Handling Spikes in Traffic
A sudden surge of visitors should be cause for celebration, not a crashed site. Whether it comes from a marketing campaign, press coverage or a seasonal rush, your site needs to cope when it matters most.
Maintenance includes preparing for, and reacting to, these spikes so success does not become an outage.
Why Sites Fall Over Under Load
A site that copes happily with everyday traffic can buckle under a sudden surge because each visitor consumes a small slice of finite server resources. Multiply that by thousands at once and limits are reached fast.
Understanding where those limits sit lets us prepare — through caching, scaling, or both — so a successful campaign does not turn into an outage.
- Limited server memory and processing power.
- Database connections reaching capacity.
- Uncached pages rebuilt for every visitor.
- Third-party services that throttle requests.
What Causes a Spike
- A successful email or social media campaign.
- Press or media coverage.
- Seasonal peaks such as Black Friday.
- Going viral unexpectedly.
Preparing in Advance
When you know a spike is coming, we can prepare — tuning caching, reviewing capacity, and load-testing key pages. A planned campaign should never catch your site off guard.
Reacting to the Unexpected
For unplanned surges, monitoring alerts us early, and scalable hosting can add capacity quickly. The goal is to keep the site responsive while demand is high.
If you need a hand with any of this, your Progressive Robot delivery team is ready to help. Raise a ticket from the Support area of your client portal or speak to your account manager and we will guide you through the next steps.