Whatever it is that gives your brand and WordPress website a major boost, it needs to be able to handle the uptick in traffic and, further, to sustain it. Just a few seconds of wait time could cost you the attention (and business) of impatient visitors.

And with a full-on website outage? Just look at your analytics to see what the trends say about how many new visitors and sales you could lose for every hour your site remains down.

• 20 Ways you can Scale Your WordPress Website
• How much Should I pay for a WordPress Website?
• Is WordPress Good for Big Websites?
• How do Websites Handle High Traffic?

20 Ways you can Scale Your WordPress Website

In order to handle major increases in traffic and keep visitor enthusiasm high, your WordPress website must scale or be ready to scale at a moment’s notice. Here are 20 tips that will help you scale your WordPress site and keep it from crumpling under the pressure of heavy volumes of traffic:

1. Get a Hosting Plan with Vertical Scaling

Vertical scaling, when it comes to web servers, typically refers to hosting providers that offer tiered plans that customers can easily upgrade to as needs change. If you’re nervous that your current web host won’t be able to sufficiently handle increasing traffic, check the currently available resources on your plan.

Read Also: Top 13 Best CRMs For Your WordPress in 2021

Will bandwidth, storage, or even visitor quantity limits keep your site from confidently handling the traffic? If so, then explore your other hosting plan options. If those won’t do the trick, then it may be that you need a new type of hosting.

While shared hosting is great to start, more traffic means you need more access to server resources and only something like VPS hosting or a dedicated server can help with that.

2. Get a Hosting Plan with Horizontal Scaling

Once your site’s traffic is truly booming, you may find that vertical scaling through hosting plans just isn’t enough anymore–especially if one day your traffic is high and then the next it’s out of control. In this case, you’ll want to look at horizontal scaling.

Unlike vertical scaling, which keeps your entire website on a single server, horizontal scaling separates it into various layers. WordPress recommends using a service-oriented architecture to create this.

Basically, you’ll separate out your front-end server, database server, proxy layer, and image layer. This will make it easier to scale resources for the parts of the backend that really need it.

3. Use SSD Drives

Do you know what type of storage drives your web hosting plan uses? If you’re currently on one with HDD, or hard disk drives, then that’s a problem. SSD, or solid state drives, are inherently more reliable, secure, and fast than their HDD counterparts.

4. Review Platform Versions

You know how important it is to keep your WordPress software up-to-date. The same goes for server technology and each of the platforms that run on it. So, whether it’s Apache, Linux, PHP, MySQL, or any other platform you rely on to properly manage your site, make sure your host runs and is compatible with the latest stable versions for each.

5. Get Managed WordPress Hosting

If all this seems like too much work for you–scaling resources, managing server configuration–then you may want to offload the work to a dedicated professional. Managed WordPress hosting services are always a viable option.

While it will cost more than a standard hosting plan, managed WordPress hosting providers help ease the pressures of scaling a WordPress site while also keeping a close eye on security and performance.

6. Put Limits on MySQL

Even though you can store a lot of data in MySQL, you have to be very careful about how you do so as overextending its limits could compromise site speed. First, put a cap on auto-loading queries. 200 is a good maximum to work with.

Also, be mindful of your Options table. Each column of the table can hold up to 4GB, but repeatedly hitting that max limit could also hurt your site’s performance.

There are other ways you can be smarter about managing MySQL performance, too.

7. Adjust MySQL/MariaDB

WordPress suggests making adjustments to MySQL and MariaDB settings to help ease the tension brought about by high traffic and the resulting database requests that come from it. Specifically, MySQL indexing and query caching are recommended.

You can also download the HyperDB plugin from WordPress. This will help with the configuration of your databases, optimizing them for top performance.

8. Use a Caching and Optimization Plugin

Anything you can do to minimize HTTPS server requests on your website is ideal. In doing so, you reduce the number of files that are transmitted between your server and visitors, keeping load times low even as traffic increases. A caching and file optimization plugin like Hummingbird will handle this for you.

9. Add a CDN to Your Server

CDN technology is a great thing to have when you want blazingly fast speeds for your WordPress site. That said, when you’re specifically looking to scale–especially if traffic is coming from all over the globe–then a CDN is an absolute must as it will shorten the distance between your server and your visitors’ browsers.

10. Amp up Hosting Security

Security also plays a big role when scaling a WordPress site since more traffic means more potential threats you have to watch for.

