Guide to Scaling WordPress for High Traffic Enterprise Websites

by Vipe Team in WordPress Development; Published on 15.01.2022

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What does scalability mean in terms of web development, and what types of businesses need to have scalable websites?

Our WordPress agency for enterprise can assure you that scalability is absolutely essential for large-scale organizations, as well as any type of business that regularly deals with large strains of traffic.

However, scalability shouldn’t be a requirement only for big websites. After all, you never know when your content might go viral, resulting in a sudden spike in traffic. This means that you have to be prepared. Be prepared for success or be prepared to accept your failure.

Obviously, “failure” is not an option for serious business owners who want to make a name for their companies and prove to the whole world that their products or services are the best of the best.

Thankfully, you can scale your site to its full potential while you’re in the process of WordPress website development and pave your road to success with the best practices from the web development world.

Scaling your WordPress site does not have to be a difficult process. Some of the most important steps you should take include testing your site, identifying the aspects that cause poor load times, and selecting a dependable host provider.

In today’s guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about WordPress’ scalability, and we’ll tell you what actions you can take to guarantee your site stays fast and reliable even under a heavy “rain of traffic”. Let’s begin!

WordPress Equals Scalability: Here’s Why

First things first. Our WordPress Agency for Development knows that you might be wondering what sets WordPress apart from any other CMS on the market when it comes to scalability?

Well, WordPress is, without a doubt, the most popular content management system in the world that powers 43.2% of all websites (according to the latest statistics). Many of the top sites on the Internet rely on WordPress as their CMS of choice, including giants such as The Walt Disney Company.

The very fact that companies of such an enormous proportion have opted for WordPress proves that this CMS can practically be scaled to infinity (and beyond).

What’s more, our WordPress development agency has come to understand that according to various research, scalability is the most important factor that helps large-scale organizations (namely enterprises) in their decision to choose WordPress.

WordPress is a super flexible platform. With it, you get a robust ecosystem, advanced security, and the non-stop dedication of skilled WordPress developers who work night and day across the whole globe to ensure that the CMS is up to date with the latest innovations from the web development world.

However, we should warn you that just because a WordPress site can scale practically infinitely, that doesn’t mean it will magically gain “scalability superpowers” without you doing anything. In fact, various important factors determine how well your site scales. Your hosting, your setup, and your content are just some of them. In this context, we remind you that you need to do some tweaking to handle unforeseen traffic surges.

Our WordPress development company knows that whether it’s a brief spike or a sustained increase in daily sessions, the server must be able to handle the load and traffic. Otherwise, your success might be compromised.

With that being said, let’s learn a bit more about high traffic, so you can better understand the scalability practices that we’ll discuss later.

Need for Speed: Run WordPress Website Speed Check

High Traffic: What’s the Big Deal?

To fully comprehend why scalability is critical for your WordPress enterprise site, you must first understand how heavy traffic may degrade performance once you complete your WordPress development for enterprise.

As we like to say, “knowledge is power”, meaning that the more you know about the challenges that high traffic brings with itself, the easier it will be to improve the scalability of your website. Here’s what you need to know.

‘Bottlenecking’ Traffic

One of the best things about custom WordPress website development is the many themes and plugins that will be at your disposal. By default, the majority of WordPress themes and plugins should be able to handle a medium level of traffic.

However, if there happens to be an unexpected spike in traffic, server resources may be stretched to their limits, which obviously isn’t ideal.

This is exactly what ‘bottlenecking traffic’ means – the process of overwhelming server resources. It will be best if you avoid any meetings with ‘bottlenecking traffic’ once you finish your WordPress development for enterprise.

Remember that an underperforming site will not only drive visitors away, but it will also lead your audience to think that you are unprofessional and unreliable. A big no-no.

Handling High Traffic

When it comes to handling high traffic, our WordPress agency for enterprise believes in the practice of “less is more”. This is the best strategy if you want to scale your site while minimizing ‘bottlenecks’.

So, what does “less is more” mean when it comes to sudden spikes in traffic? It means making sure that requests submitted to your site use the fewest resources possible and require the least amount of work for rendering and serving.

One way to improve your site’s performance under high traffic is by having a robust caching mechanism in place. We remind you that your server won’t be so strained every time a user makes a new request if users can access cached copies of your site.

Once you complete your WordPress website development, another thing that can be causing ‘bottlenecks’ might be your database. It’s possible to resolve this issue with various tools, but the best solution is to switch to a better hosting package.

How to Scale WordPress for High Traffic Enterprise Websites?

Like our WordPress agency for enterprise already said, WordPress is an excellent platform for large-scale organizations. The CMS is highly secure and incredibly scalable. What’s more, it can also serve thousands of users at once, which is an essential requirement of any enterprise company.

You should know by now that WordPress’ scalability is aided by the large number of performance-enhancing plugins available, as well as its flexible software architecture.

Although the WordPress base can be enhanced in several ways, investing in scalable WordPress hosting is definitely suggested for the best outcomes. We advise you to choose an agency that offers a full-package WordPress development for enterprise service (such as that offered by Vipe Studio).

This way, you’ll ensure that your site is built with a solid architecture in mind that can be regularly audited and adjusted. Additionally, the professional WordPress developers who have created your website are the ones who can offer the most reliable support.

