Blog Tipz

If you have a blog – large or small, run on WordPress or Blogger – you realize that huge traffic spikes will come at some point during your time as a blogger. The more of them you receive, the faster your blog will grow, but you need a great approach to managing them in order to really see their benefits.

When a post on your blog becomes “popular,” lots of people will click through various social networking services, including Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and several others. The “Digg Effect,” as it was once called, still exists today, but there are better ways of getting around the problem and more ways to reap benefits of having increased traffic for a period of time.

Shanghai Rollercoaster by Jakob Montrasio

A Little Background on Traffic Spikes

Traffic spikes can happen at any time of the day, even when you are least suspecting it. Even if you have an older post that is valuable, it may receive thousands of visitors over a brief period of time, years after you originally published it. These spikes are great enough that they can bring down the most popular sites, powered by expensive servers, especially if you don’t have your site configured properly.

Let’s say you have an article with lots of images. Web pages can easily be over ten megabytes, and when you have thousands of visitors per hour hitting these pages, your server will experience a lot of strain. This is even more true if you have your site hosted on a “shared” server, with hundreds, if not thousands of other sites. The spike will mean the server is delivering gigabytes of bandwidth per hour.

Your goal when having a traffic spike is to keep your site up as long as possible. You want these visitors, even though they may not be as “high quality,” as you’ll still be able to convert some of these visitors into readers or customers.

A Few Tips on What to Take from Traffic Spikes

As I already stated, traffic spikes can be valuable. Realize that you won’t get return rates as high as those found when people land on your site from search engines, but not as low as if you were severing non-relevant advertising on sites outside of your niche.

1. First of all, plan for the future. If you have a site focused on content such as photos and videos, you’ll want to invest in a good hosting plan. Sure, shared hosting services offer great value, but having dedicated hosting can pay for itself fi your receive a lot of traffic.
2. Have a good site layout. First impressions matter, so take the time to design your site, customize it from a pre-designed layout, or have a professional website designer code you a design.
3. Use plugins to their full potential. There are lots of great plugins out there that will help you convert more of your casual visitors into readers, so have them configured to work properly when the spike comes.
4. Monetize and optimize your site. Don’t clutter your site with Google AdSense ads, as it’ll give your site a trashy look. Draw in quality advertisers before your site gets huge spikes. Your advertisers will see more benefits from these spikes if you get them before major spikes.
5. Integrate analytics and stat tracking beforehand. You’ll be able to see the effects of these traffic spikes and help better optimize your site for the future. Check out these 10 alternatives to Google Analytics if you are looking for alternatives.

Keep a few of these in mind as we look at some of the basic methods of dealing with traffic spikes. You can adapt them to suit the needs of your website, depending on what type of site you run and what kind of server you have your site hosted on.

Converting Users

There are a number of plugins available to help you convert more users into readers. They should be installed before any traffic spike, so you won’t be struggling with the high bandwidth usage.

Converting your users into readers is key – you’ll see more benefits in the long-term than if you simply work on increasing income from these spikes.

• Referrer Detector – This plugin will display a welcome message and a link to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your site. For example, for people visiting your site from Google, your message may read as “Hello Googler! If you find this post any useful, please support by digging or subscribing to the RSS feed for more interesting posts to come in the future.”
• Toolbars (Gigya) – Plugins like the Gigya toolbar can help your readers share the post, and they can be sometimes be non-obtrusive and help your readers share your content if they like it.
• Subscribe to Comments – The Subscribe to Comments plugin can help your new readers stay up-to-date on a post with a lot of discussion stemming from it.
• AWeber Integration – This plugin, or similar ones, can help you increase readership through a newsletter-type method and you’ll be able to grow your “list” of people who are subscribed to you.

Traffic Management and Optimization

Now that you’ve incorporated a number of tools into your blog, it is time to manage your traffic to ensure your site remains up for as long as possible. Again, you want to set these up before you even begin to experience the traffic spikes, and make sure they are configured properly.

Use a Performance Plugin such as the W3 Total Cache Plugin, which includes a number of options for setting up an optimized and cached site. When fully configured, you can see up to a 10x performance improvement. In addition, you can save money by reducing your bandwidth. A number of tools have also been included for using CDN (content delivery network). By total number of downloads, the WP Super Cache Plugin is feature-rich, but contains less features (thus it is easier to install and use).

These caching plugins will also help you manage traffic when your site isn’t experiencing huge spikes, so it is best that you install them as you are setting up your site.

Contact Your Hosting Provider as they will be able to help you in the event your site goes down. They may be able to quickly isolate the problem, although you may very likely be persuaded to upgrade your hosting plan or move to a different provider if this problem persists for more than a few hours.

Reduce the Size of Images on your site. For example, use image sprits – see this article for more information – which will help minimize the number of requests to your server. Another general rule is to use JPG and PNG (or GIF) images appropriately. Generally, PNG images are better for text images, while JPG are great for most photographs without text due to the compression formats.

Use a CDN to help off-load the images and files on your site. Many of the most popular sites in the world use this technique, as it reduces costs and speeds up the load time of sites. Use the W3 Total Cache Plugin to integrate them into your site.

Optimize Your Theme, as many themes come un-optimized. If you aren’t taking advantage of particular features, it may be time to remove them to speed up the load time of your site. Generally, templates (without images) should be less than a 100KB in size.

BrowserMob is a unique tool that I recently discovered that uses real browser users for website load testing, providing better AJAX support, and clearer reporting of the load of your website. You’ll also be able to monitor the uptime of your site through their service. Pricing ranges from free to nearly $2,000 per month, but if your income depends on your site’s uptime, then tools like this can help.

Conclusion

Have a good plan for when your site experiences huge traffic spikes. Remember, take advantage of every visitor you receive, as you should value each of them equally. Invest in quality plugins and hosting providers and you shouldn’t deal with much downtime – keep uptime above 99.9% to ensure your visitors are able to access your site most of the time. Even with a percentage at this level, you’ll still experience about seven hours of downtime per year, or about one minute per day.

Has your site ever experienced the “Digg Effect,” and how did/do you deal with the problem?