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High Website Traffic? When Is It Time To Move Your Site To WordPress Enterprise Hosting?
You have a high website traffic problem, your server is constantly crashing and it’s dreadfully slow for users. Think your site wouldn’t benefit from WordPress Enterprise Hosting right about now? Do you sell products, teach courses, or publish 20 times a day? Enterprise activity requires enterprise hosting.
Then again, if you’re reading this, you’re already running WordPress websites for your clients, or you’re at least interested in creating websites for them in WordPress. That’s probably a good idea! WordPress powers almost half of all CMS-based websites today, from international companies to schools and shops, and probably even your mum’s blog.
“62% of the top 100 fastest growing companies in the US (Inc. 5000) use WordPress.”
TechJury.net
Maybe your websites are already up and running, and traffic and sales are increasing. Congratulations!
Now you’re asking yourself when is it time to move your sites into a larger place. When is it time to move to WordPress Enterprise Hosting?
WordPress Starts Off Small So You and Your Clients Can Win Big!
If your client’s websites are big, they’re probably big companies – or enterprises (enterprise CMS, enterprise hosting, Starship Enterprise — that’s where the name comes from). Franchises will often have a large website or group of websites. Larger websites require a bigger and high traffic website hosting solution.
So you’ve got a big website. “That don’t impress me much …” You know the song. Managing a large site brings with it a whole new set of problems with high website traffic. And opportunities!
“Web hosting may be the internet’s most underappreciated element. Everything you love about being online lives on a server that an individual or company pays to keep up and running so that you can access it.”
PCMag.com
How Much Webspace Do I Need for a WordPress Site?
That’s the ten thousand dollar question. Try Googling that. It completely depends on what your website needs to do. A website isn’t just about disk space, either. It’s about bandwidth. And growth, and not just today but tomorrow. What will your website need to do in two years? Three years? Five?
WordPress Disk Space
To launch your WordPress website, you should have an idea of what those websites are going to be doing. Here are a few examples of websites and their disk space usage:
- Client A has 24 WordPress blogging websites using 12GB of their 100GB disk space allocation.
- Client B has 10 WordPress nonprofit websites using 6GB of their 20GB disk space allocation.
- Client C has 5 WordPress shop websites using 4GB of their 10GB disk space allocation.
Hosting Bandwidth
In addition to disk space, you need to consider bandwidth use. Bandwidth is the amount of data exchanged between users and the server throughout a given month.
For example, if you have a page with a size of 1MB, each visit to this page will use 1MB from your bandwidth. So, per 100 visitors a day, you need 100MB daily and 3GB bandwidth monthly.
Our WordPress Enterprise hosting packages include at least 1 Terabyte of disk space and 1 Terabyte of Bandwidth with unlimited requests. That’s big. That’s fast, too!
“Does your website have a lot of interactions? Are you running eCommerce or eLearning platforms? You know users will not want to wait around for that image to load; they also aren’t going to wait for a lagging mouse event.”
Rocket.net
How Big are Your Clients’ Websites?
So, how many websites do you manage? Are these blogs? Dentist offices? Are they WooCommerce webshops? Are your clients photographers relying on images for their portfolio website or are they writers with a profile image on the author page? Before going to IKEA to buy boxes, you should know how many you need.
If you were to start a project based on an open-source CMS like WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, you actually hardly need more than a few hundred megabytes of disk space. WordPress out of the box is only about 9MB. Drupal is 15MB. It’s once you start adding themes and plugins of course, this number will grow – fast!
What comes on top of the CMS will be, of course, your images, videos, and anything else your website needs. WordPress itself will be the smallest amount of space you require.
Example WordPress setup:
- WordPress CMS: 9MB
- Themes: each circa 5MB (the 2017 theme is 1.3MB, while Avada is around 6MB)
- Plugins: each about 15-25MB (Jetpack is 20MB, Yoast SEO is 14MB)
- Images: depends on your website (example website 17MB)
- Database once your website gets going: (example website) 40 MB
FunFact: SEOs are still talking about Google’s news that it only goes through the first 15MB of your website’s HTML. Our example website, and others, are only 3 MB. The HTML of 99% of websites is going to be very light.
