Users really dislike when the online resource they need is 'slow.' Data indicate that 57% of users will leave a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load, and 47% are only willing to wait two seconds. A one-second delay can cost 7% of conversions and lead to a 16% drop in user satisfaction.
Therefore, it is essential to prepare for increased load and spikes in traffic. Today, we'll discuss how to do this.
Note: the material is aimed not at system administration gurus but rather at business website owners, so it has a more overview nature.
1. Use Caching
The more content on the site that can be cached to avoid loading it every time a user visits the page, the better. Typically, a significant portion of content is static and does not need to be constantly reloaded. Caching is especially important during traffic spikes and can not only help speed up the site but also save resources.
If you have a simple site on, say, WordPress, caching plugins like or .
2. Handle Only Useful Traffic
According to from research, nearly 40% of all traffic on the modern internet is generated by bots. Bots can be either good – like search engine crawlers – or bad. The latter includes various parsers that analyze and extract data.
In the corporate internet segment, the situation is even worse – here, the volume of bad bot traffic can 42%. For companies, this is detrimental for two reasons. Firstly, bad bots can be deployed by competitors to steal content or gather important business data; secondly, bot traffic creates significant additional strain on the infrastructure.
Eliminating the problem and reducing the load on the website can be achieved using filtering systems, but for them to work correctly, calibration must be carried out individually for each site. To do this, bot traffic can be simulated. An excellent tool for simulating such load is using services like , which allows you to rent residential proxies.
Many modern bots use resident IPs, which means that a large number of such addresses will be needed for quality testing.
3. Balance the Load
Explore the available options for load balancing tools. There are three types of such solutions – hardware-based, cloud-based, and software load balancers.
The hardware options are likely to be quite expensive for small companies or startup creators, so we will focus more on the other two options.
Among popular cloud tools, we can mention – it is often used by companies experiencing issues due to traffic spikes. Among software options, we can mention , serious load balancing capabilities are built into the web server .
4. Optimize Content Delivery
Another step that will be useful during network activity spikes is to use a CDN or Content Delivery Network. Essentially, it is a set of servers worldwide that can be used to deliver content to users via the most optimal route.
Typically, a website's content is located on a main server in a single location, so when requests come from different places, the responses may reach users unevenly – resulting in delays. The further a user is from the server hosting the website, the longer they have to wait for a response.
A CDN caches files on various servers and 'fetches' them for delivery to the user from the closest server in the network. This allows for a customized delivery route for each user and significantly speeds up the entire system's performance.
According to you can find a whole list of CDNs that are suitable for use with websites.
5. Use Compression
File compression is another tool for speeding up website loading. Many high-load resources include to reduce the size of website files for upload and transmission.
Gzip works like this – the tool searches for repeated lines in a file and replaces the second instance with a pointer to the previous line. When the browser unpacks the received file, it goes through the lines in it, reads the pointer, and displays the "removed" content. This can reduce the overall file size by up to 70%. Some hosting providers include Gzip compression by default, but it’s better to manually check this setting.
Source: habr.com
