Is Your WordPress Website Scalable Enough For More Traffic?

WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, but that doesn’t mean that every WordPress website is scalable or elastic. It doesn’t even mean that a majority of WordPress sites are ready for traffic spikes.

In fact, there is no shortage of WordPress sites that can’t handle their existing peak traffic without slowing down or throwing errors, making it difficult or impossible for visitors to use your website.

That’s right! You may be spending time and money to drive an audience to a website that isn’t even capable of serving those users.

This is particularly troubling for ecommerce businesses that rely on WordPress to work with shopping cart software like BigCommerce or WooCommerce to generate sales and revenue. However, it doesn’t take a survey to know that website owners want their websites to perform reliably for all web visitors.

WordPress as a Large-Scale Website Solution
More than 27 million websites are powered by WordPress — including almost 4,000 of the top 10,000 sites on the internet. Wappalyzer shows WordPress as commanding a full 75% of the Content Management System (CMS) market. The nearest competitors are Drupal and Joomla, each commanding only 4% of the market respectively.

WordPress.org boasts that its open-source software powers 35% of the web, from small blogs to some of the largest, most visited websites in existence.

On the larger end of the spectrum, their portfolio includes websites for publications like RollingStone, Vogue, and websites for organizations like The Walt Disney Company.

Is WordPress Scalable?
There is no question that a WordPress website can scale to meet the needs of high-traffic, large-scale websites. However, that doesn’t mean that every WordPress website is ready to maintain 100% uptime during traffic surges.

Rather than focus on WordPress’s core software as the be-all-end-all of scalability, it’s more important to focus on factors related to your individual website — from themes, plugins and customizations, to sufficiently scalable hosting.

Steps for Scaling WordPress for Growth
WordPress by itself is a flexible platform. If you clear any bottlenecks and give your website the right hosting resources, the sky’s the limit. Here are the most common areas to pay attention to when gearing your WordPress instance to throttle up in traffic.

1. Code best practices.
Your custom code can impact page load and scalability in more than one way. Your code should be “clean” and generally free of errors and unnecessary bloat. Similarly, avoid dependencies on third-party services that won’t scale — anything from a stock ticker to a live chat system that isn’t built to handle large surges in traffic.

In some cases, software like NewRelic may be extremely helpful in finding coding errors and issues that cause problems like hanging processes that eat up your website resources.

2. Vertical scalability.
Sometimes your site simply needs more resources to handle traffic. Hardware resources such as CPU and RAM are crucial to handling traffic spikes. Typically, dedicated servers have enough processing power to handle minor spikes, but may not be optimally configured for sustained traffic bursts.

On public clouds, it’s possible to allocate additional resources to your server by adding more CPU cores and RAM, but this will require downtime as these resources cannot be added while the server is running.

3. Horizontal / elastic architecture.
In many cases, more CPU and RAM alone won’t be enough to meet your needs. The hosting server, whether a dedicated server or cloud account, will bottleneck. Instead, you’ll want to use load-balancing to spread your traffic across multiple web servers.

Much like with vertical scaling, specialty hosts can help you to autoscale “horizontally” by spinning up more web nodes as needed. This is often achieved on public clouds, such as AWS.

4. Caching.
Within your WordPress website, a variety of elements need to come together to produce a complete webpage. This includes your theme, scripts, images, and content. A Full Page Caching (FPC) solution saves fully generated web pages so that these elements are already assembled and ready to be transmitted more efficiently to a web visitor’s browser.

It’s also possible to move session and object caching and store data into RAM, which greatly reduces processing time and database calls as well as API hits.

5. Content Delivery Network.
Rather than have all of your hosting resources load from your individual hosting account, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare to distribute copies of files, like images, across an “edge network” of servers around the globe.

Much like with other caching systems, this cuts down on the resources needed by your hosting environment to serve up your site. Additionally, CDNs can offer a wide range of security, resilience, and speed benefits.

