Surviving and thriving during peak web traffic

Are you prepared for the day when your website becomes the centre of the universe, asks Peter G. Marsh.

Your company's website must handle high volumes of predictable traffic, as well as spikes in unanticipated traffic. A site like San Diego's signonsandiego.com typically has 30-35 million monthly page views. However, during a recent spate of California wildfires, the site experienced 10 million page views in one week alone. But spikes in traffic are not limited to times of disaster. In Canada, the website goldline.ca is a proud sponsor of the Canadian men's curling team. The site averaged 650 visitors per day. However, after the team won the gold medal in the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the site's traffic skyrocketed by 363 percent.

A recent Compuware Equation Research study found that when a company's website performs poorly during peak traffic times, 78 percent of the visitors defect to a competitor's site. The study also found that after a poor experience, 88 percent of the visitors were less likely to return to the original company's website. Worse still, 47 percent left with a negative perception of the company, and 42 percent discussed this bad experience with friends or online communities.

The good news is that if your company's website and underlying Web CMS (Content Management System) is properly designed, the site will be able to handle any volume of expected and unexpected traffic. As a result, you can acquire new audiences, provide a more rewarding customer experience and establish new opportunities for advertising and content monetisation. Here are a few technical and practical pointers for building highly scalable websites that operate reliably under all traffic conditions:

Technical recommendations: there are three important technology tricks to help prepare for surges in website traffic - caching, decoupling and dynamic rendering. As your computer gurus will confirm, it is much quicker to access data from memory than from disk. Caching is a mechanism to temporarily store frequently viewed data in memory for rapid access. Caching improves a website's performance by allowing content to be retrieved quickly from memory, rather than fetching the content from the database.

The key to predictable performance is to deliver memory-cached content whenever possible. This is called multi-level caching. A good web CMS provides intelligent multi-level caching by classifying content according to its rate of change, creating a site that's highly optimised for performance.

Another component for building scalable websites is to separate site traffic from the back-end database load. This is called decoupling. When more eyeballs come to your site, the web CMS should automatically provide more server capacity to match the volume of visitors. Some cloud computing and hosting providers will temporarily add server capacity during peak times, which helps to ensure consistent performance without a substantial increase in hardware operating expense. The third component for managing traffic spikes is dynamic rendering. With dynamic rendering, content and format are kept strictly apart, and they only meet in the visitor's browser. Content can thus be fully and dynamically personalised for the visitor. The end result is a highly engaging user experience, with optimised performance under all traffic conditions.

Practical Recommendations: in addition to these technology techniques, it is important for website administrators to conduct serious load testing before a site is launched or redesigned. Load testing is the only certain way to know how your web CMS will perform under all conditions. Testing should be conducted from the customers' point of view, meaning from the internet, from wireless hubs, from mobile and e-reader devices, and for all popular browsers. Finally, a good web analytics program will help you identify the cause of any traffic spikes. Where do most of your visitors come from? What search terms are driving eyeballs to your site? Is there a new link pointing to your site? Discovering this information will help you balance the load on your site, and will allow you to better monetise your content by engaging and retaining all these new site visitors.

Peter G. Marsh is Head of Global Product Management and Marketing at Atex. He joined Atex in 2005 and is responsible for all global product management and marketing activities. Marsh was also the founder of Deadline Data Systems and the CEO of 5 Fifteen Inc. He holds a B.Sc. in Communications from Boston University.