So, the first thing you should do is work with your host to get your server on security lockdown. This includes:

• Server caching
• Server-side CDN
• Firewall
• Security monitoring and management (especially for DDoS)

11. Use a Security Plugin

Next up, you’ll want a security plugin like Defender to protect your site from any and all threats: malware, spam, DDoS, etc. With built-in scanning and monitoring, as well as protective security measures like two-factor authentication and blacklisting, Defender will ensure that security on the WordPress side of your website is totally covered.

12. Follow Strict Security Practices

Of course, there are other things you should be doing in order to keep your site secure from a security breach. This WordPress security checklist and ultimate WordPress security guide will ensure that you’ve covered all your bases, like changing the wp-admin, removing the admin username, applying an antivirus to your network, and so on.

13. Use a Reliable Payment Gateway

For e-commerce websites, there’s a good likelihood that traffic will one day suddenly explode–which is awesome. More traffic = more $$$.

However, the last thing you want to happen is for your site to stay up through those traffic surges and to defend itself against vulnerabilities… only to have visitors get to checkout and be unable to complete their purchase.

Before it ever gets to this point, you should have a reliable, secure, and well-tested payment gateway to ensure that there will be no issues whether one customer or 10,000 customers want to buy your products at any given time.

14. Keep an Eye on WordPress Software

As always, I’m going to remind you to keep close tabs on your WordPress software: the core, plugins, and themes.

• Delete anything that’s old, no longer supported by the original developer, or that you’re not using.
• Keep everything that is in use updated. The easiest way to do this is with Automate.
• Audit your plugins often to see if their size/quality/etc. make an unnecessary impact on load times. (If so, don’t be afraid to swap them out for more lightweight ones.)

15. Only Host Necessary Media

Visual content is a very important part of web design these days. Without it, you’re likely to lose visitor attention quickly.

But you know what else loses their attention? Visual content (or any content really) that takes too long to load. To spare them the trouble of waiting to see any of it, only host files on your site that you absolutely have to. In other words, if you can host videos using services like YouTube and Vimeo and then embed them on your site, do it!

16. Use Lazy Loading

Once you’ve removed the weight of videos from your site, you need to do something about those images. Lazy loading is a good place to start as it will only serve images to visitors once they reach those parts of your web pages, and not a second sooner.

17. Optimize Images

Lazy loading will help delay the loading of images, but they won’t stop those server requests from happening altogether. After all, you do want visitors to see that content. For when that does happen, use an image optimization plugin like Smush Pro that will take care of resizing and compressing images for faster loading.

18. Repair Broken Links

Although broken links aren’t a big deal in terms of security and performance, you better believe they’ll hurt the user experience and, consequently, SEO. As your site receives more traffic, you can’t afford to have visitors hit these stumbling blocks, so make sure you have a process in place to check for broken links and fix them on the spot.

19. Automate Scanning and Reporting

As a WordPress developer, you can’t be everywhere at once. This is why automated website scanning and reporting needs to be in every developer’s arsenal of tools. This will ease the burden of having to monitor security, performance, SEO, and more while also keeping you informed of major changes in real time.

The automated scanning and reporting tools you’ll need are as follows:

• Google Analytics to know when traffic spikes occur and analyze the sources of the traffic, behaviors of the visitors, and assess the visitor journey on the site.
• Security scanning to ensure that new vulnerabilities are caught and kicked out as soon as they’re detected.
• Performance scanning (start with WP Checkup!) to watch for issues with uptime availability, blacklisting in Google, security threats, and more.
• Speed testing tools to detect when there’s a slowdown on your website.

20. Use a Backup Plugin

Finally, a backup plugin is essential for scaling a WordPress website. No matter how much care and precautionary measures you take to keep your site in line and your server up to snuff, something could happen that makes it all come crashing down.

And, when that happens, you’ll need a quick and easy way to restore it. Snapshot Pro is a good one to check out if you don’t have a backup and restore plugin already.

How much Should I pay for a WordPress Website?

Despite the fact that setting up a self-hosted WordPress website or blog is one of the most inexpensive ways to create your very own site, it can be hard to know exactly how much should a WordPress site cost.

WordPress website pricing

Even though the self-hosted WordPress software is, in fact, free, there are a few other costs you will want to keep in mind when you are considering your website budget.

To help you get a better idea of how much should a WordPress site cost, we’ll be looking at some of the WordPress pricing factors you’ll need to budget for. This includes domain name registration, hosting fees, themes, backups and other add-ons.

1. How much does WordPress cost?

As just mentioned, the WordPress software, available for download from WordPress.org, is completely free to use. So you don’t have to worry about WordPress pricing.