Here are some additional best practices that will help you scale your WordPress site for high traffic!

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Choose a Lightweight WordPress Theme

Our WordPress agency for enterprise reminds you that the theme of your site is one of the most important components of your WordPress website development.

However, your theme can sometimes drag down your site, especially if it’s poorly coded or full of unnecessary features.

To ensure that your theme can handle large amounts of web traffic, we advise you to seek the professional help of WordPress developers who can create a custom theme for your website.

This way, you can be sure that your theme was built in a way that specifically caters to your page speed and scalability needs.

Use Simplified Plugins

Once you finish your WordPress development for enterprise, you might be tempted to take full advantage of the enormous plugin library that the CMS offers and install hundreds of different tools to enhance the performance of your site.

However, we should warn you that every plugin you install increases the weight of your site and can potentially expose you to some risks and dangers.

This is why our WordPress agency for enterprise always recommends the “less is more” approach when it comes to plugins. We advise you to choose your plugins carefully and delete those that you no longer use or find unnecessary.

Perform Load Testing

When you finalize your WordPress development for enterprise, it will be best if you get into the regular habit of running load tests. This practice will ensure that your site can meet the unique traffic expectations and goals you have set.

It’s crucial to perform load tests regularly and especially after any updates or changes have been made on your site. It is also a good idea to do load testing when you suspect you’re nearing a new traffic spike (for example, before a Black Friday sale on your WooCommerce store).

Advanced Scalability Practices for Enterprise Organizations

The best WordPress scalability practices we discussed until now are broader and easier to implement, even if you aren’t the most tech-savvy person out there.

However, our WordPress agency for enterprise wants to provide you with scalability solutions that are a bit more advanced and are used by expert WordPress developers like the ones at Vipe Studio.

Here’s our best piece of advice for you!

Maintain Control Over Your Options Table

Earlier in the article, we discussed how your database might cause a traffic ‘bottleneck’. It’s easy to see why this is true. After all, your database is responsible for storing all of the data on your WordPress site.

Once you complete your WordPress development for enterprise, you should know that the Options table is one place where possible ‘bottlenecks’ might be found. So, what is this Options table we’re talking about?

If you want to access the Options table (or wp_options for default setups), you can use phpMyAdmin or the equivalent service that your host provides.

Our WordPress agency for enterprise warns you that tinkering with the database might cause your installation to malfunction, so we recommend backing up your site first or entrusting expert WordPress developers with the job at hand.

You’ll notice that the option_value column in the Options table has the LONGTEXT string type. This basically implies that each column may contain up to 4GB of data in a single row.

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However, just because something is conceivable does not mean it should be done. So, it is not advisable to store that much data in a single row.

When you uninstall unneeded plugins and switch to a lighter theme, you will see a reduced table size. Yet, some badly-coded plugins leave traces of data behind, even after they have been removed.

This means that when you’re fully done with your WordPress development for enterprise, you should focus on optimizing your database. Of course, if you work with professional WordPress developers, like the ones at Vipe Studio, you’ll sleep safe and sound knowing that your database is in the right hands.

Deal With Autoloaded Queries

Our WordPress agency for enterprise wants you to know that some of the data from your tables is ‘autoloaded’. This data is usually connected to your widgets, themes, and plugins.

Autoloaded queries might actually affect your site’s speed performance. This is why, if you notice any page load speed problems, you should look at the number of queries that are being autoloaded.

Essentially, what you’ll need to do is perform MySQL queries on your database. We advise you to keep autoloaded queries to around 200 on any particular WordPress page. Of course, exceeding this number isn’t always a bad thing.

All in all, once you finish your WordPress development for enterprise, an overwhelming number of autoloaded queries will usually mean that your site is still bearing the weight of outdated themes and plugins. We remind you that getting rid of those might enhance the performance and scalability of your website.

You may wipe away unwanted autoloaded data using a variety of additional techniques. Whatever you do, though, just don’t forget to first back up your website.

Scale Your Enterprise WordPress Site to Unseen Heights!

This concludes our guide on scaling WordPress for high traffic enterprise websites. Our WordPress agency for enterprise needs you to remember that the scalability of your site does not have a limit and can be expanded as much as you want it to.

Expert WordPress developers are definitely the ones who can scale your site in the most effective way but it wouldn’t hurt if you also follow some of the best practices from the web development world. This will ensure that you’re always up to date with the latest advancements.

Remember that even though WordPress is the most scalable solution on the CMS market, this wouldn’t automatically make your WordPress site a scalable sight to behold. Scalability is not a magic spell – it is something that needs constant and serious work.

So, if you’re running a large-scale, complicated website, it is best to regularly test and tweak your site to ensure its maximum scalability.

Of course, you can always rely on professional WordPress developers who can help you scale your website to whole new heights.

Vipe Studio offers a world-class WordPress development for enterprise service that is specifically designed to cater to the needs of even the largest of organizations. Our programmers are highly skilled in writing clean and efficient code that is guaranteed to skyrocket the performance of your enterprise-level website.

Many successful businesses have already benefited from the long-term partnership with Vipe Studio, and we can’t wait to hear everything about your one-of-a-kind project too. So, don’t hesitate and contact us today. We’re awaiting your inquiry!