Keep Your Site Speedy: Essential High-Traffic Website Optimization Tips

Running a popular website can be exciting, but it also comes with challenges. When lots of people visit your site at once, it needs to work smoothly. Here are some key ways to optimize your high-traffic website.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN spreads your website files across multiple servers worldwide. This helps load your site faster for visitors from different locations.
Example: Cloudflare https://www.cloudflare.com/ is a popular CDN. If your website is hosted in New York, but a visitor from Tokyo accesses it, Cloudflare can serve your content from a server in Japan, making it load faster.

Compress images/ Serve the Right Image for Every Device/ Lazy Loading for Efficiency

Large images slow down your site. Use tools to compress images without losing quality. This makes pages load faster.

• Example: You have a 5MB photo on your homepage. Manual using a tool like TinyPNG, you could compress it to 1MB without noticeable quality loss, significantly speeding up load time.
• Compressing Images with Frameworks: You can integrate with various libraries to achieve it.
  • Ruby on Rails:
    • CarrierWave https://github.com/carrierwaveuploader/carrierwave acts as a wrapper for tools like ImageMagick. You can configure it to resize and optimize images during upload
    • ImageOptim https://github.com/toy/image_optim focus on image optimization. It leverages various tools for lossless and lossy compression. You can integrate it into your upload process or a background job
  • Laravel: Intervention Image https://image.intervention.io/v3 allows various image manipulations, including resizing and compression (lossy and lossless). You can use it during upload processing to optimize images before storage
  • ExpressJS: sharp https://github.com/lovell/sharp converts large images in common formats to smaller, web-friendly JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF images of varying dimensions.

Websites need to display images beautifully on all devices, from large desktops to tiny smartphones. Traditionally, this meant having separate image files for different screen sizes. The picture tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/picture provides a modern solution.

Lazy loading https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/Lazy_loading is a technique that delays loading of images until they become visible on the screen. This is especially beneficial for long web pages with many images. The browser only loads images as the user scrolls down, improving initial page load time and overall user experience.

Enable caching

Caching saves parts of your website temporarily. This means the server doesn't have to generate everything from scratch for each visitor.
Here is article that could be relevant to your interests:

• Web Caching in Popular Frameworks: Speeding Up Your Website https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/6/web-caching-in-popular-frameworks-speeding-up-your-website-66714160ea6f25bd42cafed0.html

Optimize your database

If your site uses a database, make sure it's set up efficiently. This helps your site retrieve information quickly.
Distributed database is a solution for handling high traffic and large datasets. Eg. Citus https://www.citusdata.com/ is an extension to PostgreSQL that transforms it into a distributed database. It's particularly useful for handling high-traffic applications with large amounts of data.
Here are some articles that could be relevant to your interests:

• Choosing the Right Database for Your Project https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/6/choosing-the-right-database-for-your-project-66720174336e27f6ed403c40.html
• Stop Website Slowdowns: Identify & Fix N+1 Queries with Gem Bullet https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/6/stop-website-slowdowns-identify-fix-n1-queries-with-gem-bullet-667a5f57d57f3511fdf8e376.html
• Solr for Reads, Database for Writes: Optimize Performance for High-Traffic Apps https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/7/solr-for-reads-database-for-writes-optimize-performance-for-hightraffic-apps-668901edf0915ca45912b8d0.html
• Data Fetching with GraphQL: A Modern Approach to APIs https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/7/data-fetching-with-graphql-a-modern-approach-to-apis-6688a92fc9dec2dec37a1b88.html

Background Processing

Background processing means doing time-consuming tasks "behind the scenes" instead of making users wait for them to finish. This keeps your website responsive even when it's doing complex operations.
Here is article that could be relevant to your interests:

• Speed Up Your Ruby App: Background Processing with Sidekiq https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/6/speed-up-your-ruby-app-background-processing-with-sidekiq-667b891ab7287dd8720a3a95.html

Load Balancing

Load balancing distributes incoming web traffic across multiple servers. This prevents any single server from becoming overwhelmed, improves responsiveness, and increases availability.
How it works:

• You set up multiple identical servers that can handle requests.
• A load balancer sits in front of these servers.
• When a request comes in, the load balancer decides which server should handle it.

Use a reliable hosting service

Choose a hosting provider that can handle high traffic. Shared hosting might not be enough for very popular sites.
Example:

• Moving from a basic shared hosting plan to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from providers like DigitalOcean https://www.digitalocean.com/ or Linode https://www.linode.com/ can handle more traffic without slowing down.
• GCP https://cloud.google.com/ (Compute Engine), Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us (Virtual Machines), and AWS https://aws.amazon.com/ (EC2) offer VPS-like virtual machines with full control and scalability.

Minimize plugins and scripts

Too many plugins or scripts can slow down your site. Only use what's necessary.
Here is article that could be relevant to your interests:

• Shrinking Your CSS with PurgeCSS: A Beginner's Guide https://vulehuan.com/en/blog/2024/6/shrinking-your-css-with-purgecss-a-beginners-guide-66702c775a4f496812696a37.html

Monitor your site's performance

Use tools to track how your site performs. This helps you spot and fix problems quickly.
Example: Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool. You can enter your website URL, and it will give you a performance score and suggestions for improvement.

Handling high traffic during peak events

Here's how to manage such situations:

• Load Testing: Use tools like Apache JMeter https://jmeter.apache.org/ or Loader.io https://loader.io/ to simulate thousands of users accessing your site simultaneously. This helps identify bottlenecks before the actual event.
• Autoscaling: Set up your cloud infrastructure (like AWS Auto Scaling) to automatically add more servers when traffic increases, and remove them when it decreases.
• Queue Systems: Implement a system like RabbitMQ https://www.rabbitmq.com/ or Apache Kafka https://kafka.apache.org/ to manage incoming requests. If your servers can't handle all requests immediately, the queue holds them until resources are available.
• Rate Limiting: Use a tool like Nginx's limit_req module to restrict how many requests a single IP can make per second, preventing any single user from overwhelming your system.
• Caching Strategies: Implement full-page caching with tools like Varnish. During Black Friday, you might cache your product pages for a shorter time (like 1 minute) to balance between performance and inventory accuracy.
• Database Optimization: Use read replicas for your database. Your main database handles writes (like orders), while multiple read-only copies handle product information queries.
• Content Prioritization: During peak loads, temporarily disable non-essential features. You might turn off product reviews or complex recommendation systems to focus server resources on core functions like browsing and checkout.
• Failover and Redundancy: Set up your system to automatically switch to a backup if the main system fails. This could mean having a complete mirror of your site in a different data center.
• Real-time Monitoring: Use tools like New Relic https://newrelic.com/ or Datadog https://www.datadoghq.com/ to watch your system's performance in real-time. Set up alerts to notify your team immediately if certain thresholds are exceeded.
• Simplified Design: Create a streamlined version of your site for high-traffic periods. This could mean simpler product pages with fewer images and JavaScript, focusing on essential information and purchase functionality.

By following these tips, you can help ensure your high-traffic website runs smoothly, even when lots of people visit at once.