6. Database optimization.
The content in your WordPress website is stored in a database. By making sure that your database is well configured and optimized, you can decrease the chances that the weak link in your scalability chain will relate to your database. You should focus on hardware as well as software by using a database like MySQL or MariaDB with proper sizing and configuration.

7. Search indexing.
WordPress’s built-in site-search feature can be a bottleneck in some situations. As your site scales up, you should consider another option, like ElasticSearch.

8. Security.
As with other popular CMS systems, WordPress security is a moving target. Your web host should be deploying web application firewalling, intrusion detection, and malware scanning solutions for your site. However, it’s important to make sure that these systems are not hurting your scalability.

For instance, if your malware scans are scheduled for peak traffic times, they could be using vital server resources at the worst possible time. A WordPress security audit can help you identify vulnerabilities and risks.

9. Available disk space.
Running out of CPU and RAM resources is temporary during a traffic spike and normally resolves itself, but running out of hard disk space is catastrophic and requires manual intervention. It’s important to have your host alert you if you’re running short on disk space. Without enough space to compile your cache or address other basic server functions, your website can come to a halt.

10. Integrations.
Is your website connecting to other software and external systems via APIs? Are you calling up data from other websites or servers via JavaScript or iFrames? Be aware that every integration is another potential point of failure when it comes to scalability. It’s important to choose integrations that you can rely on to be scalable and not hold back your site.

In the case of operating an ecommerce store using your WordPress site, you may be putting more load on WordPress than you need to. There are many great examples of WordPress + BigCommerce Headless Commerce sites, in which a WordPress is used for its strong CMS capabilities, while BigCommerce provides a hosted ecommerce backend to manage product, customer, order, and other vital data and operations for managing an online store.

11. Server software.
Your web host should analyze your individual website and choose the right software like NGINX or Percona DB. New versions of software like PHP operate more efficiently than old versions, helping your overall scalability, not to mention security. How it’s all configured is equally important. Simply installing software like PHP will not ensure successful scalability. It takes an experienced hand and the right settings to avoid bottlenecking.

12. Hardware performance.
As with all computers, not all hardware is the same — and it’s not just about size. For instance, choosing a host that uses Solid State Drives (SSD) using TLC technology can lead to much better loading speeds and scalability than Spinning Disks or SSDs using QLC. While you may be able to get a cheap hosting solution on aged hardware, it’s best to look beyond cost and focus on getting the right architecture for high performance.

13. Speed optimization.
Generally speaking, the better your WordPress loading speed, the more compressed, “minified” and optimized your site is. Your infrastructure should be able to more elegantly serve more users if it’s not choking on large files and otherwise under-performing code. You should also have a Time to First Byte (TTFB) under 200ms, which is easy to check with a WordPress speed test.

Best Practices for WordPress Scalability
Now that you know what impacts your site, these are the top best-practices that will traditionally have the biggest impact on your WordPress scalability and elasticity.

1. Use the right hosting provider.
You may have noticed that more than half of the steps for scaling WordPress listed above require web hosting optimization. Selecting the right WordPress hosting plan with a provider that specializes in WordPress scalability will greatly increase your chances of being successful. So does having a team that’s engaged in real-time monitoring of your hosting environment.

2. Lightweight WordPress theme.
If your WordPress theme is poorly coded, or chock full of unnecessary features and code, it may be weighing down your site and limiting your ability to handle large amounts of web traffic. Consider cleaning up your theme code, or simply using a theme that’s built to address your page speed and scalability needs.

3. Simplified plugins.
Every plugin adds weight and risk to your store. When it comes to WordPress plugins, less is more. Choose your plugins wisely, and if they’re not truly necessary, be sure to remove them. If you’re operating an ecommerce website, consider adding BigCommerce to your WordPress site, which will offload much of your ecommerce related workload to BigCommerce’s SaaS solution.

