Traffic should only be conceived negatively if we’re talking about stacks of motor vehicles going nowhere. Whereas with traffic for a website it’s an entirely different occurrence, and one that is entirely desirable if you have a website for your business. More ‘traffic’ means more potential customers arriving at the site, and there’s everything to like about that if you’re leaning on the site as an integral part of making your business both viable and profitable. Many small businesses choose to go the cost-effective route and have their website built on the WordPress platform, and one thing that WordPress hosting Canada for high traffic sites will do is use clustering when the site on a virtual private server.
Going with a VPS is going to be recommended for any site that expects to see high volumes of traffic, and there are added site security benefits too when you have a virtual private server. But the bulk of the appeal is always going to be in the way that all the server resources are made available to your site exclusively. And if you are a small business owner who’s leaning on their site just as much any other but you’re also super busy and not so savvy with webmaster tasks then it makes a lot of sense to go with Managed WordPress hosting with clustering. The term clustering may be something that’s foreign to you, so that’s what we’ll look at with this week’s blog entry.
It has everything to do with facilitating better site operation, and more specifically improving the location of resources so that none of them are in position to be encumbering the server from receiving and responding to server requests. Which is at the heart of what happens when a potential customer who’s come across your site in their search results proceeds to click through to it. A request goes to the server, and that part of it will always occur in the same manner. But what can vary is how that server is able to respond to the server request based on the site’s configuration.
It’s here that VPS clustering has it’s value in improving the site’s ability to handle server requests when they are coming fast and furiously. But again, this is exactly what you want to be happening with your business website and this is the type of traffic that you want to be experiencing. What happens on your commute home at the end of the workday is likely to be an entirely different story with that type of traffic.
Scale, Then Build Clusters
VPS hosting for high traffic WordPress websites is always going to best. The ability to use clustering to group similar web documents or pages to improve information retrieval, organization, and search engine visibility is a proven-effective way to be getting more out of website with regards to promoting your business and making it more visible to your growing customer base.
Much of making clusters work is tied into scaling of the website, and it’s a standard process for any site that needs to be reconfigured to better accommodate traffic spikes. With that growth will come new technical issues, and most notably with performance, uptime, and loading speed. Go with WordPress hosting Canada for high traffic sites and you’ll be better equipped with the right resources and server configurations, but dependent on whether or not your know what to do with them. If not then Managed WordPress hosting with clustering is what you want to be considering as all of this will be taken care of for you, following proven hosting and performance strategies that help your WordPress blog thrive under pressure.
Caching is also a primary component in this process, but not in a good way and so you need to be careful about caching your site if you’re experiencing traffic spikes to your site now.
Caching can negatively influence server response speed, and every much so in any instances where thousands of visitors are hitting your homepage daily. If it’s a WordPress site and you need to be caching, however, then it’s better to go with plugins like LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache.
These plugins also offer object caching, database cleanup, and lazy loading, three important things to speed up response times and reduce load on your server, especially if you are on shared hosting. But as we will always continue to stress here it is so much better to have VPS hosting for high traffic WordPress websites if your business is increasingly visible to the extent that you have so many more potential customers entering at any time.
Cluster Along with a CDN
Using a CDN is also conducive to getting better results from site clustering, and that’s because the website’s static content is distributed more equally on the web hosting server. It includes content like images, CSS, and JavaScript across multiple servers worldwide. It ensures the visitors get content served from the nearest geographical location, reduced latency, and enhanced load times. A properly-configured CDN means your origin server will receive fewer requests. This even applies to a shared hosting setup - traffic spikes can be handled without being overwhelmed, although not to nearly the same extent as would be the case with a VPS.
Database optimization is also recommended here, as without it the benefits that come from page clustering can be lessened because of clutter building up in the database. Example of this can be post revisions, transients, spam comments, and outdated metadata. As this stuff builds up it starts to slow down the queries, adds extra load on the servers, and affects the responsiveness of the sites. As a rule clean databases respond to queries quicker, and when this occurs with large amounts of concurrent users on a non-VPS framework hosting setup the site becomes that much more capable of handling traffic spikes.
Circling back to why managed WordPress hosting with clustering is best it is also true that it’s helpful when your host is the one responsible for seeing to SSD NVMe storage, SSD NVMe storage, LiteSpeed or NGINX web servers, HTTP/3 support, and account limits per server.
Guaranteed CPU and RAM allocations are also on the menu when you opt to pay more for managed website hosting for a WordPress business site, but for business owners all they’ll need to have is the assurance that their site won’t be throttled due to a traffic spike on the same server.
Sites that are dynamic content heavy - images, videos, downloadable content, etc - may also want to offload this media to 3rd-party storage or platforms. One popular method is to offload videos directly to YouTube or Vimeo. Amazon S3 storage is good for blogs that use a lot of images, and it really can serve as an external media library that is linked your WordPress site.
This frees up a significant amount of bandwidth and storage consumption on your shared server, allowing system resources to be freed up to serve core content and increasing overall stability during high load.
Moderating Server Processing Loads
Every plugin you have active at any time increases the processing server load, and so you will need to be selective with them if you have a high-traffic websites. If you can identify redundant or poorly coded ones then it will be best to remove them. The greater resources made available with VPS hosting for high traffic WordPress websites may make this a less-pressing matter, but even then you may find that some plugins are taking away from the gains you’ve made with clustering.
Some of the worst ones in this regards are plugins that frequently call external APIs. In general it’s best to go with lightweight themes if you are working on building good webpage clusters for your small business WordPress website. GeneratePress, Astra, or Blocksy are good ones. The last thing we’ll mention in this look at WordPress hosting Canada for high traffic sites is that if for any reason you find yourself needing to migrate the site then it’s best to avoid any major element changes. Usually there’s not going to be any reason to do that, but it’s something you should be aware of.
We’re always here to talk with anyone who’s got a WordPress site for their Canadian business and is considering moving over to Managed WordPress web hosting. There’s all sorts of reasons why that’s likely a good idea, and we’ll lay them out for you. And we can also provide explanations around the need for PIPEDA-compliant hosting Canada if your site collects data generated by customers at the website.
