Next Web, The New Yorker, Vogue and TED, to name just a few. These are sites that not only have a generally high level of traffic, but also ones that are liable to spikes when they are in the news. Because they have decent hosting packages, they work absolutely fine.
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, of course. So you might have the best hosting and a proven platform, but if your installation is bloated with unnecessary plugins and high quality graphics and video, it’s possible you could still overwhelm your capacity, especially during peak demand. Paying attention to page speed is always a good way to keep a check on how many resources your site is using, and it translates pretty reliably into estimating how well your site would cope with high demand. If you’re running an eCommerce site using WooCommerce, have a read of our piece on scaling it up, and you’ll see how important it is. In short, you have nothing to worry about with WordPress as a platform. Just make sure you use a good WordPress developer, don’t overload your website, and have the best hosting you can justify, and you won’t go far wrong.