4. Load testing.
As they say, “The proof is in the pudding.” You should run a WordPress load test to verify that your site is capable of meeting your specific traffic expectations and goals. Furthermore, you should retest from time to time, such as after making changes and updates to your site, or when you believe you may be approaching a new traffic peak, such as before Black Friday.

Conclusion
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!

Scalable WordPress: How to Scale Your WordPress Site for High Traffic
As an online business owner, you must understand how to scale your WordPress website to handle high traffic. Even if your site performs well, it may slow down or become unavailable during unexpected traffic spikes.

Slow or inaccessible websites can drive visitors away, increasing your bounce rate. Eventually, it will harm your site ranking and business reputation.

Thankfully, there are several strategies for managing high volumes of traffic and keeping your WordPress performance stable.

In this article, we will discuss how scalable WordPress is. You will learn how high traffic can impact page speed and how to maintain your website’s performance under heavy load.

How High Traffic Can Slow Down the Website
How Scalable Is WordPress
How to Scale a WordPress Website
Best Practices for Scalable WordPress
How High Traffic Can Slow Down the Website
When users access your web page, their browsers request the site’s data from its host server.

During heavy traffic, the server has to deliver the website data to more users. This requires more processing power, especially for complex WordPress sites with a lot of data, such as high-resolution images and videos.

Commonly, a traffic spike occurs due to certain events, such as:

Viral content
Holiday sales and special offers
Successful ad campaigns
Competition or giveaways
Note that users interacting with the website, such as playing a video or sending search queries, can worsen the performance. This is because processing them requires additional resources.

Consequently, if the server resources are used up, high-traffic websites will slow down or become inaccessible.

How Scalable Is WordPress
WordPress is not just a simple blogging platform – it can serve many purposes, from building high-traffic websites, such as a large eCommerce store, to simple sites, like an online portfolio.

However, WordPress websites are not able to handle high web traffic by default.

Luckily, this can be changed once WordPress is configured properly. When scaling WordPress sites, consider the following aspects:

Database loading
Dealing with a large number of visitors
Website caching
Media resources optimization
High-end coding architecture
How to Scale a WordPress Website
Thanks to its high customizability and flexibility, you can modify many different aspects when running WordPress sites.

In this section, we will focus on the seven critical strategies to scale your online business.

Optimize Your Site Speed
Loading speed indicates how optimized your site is. It also shows how reliable and capable the host server is in serving users’ requests.

Quick loading speed means the host server can effectively display the website content. If the server can display the web page efficiently, it can better manage the resources to handle more traffic.

As 47% of visitors expect websites to load in less than two seconds, having a slow site can increase your bounce rate and harm your overall user experience.

To avoid this, start by checking your site loading time using a speed analytics tool like Google PageSpeed Insight.

Based on the test results, choose an effective website optimization strategy. However, the work doesn’t end here – remember to take additional steps to speed up your WordPress site.

Use a Caching Plugin
Caching stores your site data for future use. Instead of fetching the data directly from the server, web browsers can use the cached versions to display a web page.

As a result, browsers don’t have to make a request to the server when displaying a web page. This minimizes the server load, allowing it to serve more requests during traffic spikes.

The easiest way to enable caching is by using a plugin. With it, you can manage your site cache directly on the WordPress dashboard.

One of the best WordPress caching plugins is LiteSpeed Cache. However, to fully utilize the LiteSpeed Cache optimization features, your web hosting provider must use its server.

Other popular options include WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. We recommend the former if you are unfamiliar with caching. Alternatively, opt for the latter to get more advanced features, such as object caching.

Important! Keeping an old cache may trigger errors and even make your site inaccessible. To fix the issue, enable the auto-renew caching feature if available. Otherwise, manually clear your WordPress site cache periodically.

Follow the Best Security Practices
Once there were 13.7 million attacks on WordPress sites in 36 hours. As the number of cyber attacks soars, security becomes a crucial aspect when scaling your WordPress site.