On its own, WordPress is powerful, but it is also incredibly customizable, allowing you to change almost anything about its appearance and the way it operates, through the use of themes and plugins. A large number of these are available for free, but many cost either a one-time or a subscription-based fee, which we will get to later.

However, when it comes down to it, the backbone of your WordPress website or blog is free. This is great news for small businesses, individuals, or bloggers hoping to make their mark on the web.

2. How much does a  domain name  cost?

After WordPress pricing, it’s time to get a domain for your website. A domain name is used as the address of your website. It’s what people type into to find your site. It could be a .com or another type of domain name that you own and is your home on the web.

While it is possible to skip this step (as well as the next one) by setting your website up as a free blog on WordPress.com, virtually every professional website on the internet has its own domain name and self-hosted website. You and your blog or business will be taken far more seriously, and be easier for visitors to find if you purchase a domain name.

Domain names are available for registration from a domain name registrar. While there are many, many options for where to purchase a domain name, the company I use and recommend is NameCheap.

Though .com is the most-recognized top-level domain (TLD) on the web, it is getting harder and harder to find available domains to register. However, there are now hundreds of other interesting TLD options. These are often more expensive, but they are worth keeping in mind if your great idea is already taken.

Cost: $15 per year

3. How much does WordPress  hosting  cost?

The next step when it comes to answering the question of, “how much should a WordPress site cost me?” is determining your web hosting requirements. If you are trying to keep your WordPress website costs minimal, hosting will most likely be the priciest part of your shopping list.

Although there are a ton of options for the type of hosting you can use, entry-level shared hosting is generally adequate for bloggers and businesses creating their first website. This type of hosting means that your website will live on a server shared by many other websites like your own.

If you are expecting huge bursts of traffic or need advanced security features, you may instead opt for dedicated hosting, where your website is the only one on the server.

Hosting prices range widely from service to service, but you can generally expect to pay between $5 and $15 a month to host your WordPress website with a reputable and reliable company.

Usually, hosts will offer you cheaper hosting for the first year if you pay for the whole year in advance. If you can afford to do this, we would recommend it since it results in a cheaper bill overall.

Cost: $5-20 per month, or $60-240 per year

4. How much does a WordPress  theme  cost?

A WordPress theme can make or break a website. Your theme is ultimately what controls the look and feel of your blog, so be sure to invest the time into finding something that’s just right.

There are a ton of different features a WordPress theme can have, but one of the most important things to look for is a theme with a responsive design. That means that your WordPress blog will look just as good on small screens as on larger ones.

Some WordPress themes are free. With a few exceptions, these themes will do in a pinch, but they tend to be fairly plain, not very customizable, and offer little to no support to users. Paid themes, which are almost always higher quality and fuller-featured, can run you anywhere from about $50-$200, either a one-time fee or an annual one.

Here are some specific recommendations for themes to keep your WordPress pricing budget to minimum:

• Give the default WordPress themes a try. After all, they have been selected to be the default themes for a reason. Experiment with “Twenty Fifteen” and “Twenty Sixteen” for starters (you can find them in your wp-admin right out the gate).
• If you’re launching a blog, consider ThemeIsle’s newest, completely free blogging theme. It’s called Zillah.
• For a modern design with some cool parallax effects, Zelle PRO is perhaps the solution for you.

Cost: $50-200, either one-time or annual fee

5. What  other costs  might a WordPress site have?

Depending on the exact functionality you need, that can be a very difficult question to answer. There are thousands upon thousands of plugins available to alter the way the core WordPress software works. Many are free, but fuller-featured plugins or those that do something truly unique can range in price from a few dollars to hundreds.

Something every blogger needs to consider before it becomes a problem is how they are backing up their website. Although rare, mistakes can happen that cause your entire site to be wiped from your server.

If you aren’t making regular backups, that could mean months of hard work down the drain. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin is a free option for bloggers who are starting out, but if your blog is vital to your livelihood, you should look into more secure options, like VaultPress.

The basic VaultPress plan starts at $99 per year and it’s something I use myself on my most important websites.

Cost: $0-400, some one-time fees and some annual

Answering the question of how much should a WordPress site cost is very difficult. Every individual and every website has very different needs.

Sometimes low cost, entry level hosting will suffice. Other times high-end managed WordPress hosting is the best option. Sometimes free themes and plugins will fit the bill, other times only the best premium themes or even a custom built design will do.

Although self-hosted WordPress is one of the quickest and most inexpensive ways to build a website, it is easy to see the word “free” and forget about all the other costs that can go into making your website a success.

