So you had a groundbreaking idea. You gathered enough courage to try and transform that idea into a plan and become an internet writer. Then you went and purchased a web hosting, a domain name, a nice WordPress theme and launched your WordPress site. Now, after some time things are looking good, you are getting more clicks and you start to worry that your site may crash. Here we will provide you with essential information and advice on how to avoid that uncomfortable situation.

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Why is traffic important on WordPress

The importance of traffic on WordPress is obvious. It indicates the number of clicks your site generated, and people interested in its content. To put it in more classical terms it means more potential customers and more customers means more money.

How to Prepare Your WordPress Site for High Traffic

Firstly you will need a capable server with adequate processor power and memory that will provide you with sufficient resources to run your site without trouble.

Secondly, you need to decrease the number of graphics needed to create your WordPress site, as well as turning off plugins that are not necessary in order to unload some activity from your server.

In order to avoid traffic overages and improve performance, you should use CDN – a content delivery network that makes sure that your files are delivered from the data center nearest to the visitor.

A caching plugin can save your site when traffic rapidly increases. These plugins create HTML versions of your pages which will reduce the number of times WordPress needs to summon PHP to deliver pages.

If you are on a shared hosting plan when your traffic increases you will have to consider transferring to VPS. And if you encounter problems with your VPS plan then migrate to a dedicated server. There are some WordPress hosting companies that will offer you packages with some awesome features.

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Case Study: High Traffic WordPress Sites

Here we will take a look at how some of the high traffic sites cope with their high volumes of traffic.

Hot Air

One of the fastest growing WordPress sites out there with 45+ million views per month had to migrate to a new server only two days after launching because their developer Mark Jaquith didn’t anticipate that much growth in such a short period. He later invested in a CDN, a caching solution, and a load balancer with multiple web backends.

Digital Trends

Tom Willmot, the guy who brought us Digital Trends, another one of the high traffic sites with 33+ million views sais that in the beginning there were some code problems that needed resolving. So, as he sais: “coding plus some persistent object caching are enough, to begin with”.

Essential Plugins + Tools for High Traffic WordPress Sites

In this section, we will summarize some of the valuable plugins, tools, and solutions you can utilize in order to acquire more traffic.

• Hosting solutions (WPEngine, Cloudways, Flywheel and Media Temple)
• Improved caching (W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish Cache, Memcached and WP
• Widget Cache)
• Better comment management (Disqus, Akismet, Comment plus)
• CDN for improved performance (CloudFlare CDN & MaxCDN are both great)
• Website backups (VaultPress, BackWPup, BackupBuddy etc.)
• Analytics & tracking tools (like Munin, WordPress Stats, and Google Analytics)

Acquiring WordPress Traffic

First of all, you must do a smart keyword research and SEO. You also need to be a skillful writer and write a great blog content regularly. Good interlinkage between your posts is also important. Create brand accounts on social media because these sites attract huge volumes of traffic.

All in all, you should not be daunted by the huge amount of traffic your website generates. On the contrary, you should take this as a sign that you are doing a good job and it should encourage you to continue doing it and constantly improve until you get where you imagined being at the beginning.

Author Bio

Kira Carr is wedded to her job as a freelance writer and blogger at writersdepartment.com. She creates many amazing posts regarding helpful techniques & strategies for new bloggers and freelancers. This girl is a translator by education. She goes mad of reading American modern literature.

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