To maintain a reliable reputation for your online business, you can’t afford to risk your customers’ data security.

To help secure your WordPress site from cyber-attacks, implement the following practices:

Update WordPress regularly. By doing so, you will receive the latest bug fixes and security patches. Additionally, update themes and plugins to ensure they work properly in the newer WordPress version.
Use secure admin login credentials. Avoid using obvious usernames and passwords, such as your name. Make them more difficult by adding numbers and special characters. Finally, change WordPress your password regularly.
Use trusted themes and plugins. Only install rated themes and plugins with positive user reviews. Furthermore, make sure they come from trusted marketplaces like the official WordPress directory, ThemeIsle, or Themeforest. Random plugins or themes may contain malware or other malicious software.
Install SSL certificates. A secure socket layer (SSL) certificate encrypts data transmission between your WordPress website and users. It prevents hackers from stealing visitors’ personal information.
Remove unused themes and plugins. Unused themes and plugins usually remain un-updated for a while. They may have security flaws that cybercriminals can exploit.
Install a security plugin. For example, Wordfence adds an extra security layer to your site. Some of its features include a firewall, two-factor authentication (2FA), and a security scanner.
Furthermore, the server may not perform security checks normally due to increased traffic since it might lack computing resources. For this reason, scaling your WordPress to handle more traffic is even more important.

Optimize Images
Images contribute a lot to your page weight, impacting your site’s scalability. Using many large pictures will slow your page load speed, especially during traffic spikes.

However, rushing to delete all your site images might not be the best idea – like other visual elements, they are essential to keep your site visitors engaged.

Besides minimizing their number, you should optimize your WordPress site’s images to make them load faster and more efficiently.

To accomplish this, consider applying the following strategies:

Compressing. It reduces the image size without significantly lowering its quality. Use web tools such as Compressor.io to quickly compress your images.
Resizing. Using overly high-resolution images may provide no value and instead slow your site down. Resize the image according to its container dimension.
Caching images. As pictures are static content, they don’t change based on user requests. As a result, they can be served from the cached copy instead of the server.
Clearing up the WordPress media library. WordPress stores all uploaded images, including unused ones. Having too many images wastes the server’s storage, slowing down your site.
Repair Broken Links
Broken links are URLs that return an error message when visited. It may occur due to an incorrect address, back-end misconfiguration, or a server issue.

Although repairing broken links doesn’t impact a website’s performance and security, it is important for your user experience.

To get the most out of traffic spikes, your web visitors shouldn’t encounter any errors. Moreover, broken links prevent crawlers from indexing your website, harming its ranking on search engines.

To quickly find broken links on your website, use a WordPress SEO tool, such as Ahrefs and Google Search Console. You can then fix them by editing the .htaccess file or the pages’ permalinks.

Alternatively, use a plugin to fix broken links on your WordPress website. For example, Broken Link Checker allows you to quickly identify errors and repair them on a single screen.

To do so, follow the steps below:

Download and install the Broken Link Checker plugin.
Once activated, on your WordPress admin area, navigate to the sidebar → Settings → Link Checker.
Link checker menu on the WordPress sidebar
Go to the General tab → Status → Found X broken link.
Broken Link reports one broken links on your WordPress site
You will see a list of all broken links on your site. Hover over the broken link you want to repair, and choose Edit or Unlink. Select Dismiss if you found a false-positive result.
Broken link management menu on the Link Checker plugin
Automate Tracking and Reporting Site Performance
When scaling your website, it is essential to track and analyze its performance. Doing so will show you whether the site can handle high volumes of visitors, point out the areas for improvement, and help catch any potential issues.

To make this task easier, consider using an analytics tool. It provides an accurate performance report and issues alerts, eliminating the need to monitor your site 24/7.

