Handling a high amount of traffic and a large number of orders on a Magento website can be challenging, however there are several steps you can take to ensure your website can live up to the challenge.
-
A reputable Hosting Provider: A reliable hosting provider with a solid infrastructure can provide the necessary resources to handle many visitors and orders. Weeding through the many Magento hosting providers can be challenging. Check for a hosting provider that specializes in Magento along with a high level of server availability, performance, and 24/7 support. Are the hosting providers actually experts of Magento? Ask them and judge for yourself.
-
Optimize Database Queries: Magento's database is critical to the performance of your website. As such, it’s important to optimize your database queries and keep the amount of a long queries to a minimum. You can use tools such as the Magento Database Analyzer or the Magento Profiler to identify and optimize the slow/long queries.
What is an easy way to estimate the number of visitors your hosting plan can handle?
The estimation can be a complex task since it depends on a variety of factors, including the hosting environment (e.g., shared vs cloud), the resources available on your server (amount of RAM, CPU, etc), the complexity of your website (number of products, plugins), and the amount of traffic you are currently receiving.
-
Monitor your website's current traffic: Tools as Google Analytics can help review your site stats, conversions, and visitors. This will give you a baseline understanding for how well your current server can handle visitors.
-
Check your hosting resources: Check the resources available on your server, such as CPU, RAM, and disk space, to understand what resources are available for your website. The best Magento hosting providers will provide this information in your hosting account.
-
Resource usage: Use tools such as NewRelic, DataDog, sysstat, or htop to calculate the average amount of resources your website uses, including CPU, RAM, and disk space. Sysstat for example is free and can record your server’s CPU usage every 10 minutes. This insight will help you understand well your resources are being used and will inform you as to how much traffic your site can handle.
-
Use website performance testing tools: Use website performance testing tools, such as Apache JMeter or LoadRunner, to simulate a high number of visitors and determine how your website performs under heavy loads.
-
Use load testing services: If you have a large or complex website, you can use load testing services, such as Load Impact or BlazeMeter, to simulate a high number of visitors and determine how your hosting infrastructure performs under heavy loads.
Keep in mind that hosting infrastructure can be upgraded to meet the increasing demands of a growing website, so don't hesitate to reach out to your hosting provider if you need additional resources.