How Much Traffic Can Your Website Handle?

In today’s times, a website is an important aspect of a business. From marketing products and services to provide a contact point to people, websites are digital offices of a brand. When users visit a site, they tend to equate the site experience with the experience they can expect from the brand. Hence, it is important to ensure that your site performs optimally at all times.

When you launch a website, you look at web hosting plans and choose the one that is best suited for your website. You try to estimate the traffic and factor in a certain rate of growth to choose the resources needed in the plan. While most new site owners opt for Shared Hosting plans, choosing adequate resources is essential for the hosting server to support your site optimally.

Today, we are going to talk about ways in which you can assess the volume of traffic that your website can handle so that you can ensure the availability of resources beforehand.

The Fundamental way of measuring your site’s traffic capacity

If your site receives one user every 30 seconds with a browsing time of 25 seconds, then it can manage around 2800 visitors per day. Also, each visitor will get all the resources dedicated to him.

However, in the real world, there are times during the day when the site traffic is minimal or at its peak. Hence, one of the most critical aspects to consider while determining the traffic capacity of your website is looking at the number of concurrent users or simultaneous users.

Concurrent users are visitors who access your site at the same time for different requests. To ensure that you have adequate resources available, you must calculate the number of concurrent users at different time intervals.

Here are some tips to determine the highest number of concurrent users and assessing your site’s traffic capacity:

  • Monitor the active users on your website. Usually, site analytical tools like Google Analytics offers 30-minute charts of active users. This can allow you to ascertain the highest number of concurrent users during peak hours to determine the maximum load you can expect.
  • Assess the page views per minute and per second as an average value across a day. This will give you a bird’s-eye view of the load that your site can manage.

Prepare for traffic spikes

With search engines and social media platforms driving online traffic, traffic spikes have become a common occurrence. While predicting a spike can be difficult, there are three primary factors that are considered to be the drivers of viral content online. These are humour, authenticity, and social debate. While you cannot predict the height of the spike, even if your site receives a low but stable number of visitors, you must account for spikes around 30 times your normal average traffic.

Summing Up

As a site owner, it is important to have an accurate idea of the traffic capacity of your website as it can help you plan marketing and promotional activities accordingly. Also, if you are experiencing a steady increase in traffic and not just spikes, then you can consider moving to a higher Shared Hosting plan to ensure uninterrupted site performance. Most new website owners opt for Shared Hosting for the ease of use and affordability. However, if you feel your Shared Hosting plan cannot cope with the traffic spike, you can move to a higher plan.