User retention depends solely on the experience they get when browsing through a website and if it fails to load promptly (it’s reported that most users will abandon a page in 8 seconds if it doesn’t load) then that lead is long gone and the probability of them coming back is… unlikely.
However, there are a few things that can be done to avoid and have a good response to an influx of new users into our website:
- Be prepared beforehand, if there’s the prediction that there’ll be an increase in traffic due to a specific holiday coming or if there was a recent release in the company, contact the web host and review the possibility of increasing the server’s capacity. This is why it’s always important to choose a scalable hosting platform.
- Redistribute traffic to avoid bottlenecks, with the use of load balancing which helps leverage user load through a device called load balancer that distributes traffic across multiple servers.
- Ensure content is optimized, all images and videos should be in formats that are web-friendly and have acceptable sizes that won’t affect page load. Web pages as well should be delivered in compressed files that are not too large.
- Keep track of traffic reports, traffic surges are unexpected but it’s possible to plan for them if there’s an understanding of the pattern they usually happen in.
Besides the things we can do to have a strategy in place when traffic rises, other things can be avoided so there are no noticeable fails or mistakes in the way we handle our servers, such as:
- Don’t have your site working at full capacity at all times, it’s costly and unnecessary.
- Don’t overcompress files, examine your website and accept there are places where space can’t be saved.
- Don’t think of your website as an indestructible piece of software, fails are bound to happen at some point in their lifecycle and the best we can do is be prepared beforehand.
As we stated before, it is important to have a scalable hosting solution, a hosting provider that will correctly respond to adversity and is willing to go above and beyond to protect the integrity of your website. To learn more about how to prepare your website for a traffic surge, contact us at Rootstack.
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