How to Save your Blog from Crashing

This article is not about how to use your blog / website to generate extra income or sell more of your product. This time I will present you three ways (a good one, a bad one and an expensive one) that have the potential to save your blog from crashing in case of an unexpected peak in traffic. For it I will assume you use WordPress, the one most popular blog engine / CMS in the world, used for everything from https://www.europalace.com reviews to selling products or presenting design portfolios.

1. The bad one – pray

Most bloggers simply don’t expect their blogs to undergo large stress because of a spike in visitors, so they don’t take any measures to prevent unexpected crashes. But, as the immortal Forrest Gump so well pointed it, “Sh*t happens”. You only need a single article to go viral, and you have a disaster at hand.

A friend of mine, blogging for years about a small town community, has posted an image of a pigeon drinking from a drinking fountain on a hot summer day. He had the surprise of the picture going viral, raising the number of visitors simultaneously rushing to his blog to tens of thousands in a short time. Of course, the blog went down crashing under the pressure, ridding him of some well deserved ad revenues for the rest of the day.

2. The good one – caching

One of the reasons the above mentioned blog has crashed was the high number of simultaneous requests its database server received in a short time. To avoid this it is always a good idea not to rely exclusively on database queries (which means generating the page when it is requested by reading its contents from the database every time it is accessed) but create a static version on the server, which does not involve stressing the database each time it is read.

Under WordPress you can avoid such unpleasant surprises (and disruptions in ad revenues) by installing a plugin that will handle local and browser caching. Experts recommend W3 Total Cache to handle stress, but there are more than one tried and approved plugins available free of charge.

3. The expensive one – paid CDN

When a blog or portal becomes really popular, bandwidth can be a burden for its budget – with many visitors come many image downloads, which can raise your server bill considerably in the long run. This is where content delivery networks (CDN) come in: for a friendly price these networks serve bandwidth-intensive content to visitors. CDN services are here to make our websites faster and more efficient. Besides, it can improve a lot on customer satisfaction in the long run, meaning more engagement, more satisfied customers – and more revenues for yourself.