In this breakdown, we will discuss shared web hosting traffic. The reason for this is because shared hosting is what most people host on, including some of our other sites – so how much traffic can my website handle seeing as it is utilizing shared hosting.
What Will I Learn?
How much traffic can shared hosting handle
If you are new to websites and understanding how your shared web hosts work, you might want to check out our web hosting Singapore reviews to see what our top choice are, but before you do – traffic is another name for visitors, so if I refer to traffic, know that I am talking about the visitor count on a site.
The process of figuring out how much traffic your website can handle varies, and it is not unlimited.
Some shared hosting providers say that you can happily run your websites and get 100,000 visitors to your website per month, while others say about 50,000 per month.
Here, is how we like to look at it, there is a limit to the traffic, and it is NOT 100k…
If you are getting over 20,000 visitors to your website you are going to start eating into resources that your online business needs to operate comfortably.
How do I estimate how many visitors my website can handle?
Before you even think about how many visitors your website can handle, first you must understand how it works… but before we even get into this, not all hosting is created equal and quality shared hosting matters!
What affects shared hosting performance?
Let me give you an easy way to understand this. The lighter your website is, the more traffic it can get. The heavier your website becomes the less traffic you can get on the same kind of shared web hosting.
What makes up your website and hosting contains lots of different elements (that weigh different amounts) that all count to how your website and hosting runs, and one of them is traffic. Others are…
Overselling of shared hosting – because your hosting is shared it is on the same server as many others, the more that are on that hosting server the worse your website will perform. So look out for a hosting company that doesn’t oversell their plans.
Server Performance
This is about how quickly your website loads when someone comes to your site. When someone goes to your site, via the search engines or directly, your server gets a notification that someone is looking to access your website. The server then pushes your site to that person’s location.
Location
If your hosting provider is located far away from the person who is requesting to see your website, then the rate of data transfer takes longer because it has further to travel.
Traffic
If your website gets lots of traffic it puts more strain on your server performance to bring the site at a timely speed to the searcher who has requested it.
Large Files
If your website has loads of large image files on your blog or website, then it will take longer to load, putting pressure on your server to load them for your visitors, the more traffic you get, the harder it is for your server to do this.
Code Heavy
If your website is code-heavy (lots of strange code on it) or has scripts (social media buttons, JavaScript, etc.) that are not easy to read this then causes issues with your website being delivered in the most efficient way, again causing burdens on your server, which leads to lesser traffic allowances.
Plugin Issues
Too many plugins on your website can cause it to lessen the traffic also, because they take up space, and the more space you have taken up the heavier your website becomes, the less traffic your website can take to run optimally.
Old Outdated Software
If you are running something like WordPress or Drupal, or even an eCommerce platform like Magento, if your e-commerce platform or choice or CMS is running on old software, this can cause issues with weight also.
So all in all, the things mentioned above here are all determined by how many visitors or traffic your shared web hosting can handle.
So with these things in mind, how can you optimize some of the things above to ensure you can get more visitors to your website. Well, as mentioned these things all weigh a certain amount, so just like using weight in real life, you would put your website on a diet.
Optimizing your shared hosting for a faster website and heavier traffic
First off, you must understand that your shared host has multiple customers on the same server. This means that you are sharing the bandwidth of that hosting with others. The more accounts on that server, the more databases created, the more requests are made, the less your server is going to perform.
And this point, you could opt for a dedicated server, which would be occupied by you alone, but that costs a lot.
You can also look at where most of your customers are located, and then look to see if your hosting is located close to that area. If not, get in contact with support and ask them to change the server location of your site. This will cut some weight.
If you have lots of big images on your site, then you can start your optimization and condense your images to cut the file size down. This massively cuts weight and is a reason why so many sites run slow.
After that, you could go to GTMetrix and see what it says about the different codes and scripts that are slowing down your site. If you are not a developer, hire one to sort that out. That cuts a bit more weight also.
Again, look at the plugins that you are using. Are there ones that you could delete? Or maybe there are ones that are out of date and a new replacement that weighs less can be used?
Example: Sometimes a free account on a plugin can give you a heavy script plugin and upgrading the plugin can give you more features and lighten the load also. Again, cutting your weight.
And lastly, the software your website is using to make it work, like WordPress, if it is an older version, it can potentially run older heavier scripts, etc., that on newer versions might have become lighter. Upgrade and lose some more weight.
How many visitors can WordPress handle?
WordPress is just an open-source software that you can install on your web-host and run a website easily. So, when I talk about how much traffic a website can handle, it is talking about the same thing, it all comes down to the hosting, and the weight you put on that hosting you have.
How can I handle heavy traffic on my website?
Simple, you can handle heavy traffic on your website in any number of ways.
Buy good hosting that allows for lots of traffic.
Make sure your website is super light and doesn’t impede your server hosting performance and speed.
Get VPS, or a dedicated hosted server so you have more room, don’t share resources, and potentially have your own server all to yourself.
How high traffic can damage an unprepared website?
If your new website starts to get lots of traffic and it isn’t on the proper type of hosting to actually be able to take that traffic, your server could go down, meaning your shared hosting will buckle, hit a wall, and go offline.
How much traffic can my website handle at the same time?
Understanding how many users you can have on your website at the same time isn’t that well know…There is no real rule to this, and it all depends on many factors explained in optimizing shared hosting for a faster website.
The more resources that your website uses up, plus the worse the hosting, the fewer users you can have. BUT… if you think about it, if your website has 5000 visitors per day attending it, that would be almost 150,000 per month and 1.8 million per year. Now if you were to break it down like this…
Research shows that the average time someone stays on a website is 45 seconds (that’s pretty bad by the way). So let’s give an estimate, let’s say we wanted our visitors to stay for an average of 5 minutes.
There are 12 5 minutes in an hour, now if we said that at any one time we could have 100 visitors on our website, that would be 100×12 = 1200 visitors per hour. I think you get the math’s here…
So, the best strategy to start is this… limit the number of users to your website at any given time. Start at say 100, as I mentioned, and then as you scale and grow, you can increase your resources, get better hosting, maybe a virtual private server, or a dedicated host.