“There are very few pages on the internet that are bigger in size. You, dear reader, are unlikely to be the owner of one since the median size of an HTML file is about 500 times smaller: 30 kilobytes (kB). However, if you are the owner of an HTML page that’s over 15 MB, perhaps you could at least move some inline scripts and CSS dust to external files, pretty please.”
Google Developer
Is That an Unoptimized Image I See Before Me?
Your websites aren’t using images just to make a pretty picture. Images serve to help your clients. They can save your clients a thousand words. They can save your clients a thousand words. Be careful how large those images are.
Let’s see. How big are your client’s websites? Choose one. You can test them on a variety of tools, such as WebPageTest.org.
Our example website breakdown was as follows:
- 60% Images
- 30% Javascript
- 6% CSS
- 2% fonts
- 2% HTML
See all those images? They account for 60% of our website’s weight. Images weighing us down is, of course, a serious SEO issue because our websites load slower. All the more important is that your WordPress hosting is lightning fast — whenever and wherever your website is viewed. Our Cloudflare Enterprise CDN not only caches your content (including those images) as close as possible to your visitors, but it also optimizes your content on the fly without the use of additional plugins.
“Search engines will look at your web page like you might look at a big vat of Crisco: You can’t seriously be considering putting that on your website, right?”
SearchEngineJournal
Do I Need Hosting for My WordPress Website?
Ideally, yes. Why? WordPress needs a browser to display a website. The browser turns the PHP, HTML, Javascript etc., together with the content found in your database and the images and other files you uploaded, into your great-looking website.
For the magic to happen, the browser looks to your server because that’s where everything your site requires is stored. Finding the best hosting solution for your high traffic website needs is critical for success.
You can run a server locally on your own computer too. XAMPP, for instance, can be installed on your own computer. This is a very common way to test your websites locally before it’s uploaded to your web host. You probably do this.
If you want your websites to be seen by the public, as we’re sure your clients do, then you will probably want a hosting package offered through a hosting company. It’s possible to connect your computer to the internet and use it as a server, although the configuration process may be too complicated for many people. In addition, you would need to have your computer (server) on all the time and have a really good internet connection.
Hosting takes care of the physical machines, connections to the DNS server, the main web server, database, and everything else your website needs. Hosting ensures your website is up and running so you don’t have to.
While you don’t need WordPress-specific hosting, it does have many benefits. Hosting companies that specialize in a specific CMS know its tricks, trials, and tribulations. They’re specialists focused on optimizing WordPress websites. You wouldn’t leave your Porsche in the hands of a Hyundai mechanic, would you?
Is WordPress Hosting Good for Enterprise-Level Websites?
Of course, WordPress is a great solution for enterprise-level websites and the best solution for them is enterprise hosting. The following companies use WordPress:
Our WordPress Enterprise Hosting Platform powers many of the world’s highest traffic websites.
From WooCommerce stores processing thousands of orders and key government officials to large media and ad tech websites, Rocket provides the fastest and most secure infrastructure for your business.
Can WordPress (Really) Handle High Website Traffic?
WordPress itself is unlimited in terms of how much traffic it can handle. That goes for other CMS, too. What’s important when it comes to traffic is your server’s ability to withstand heavy traffic.
How much traffic does your website have each day? Don’t be shy. More than 50% of local business websites get less than 500 visits a month (Search Engine Journal).
Let’s say your website has 10,000 visitors, and maybe they all come at once. Then your server needs to handle 10,000 concurrent users.
These websites get millions of visits each day, and they all run on WordPress:
- healthline.com 177 million visits
- nypost.com 127 million visits
- realtor.com 122 million visits
(April 2022 source: semrush.com)
High website traffic tends to be the tipping point from Managed WordPress Hosting to Enterprise WordPress Hosting, but it is just one of the reasons you should consider enterprise-level hosting. Peace of mind is the other. Getting your clients’ websites into a hosting package that is future-safe makes you look good. Remove one of those pain points so you can focus on helping your clients with their next content marketing campaign. Let someone else do the heavy server lifting.
We’d Love to Show You How Our WordPress Enterprise Hosting Benefits Your Agency or Business!
Let’s talk about how we can help your enterprise clients and migrate your portfolio of client sites to Rocket.net, the fastest WordPress hosting in the world.
