High Traffic Tips For Wordpress

April 12, 2008

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Does your blog crashed when you have digged or stumbleupon? If you have noticed in Googlelady.com there are sometimes a timeout because it was submitted in any social network site. Then I started to search about how to improve the performance of my blog to stay up in high traffic times. Also consider that Now if you use wordpress/blogs for landing pages as an affiliate marketer you will need a fast load to not get slapped by adwords quality system. Even if you have personal blog for any reason and sure that one day one of your articles will be stumbleupon, digg or will be submited in any Social networking site, then you will need to be ready before your site will be crashed.

Those tips have been taking directo from the Wordpress.org which give a good explanation and good tips about this, and also will add some tips from my side.

Have you wondered whether WordPress can handle high-volume traffic? Think of creating a high-traffic site or generating volumes of writing? Think that something you write might get enough attention to get “slashdotted” or dugg by digg, or some other high-traffic-generating site. Wonder if WordPress can handle the sheer volume of traffic or fail. Can WordPress handle all these situations?

The simple answer is “Yes,” but this is a conditional yes. There is a lot you need to consider and understand before you decide on WordPress as your publishing platform, and if you expect high traffic volumes. Running WordPress on basic shared hosting will not be sufficient for truly high-traffic sites.

Before selecting WordPress for your high-traffic site, you will need to check the following to ensure your site is ready for the anticipated traffic: The site server and it’s software, upon which WordPress is dependent, needs to be sufficient for the traffic you anticipate and expect.

Hardware Limitations

“Can WordPress handle my traffic?” is the wrong question. Virtually any blogging platform — indeed, any web application — is only able to handle as much traffic as can be supported by the hardware on which it runs.

Two physical barriers prevent your site from handling a high volume of hits:

• Processor Limitations
• Network Limitations

Processor Limitations

To serve high-traffic web sites, you will have to contend with the demand that high traffic puts on your server’s internal resources. Be sure that the general demand on your server is met by sufficient processor power and memory resources.

There can be more dependencies than what follows for publishing your WordPress site, however these are the ones that WordPress requires by default.

MySQL

WordPress, as with many blogging and web applications, depends on MySQL to store data for producing output. Every request that WordPress makes to MySQL for reading or writing data puts load on the server.

WordPress is continuously optimized to reduce the transactions required to perform its functions; However, in high-traffic situations, many simultaneous connections to the database can cause excessive load on the server. In this case, connections to the server may not complete, causing the typical “Connection timed out” response in the visitor’s browser.

In most cases, MySQL connection rates can be improved by either adjusting settings for MySQL, or providing more memory and processing power to the overworked server.

Web Service

WordPress is a web-server-neutral application, meaning that it can run on many different platforms. Apache and Linux are the most robust platforms for running WordPress, but any server that supports PHP and MySQL will do.

Make sure your host features the most up-to-date and stable version of these platforms to create a strong environment in which to run WordPress.

Choosing the best method to run PHP, the language that interprets the WordPress code, can also affect your server’s performance. In CGI mode, the server creates a new instance of the PHP program for every PHP file that a visitor requests. In shared module mode (or ISAPI), a single library instance is used for each PHP hit. There are advantages and drawbacks to each method - while choosing the method for your server, be sure to keep in mind traffic and its demands on the server.

Network Limitations

Depending on the quality of your server’s connection to the Internet, you may not be able to serve as many pages as you want to as fast as you want to serve them.

Your server’s network provider (your host or ISP) will usually connect your server to their internal network via an ethernet adapter. Adapters typically operate at certain standard maximum speeds, usually 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s, or 1Gb/s. Your server is physically incapable of transferring files of any kind in excess of this speed. There are additional barriers to your transfer rate that will likely reduce your server’s speed even more.

First, it is important to note that many of these numbers (especially the speed of your server’s network adapter) are theoretical. In practice, your server will never transfer files at the maximum rate specified by the adapter, because in addition to the actual data being transferred, the server is also sending and receiving routing information of different kinds that the internet requires to get data to your site visitors. Because of this “network overhead”, only a fraction of the full bandwidth is available for actually transferring files.

Second, your server is likely connected to various devices in your network provider’s facilities that will limit your transfer rates more than the limits on your server’s network adapter. These devices are in place because your network provider has to fraction out its limited bandwidth to many servers at its location, and all of the bandwidth must be shared.

Certain network providers allow you to “burst” data — temporarily exceed a pre-set transfer speed limit — in special cases when demand for your site content is high. The network provider’s hardware is specially designed to know when this is required. Some providers charge extra for this feature, some do not, and others do not offer this feature at all. It’s up to you to find out.

High Traffic Solutions

I have a wordpress site with over 1,000 articles and as long as you have a decent mysql cache and are using a php opcode cache (eaccelerator, xcache, etc) there is very little overhead. Dynamic pages are created in less than 0.150 second on a VPS. The search feature on wordpress leaves a great deal to be desired but not because of speed - it’s because of lack of features. Fortunately there are third party plugins that can solve that. The new tag (vs just category) feature built in to versions after 2.3 is quite powerful for organizing things too.

Using wp-super-cache for wordpress you can have thousands of simultaneous connections to your server without impossible loads. Super-cache (the successor to wp-cache2) compiles the pages literally to static html files (transparently) that are then served directly via htaccess internal redirects without php or mysql being used at all. Then you have the best of both worlds, a free, open-source CMS-like program with thousands of plugins available to customize it however you’d like, yet virtually no overhead for visitors (note, that logged in users don’t get cached pages).

If you use an apache replacement like litespeed or lighttpd you can also double the capacity of any server over apache1 or apache2. But that step may not even be necessary unless you are building some kind of site that is going to be constantly slashdotted/dugg.

WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

However, because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment, the plugin will only serve static html files to:

• 1. Users who are not logged in.
• 2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog

.

• 3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

The good news is that probably more than 99% of your visitors don’t do any of the above! Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see regular WP-Cache cached files and your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin should help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

As this plugin is based on the older WP-Cache plugin you can switch off the Super Cache static html caching. Caching will still be performed, but every request will require loading the PHP engine. In normal circumstances this isn’t that bad, but if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic you may run into trouble. Super Cached html files will be server more quickly than PHP generated cached files so there’s very little reason not to use the Super Cache feature.

Before Installing WP Super Cache I would recommend to read the whole process, may be you will not be able to install it properly, here are some questions: Check It Here.

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