You may need to use multiple tools for a more comprehensive performance report. Some of the most popular options are:

Google Analytics. This popular freemium website analytics tool provides a detailed breakdown of your website traffic, including visitors’ behavior, location, and journey.
Pingdom. It is a great tool with real-time monitoring and multiple test locations. It also alerts site owners via email and push notifications if an issue occurs.
Site24x7. This comprehensive tool tracks your site, web server, and network performance. Its synthetic monitoring feature also allows you to simulate how your website would perform under traffic spikes.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of servers spread across the world storing a copy of your site. It allows your website to perform consistently for users in different locations.

When users access your website, the CDN will serve their request from the closest server. It shortens the website’s data travel path, allowing the web page to load faster.

Moreover, CDN distributes the incoming traffic to different servers. This minimizes the host server’s load, allowing it to handle traffic surges better.

Aside from a speed boost, using CDN for your WordPress site also presents other benefits. It improves the site’s security, uptime, and search engine optimization (SEO) performance.

There are plenty of CDN services available at various prices. The most popular CDN service is Cloudflare, which is also available for free.

Best Practices for Scalable WordPress
To scale WordPress, you must follow several web development best practices. In this section, we will go over each of them.

Choose Managed WordPress Hosting
There are different hosting plans for various user needs. However, to scale WordPress sites, we recommend the managed hosting package.

With managed hosting, the provider will take care of the back-end aspects of running a website. It allows you to manage the site without having technical knowledge, which is ideal for beginners.

A managed WordPress hosting plan also helps simplify your scaling task, as you can focus on the front-end aspects, such as content production or design.

Before opting for managed hosting, you must understand how to choose the right provider. A reliable web hosting provider is the foundation of a well-performing and scalable website.

Here are some aspects to consider when choosing a hosting provider:

Hosting plans. Ensure the hosting provider offers a plan that suits your needs. Choose a hosting plan that suits your budget, traffic, and feature requirements.
Scalability. Choose a provider that offers a scalable WordPress hosting plan. Avoid using shared hosting with limited server resources when scaling WordPress sites.
Customer support. Look for a hosting service with excellent customer service, preferably 24/7. This way, if your host server faces an error, you will always be able to reach out for a solution.
Server resources. Pick a hosting provider with sufficient SSD storage and bandwidth. For scaling WordPress, the host server should ideally have 50% more resources than it will need when starting.
Security. Choose a reputable hosting service provider that offers additional security features, like an installed SSL certificate, a CDN, a firewall, monitoring, and automated backups.
Ease of use. Check what hosting control panel the provider offers. For better usability, choose one that has a simple user interface, such as hPanel.
At Hostinger, we offer managed WordPress hosting starting at $1.99/month. The cheapest plan comes with a free SSL certificate, weekly backup, and 24/7 support.

This scalable WordPress hosting plan is ideal for beginners – you will be able to upgrade once your site gets more traffic.

Don’t Overcrowd the Database
The WordPress database stores all of your site data, including posts, themes, and plugins. It will expand every time you add something to your site.

This database also stores information on deleted comments, spam, and post revisions. If your WordPress site has been around for some time, these files may pile up and waste storage space.

A bloated database takes longer to load, slowing down your website. Removing unused database files allows your site to load faster and more efficiently.

You can optimize your WordPress database using its built-in tool or via phpMyAdmin. Alternatively, use an optimization plugin such as WP-Optimize.

We recommend using a plugin to optimize your WordPress database, as this is the easiest way. Here is how to do so using the WP-Optimize plugin:

Download and install the plugin.
On the WordPress sidebar, navigate to WP-Optimize → Database.
WP-Optimize plugin’s database menu on the WordPress sidebar
Download and install UpdraftPlus by clicking the top hyperlink.
UpdraftPlus installation menu on the WP-Optimize plugin screen
After the installation process finishes, click Activate Plugin.
The UpdraftPlus plugin activation button
If you are redirected to another screen, go to WP-Optimize → Database.
Check the Take a backup with UpdraftPlus before doing this box.
Backup creation menu in WP-Optimize
Click the Run Optimization button next to the data type in question. Alternatively, optimize multiple data by checking the boxes and clicking Run all selected optimization.
Important! Always create a backup before clearing unused data from your WordPress database. This way, if you delete the wrong files, you will be able to restore them quickly.