Hopefully, this article has given you a little more perspective about all the hidden costs that can add up to your WordPress pricing budget, and you now have a better idea of how much should a WordPress site cost.

 Total Cost:  $200-800 annually

Is WordPress Good for Big Websites?

WordPress is a proven CMS that handles various applications handling millions of users and tens or even 100M views a month. From our experience, scaling from 10M to 50M is feasible, 50M to 100M is challenging, 100M – 200M is quite complex, and 200M+ may require some serious engineering effort.

Then again, it really depends on the most complex components and handling the right solutions with the corresponding vendor. For instance, the payment part of your application is through PayPal or Stripe whereas accounting can be the trickier part of your workflow.

As long as you can leverage the WordPress core feature set, it would work well in the long run.

Now, let’s go-ahead to view the most popular big-name brands using WordPress.

1. BBC America

BBC America is a popular television network that brings a variety of programs including lifestyle, comedy, drama and science-fiction series, movies, etc. The BBC America website features a blog-like design with large featured images and dark skin on the homepage.

2. Sony Music

Sony Music Entertainment Inc. is a global music company, and its website is also on WordPress. The site features a header slider to display the singers, artists, bands, featured videos, news, and their twitter timeline.

3. Microsoft News

Microsoft’s news site was created with WordPress. It features a magazine-style layout to showcase their stories, news, and updates.

4. TechCrunch

TechCrunch is a popular online publisher that features news around startups and technology. The TechCrunch website features a full-width content-focused design.

5. The Walt Disney Company

The popular Walt Disney Company runs its website on WordPress. The site features a large featured image, recent news, and multiple sections including about, careers, philanthropy, etc.

6. Facebook Newsroom

The most popular social media platform, Facebook, uses WordPress to publish their news and announcements. The website is minimal, with a featured section for top stories and a blog list layout for news and announcements.

7. The Rolling Stones

he popular English rock band, The Rolling Stones’ official website, is in WordPress. It features bands’ songs, videos, news, etc. boldly and beautifully.

8. Toyota Motors Brasil

The official website for Toyota Motors Brasil was created using WordPress. It has a simple site with minimal content in the header slider and products showcase.

9. The Havard Gazette

The Havard Gazette brings official news from Havard University covering innovation, teaching, research, events, etc. The website looks clean and elegant with a mixture of the featured post, list, masonry-style posts, and plenty of white space.

10. The Mozilla Blog

The Mozilla Blog carries the latest news, stories, and updates on Mozilla Firefox, community, and anything around the web. The blog has an image header and a grid layout to showcase their blog articles.

11. Usain Bolt

Known as the fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt, choose WordPress for his official website. It has full-width homepage sliders featuring Bolt’s photos and achievements and the latest updates about him in the masonry-style blog.

12. Reuters Blogs

Reuters Blogs brings the latest news on business, markets, world, politics, tech, life, and a variety of categories. The blog was created with WordPress that has a grid-style homepage.

13. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog is also based on WordPress. The site’s design is simple with a list-style layout and plenty of widgets, including the most popular posts and most popular videos.

14. Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a widely-known and played video game. Its official website was made using WordPress. The site looks colorful, and features Play Now buttons from top to bottom, which makes it look more like a landing page.

15. Katy Perry

Katy Perry’s official website features multiple things, including music, videos, tours, photos, and also a store. It has a bold and elegant look with header slider, video section, shop section, and latest news section at the end.

16. Sweden’s Official Website

If you’re looking for facts and stories about Sweden, you can check their official website. The website uses WordPress. You can find a grid-style blog with articles on business, culture, tradition, nature, society, and much more.

17. PlayStation Blog

The video gamers’ favorite PlayStation has its blog in WordPress. You can find featured sections at the top and a simple masonry-style blog at the bottom of the site’s homepage.

18. Variety

Variety brings entertainment news, film reviews, stories about awards, film festivals, etc. It’s created with WordPress and has a great magazine-style design and several widgets to showcase top stories, categories, etc.

19. AMC

The American television channel AMC has its official website on WordPress. The site features full-width featured images to showcase its shows and episodes.

20. Groupe Renault

One of the most popular car manufacturer companies, Renault group, has its official site built on WordPress. The website homepage features a full-width image header, featured articles, featured content, and video posts.

How do Websites Handle High Traffic?

website traffic is great. However, if you’re managing a high traffic website that constantly crashes due to such a high volume of visitors, it might not feel so great.

Here are five ways in which you can manage the website more effectively in order to prevent crashes and increase its functionality and speed.

1. Upgrade Your Web Hosting

When you create a website, you’ll have to select a web hosting provider. Oftentimes, you choose the cheapest web hosting plan or one that provides you with the features and add-ons that you think you’ll need.

It’s rare that people look for a web hosting plan that offers enough power to ensure that your website will be able to handle lots of traffic.

To maintain website speed, you’ll definitely want to either factor this in before choosing a web hosting plan or upgrade your plan later to fit your needs. 

Generally speaking, shared hosting plans are going to slow you down, and if you need to, you should switch to a more scalable plan as your website traffic increases. 

Look for a dedicated hosting plan as this will ensure you’ve got dedicated servers that are working solely for your website and the traffic it’s receiving. You might also want to look into cloud hosting as this can enhance the speed of a site with lots of traffic.

2. Compress Your Images

If you’ve already increased your hosting plan and its ability to put servers to work for you, then your next step will be to work on your actual website itself.

How can you reduce the size and processing time of your website every time someone visits it? You can compress your images! Images and dynamic content on a website have a direct correlation with the loading speed.

If you have a sudden surge on a high-traffic website, then the bigger files are going to start to lag a lot more and slow the loading speed down. If you’ve stored the files on a web server, then the large file sizes are going to make it harder for the server to process.

So, it’s smart to compress your images from the get-go. Not only does this help avoid overloading your web server, but it actually helps increase your on-page SEO.

The faster an image loads, the higher a search engine is going to rank your page. This ensures that people stay on your page, which may or may not be a good thing if you feel like there are already too many people on it!

If you’re using WordPress to create your website then you can use a plugin to optimize your images. SmushIt is a great plugin for WordPress users and can help reduce file sizes by up to 50%.

3. Install a Caching Plugin

Caching is crucial when it comes to optimizing a website’s speed. It’s also one of the most overlooked website tips. Essentially, caching works to reduce the load on your web server while also improving the speed. What is caching?

Well, when a new user visits a web page, the server has to perform a lot of different actions.

Each time it has to do this, it takes a lot of power and memory. If you’re able to cache this request, however, the server will remember the action and save time the next time it happens.

If you have a high traffic website then chances are that you’re receiving lots of repeat visitors. Think about the visitors that Facebook and Netlfix have. They’re mostly all repeat.

So, if you can, install a caching plugin on your website to compress HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. If you’re using WordPress, then this is a whole lot easier as these plugins are more readily available.

4. Consider Switching to WordPress

We’ve mentioned WordPress a few times now, so it might be clear that WordPress is a great website platform that offers you lots of features when it comes to managing high traffic websites.

It’s a pretty lightweight content management system, which means that it’s going to be able to handle a surge in traffic a lot easier than other platforms.

Not only that, but it offers you the ability to install various plugins that can make life a whole lot easier.

Read Also: New 30 Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Install in 2021

You can install plugins that help you cache files and compress images. Or, you can install plugins that remove unused images and themes to help clean up the backend of your site and keep it running smoothly.

5. Think About a Load Balancer

If you’re planning on really growing your website and expect the traffic to grow a lot with it, then it’s worth thinking about getting the help of a load balancer.

A load balancer is going to spread the load evenly across various different servers. Essentially, your website has multiple paths to its destination, and this greatly improves speed while reducing the risk of overload.

It’s worth mentioning that load balancers are really only necessary if you have a really high traffic website with millions of visitors per month. 

For anything less, it helps to follow the steps above to reduce the load on your servers and make sure you’re monitoring for spikes in traffic.

When it comes to managing high traffic websites, part of the work takes place in the beginning when you’re designing the site and deciding on a web hosting partner.

Choose wisely here, as it plays a big role in the future of your site and its speed. However, managing high traffic sites requires lots of work after your site is up and running.

Make sure you’re staying on top of updates and always looking for ways to reduce the load that you’re placing on your web servers regardless of the amount of traffic you have.

Finally

This is an exciting time for your WordPress site. In order to preserve those higher volumes, you need to ensure that visitors trust you to provide a high-quality experience at all times. To do this, you need to scale your website alongside this traffic in order to ensure a truly optimized experience in terms of security, performance, and more!

Your WordPress website will be as scalable as you make it. In order to scale WordPress, you must adhere to best-practices when it comes to both web development and web hosting, and you’ll need vendors that you can count on. 

You should never assume that because there are huge WordPress sites, or because your WordPress site is hosted in a cloud environment, your site can handle anything you throw at it. 

Whether you’re using WordPress as a blogging platform or to power a more complex website, you should test, adjust, and make sure that your site is indeed scalable — and rely on teams that you can trust to support you!