Aside from optimizing, WordPress recommends adjusting your database settings. Enable query caching and proper indexing to improve your MySQL or MariaDB database performance.

Limit Autoloaded Queries
Your WordPress site’s database may have data that loads automatically upon visit. This autoloaded data is usually related to plugins, widgets, and themes.

Whenever a user accesses your website, MySQL or MariaDB automatically sends queries requesting this data. More data means more autoloaded queries to send and process.

Your website may slow down if there are too many autoloaded queries. To make sure this is not an issue, check the number of autoloaded queries and disable some of them via phpMyAdmin. To do so, follow the steps below:

Log in to your hosting control panel. For this tutorial, we will use hPanel.
Select the Hosting tab from the top bar.
Hosting menu in hPanel home screen
Click the Manage button next to the domain in question.
Scroll down to Databases → phpMyAdmin → Enter phpMyAdmin.
phpMyAdmin menu in the hPanel hosting settings screen
On the phpMyAdmin page, go to the SQL tab.
The SQL tab in phpMyAdmin
Paste the following code into the designated field. If you don’t use the default wp_ prefix, change the wp_options:
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE autoload LIKE ‘yes’;
Click Go to run the command.
The SQL command execution button in phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin will show you a list of autoloaded data. Select Delete → OK to remove unnecessary autoloaded data. Alternatively, disable it by clicking the Edit button.
Scroll down to the Autoload section. On the designated field, replace yes with no.
The autoload value field in phpMyAdmin
Click Go to save the changes.
The maximum number of autoloaded queries your server can handle may vary. Regardless, ensure that you don’t delete or disable queries that affect your site’s functionality.

Aside from phpMyAdmin, you can also use a plugin such as Advanced Database Cleaner for this task. This method is ideal for WordPress users who aren’t familiar with database management.

Don’t Overcrowd the Site With Plugins
Having too many WordPress plugins can harm your website’s performance.

WordPress plugins and their generated files take up a lot of disk space in your website storage. If you run out of storage space, you can’t add more files to scale your website.

In addition, using incompatible or poorly-coded plugins can slow your website down even more. They are less efficient to run, thus demanding more server resources.

Even worse, they might expose your website to security threats, as such plugins are easier to exploit for hackers.

Pro Tip
Before installing a plugin, check its user ratings, reviews, and the number of active installations to ensure its legitimacy. Furthermore, make sure it is compatible with your current WordPress version.

Here is how to remove unnecessary plugins from your WordPress site:

Log in to your website’s wp-admin page.
Navigate to the sidebar → Installed Plugins.
The installed plugins management menu in WordPress
Find the plugin you want to uninstall. If it is active, click Deactivate.
An unused WordPress plugin’s deactivation button
Click Delete to remove the plugin.
An unused WordPress plugin’s deletion button
Conclusion
Sometimes, your WordPress website may slow down or become inaccessible due to unexpected traffic spikes. A poorly performing website may drive visitors away, wasting the high traffic.

To avoid this, you can scale your website to make it responsive and perform consistently under heavy traffic. In this article, we have explained seven methods to scale your WordPress site:

Optimize your site’s loading speed.
Enable caching using a plugin.
Implement the best security practices.
Optimize your site’s images.
Repair broken links.
Use a content delivery network (CDN) service.
To improve your scaling effort, use a reliable, managed WordPress hosting service. In addition, uninstall unnecessary plugins to improve your site’s performance. Finally, don’t overcrowd your database.

We hope this article helps you understand how to scale your WordPress site. If you have a question, don’t hesitate to leave it in the comment section below. Good luck!