You will only succeed in the online world if you are providing value to your audience. And if all goes well, the growth is sometimes so huge that you need to scale up your existing resources to accommodate a larger audience. In terms of WordPress sites, you will need to upgrade to a higher hosting plan in case your traffic skyrockets.
To be able to scale and grow your website according to its evolving requirements, you will need to select a hosting provider that allows scalability. Many companies will happily allow you to upgrade your hosting server but some might restrict you from doing so, or charge you extra amounts. You need to be prepared in advance for the growth of your website.
In this article, I will explain how to scale up your WordPress website with WPX hosting as it grows with time. I will also provide tips on how to prepare yourself for future growth and keep the doors for scalability open.
What is Website Scalability?
First, you need to understand what I mean by website scalability. The ability of a website to scale up according to its growing traffic and required resources can be termed scalability. When you have made the right choices in advance, you will be able to scale up your website pretty easily upon finding success and growth.
For any website, the essence of scalability cannot be neglected. All website owners aim to grow their website and increase more and more visitors. But, not every website is built with the largest hosting server from the start. That is why there should be some room left for scalability in the future.
I will first explain how to leave room for future scalability and growth, and then I will provide a guide on how to scale up your website.
Planning for Website Scalability & Growth in Advance
The essence of planning to adjust for future website growth cannot be stressed any further. It should be the top priority when planning to build a website and purchase hosting for it. You should check the details of your desired hosting plan and see if you are allowed to scale it up in the future. Similarly, you have to use data and analysis to grow your website and reach a wider audience online.
Here are a few more detailed tips to plan your website while keeping future scalability in mind:
1. Conduct a Requirements Analysis
First of all, you need to conduct a thorough analysis of the requirements for your website in advance. The target audience and its size should help you start with this. Use tools that assess and analyze the market, competitors’ websites, and other related things. Then utilize all this data to select a hosting plan that suits all your requirements.
2. Choose a Scalable Hosting Provider
Next, choose a web hosting provider that is open to scaling up your hosting server and pricing plan. Many companies claim to be offering such services but they charge tons of extra charges when you attempt such things. Additionally, you might face some issues with your website’s files and data. That’s why you need to choose a web hosting like WPX that allows you to easily scale up your hosting plan at any time.
3. Execute Planned Growth Strategies
The last tip in this section is to execute strategies that you make based on data and analysis. The growth of your website should all happen with planned strategies. You will need to install site performance and size monitoring tools. These will help you make improvements to your content and marketing efforts. It will also help you figure out what works and what doesn’t work in increasing the growth of your WordPress site.
Tips and Tools to Manage WordPress Site Growth
A website owner needs to be prepared to manage their website’s growth of all types. If you keep pushing good content, you will see an increase in traffic over time. But this also means more responsibility for you. Hence, I will tell you about some tools and a few strategies to manage your website’s growth.
Tools to Monitor Site Growth
Here are the three most important tools you need to monitor the growth of your website.
- Google Analytics: This is the king of all analytic tools in the world of WordPress websites and blogging. It provides you with key information regarding the traffic, visits, and other related things of your website.
- SEMrush: SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing tool that will not only help you monitor your website’s growth but also facilitate you to grow it further. Its SEO part can help you scale up your website significantly.
- Pingdom: The Pingdom tool helps you assess the performance of your website. It tells you about the availability of certain features of your website in different parts of the world. The tool is necessary for ensuring the availability of your complete website everywhere.
Strategies to Handle High Traffic
As growth is almost certain after you rightly implement growth strategies, now you need to know how to handle the traffic growth. Here are three key tips:
- CDN Implementation: Put a CDN in place or use the WPX Hosting’s built-in CDN to provide your content to visitors from all parts of the world. This feature reduces latency and prevents additional burden on your website in the event of a traffic spike.
- Load Balancing: The load balancing feature is often managed by your hosting provider. With this, incoming traffic is distributed to different servers to prevent a single server from overloading.
- Autoscaling: Autoscaling also needs to be enabled on your website. If you have multiple sites on your plan, you need to have this feature so that one website can get the required resources when the traffic is higher than normal.
How to Scale Your WordPress Site with WPX Hosting?
If you have already planned to scale up your website’s hosting plan after it grows to a certain level, this procedure will be a lot easier for you. WPX Hosting has a straightforward plan upgrade procedure where you only need to complete a few steps. Keep reading to learn about these steps in detail:
1. Evaluate Your Current Hosting Plan’s Resources
Before you upgrade your hosting plan, evaluate your current hosting plan’s resources and requirements. Look at the traffic and other key information on your website. This will help you understand if your current plan is enough for your WordPress site or if the time for an upgrade has come. It will also help you in determining which plan to upgrade to next.
2. Go to WPX Hosting’s Control Panel
To scale up your web hosting plan, you will have to go to the control area of your hosting provider. In this case, we are going to upgrade a WPX Hosting plan so I will also explain the procedure with that as an example. The following screenshot shows what you will see once you go to the “Manage Services” section from your client area.
3. Head to the Service Details Section
Next, you need to visit the Service Details section on the top left of your screen. The screenshot below explains where you need to click to go to the Service Details tab. This is the place where the details of your current hosting plan will be provided. You can manage several things from here including changing the billing plan and upgrading your hosting server.
4. Upgrade Hosting Plan
In this step, you will upgrade your hosting plan to something bigger. Take a look at the next screenshot and find the “Upgrade” button there. You need to click on that and it will take you to the menu where you will be able to upgrade your web hosting plan.
Now you will see a pop-up menu that shows all the available hosting plans that you can choose from. Since you would already have determined the plan you want to upgrade to, just choose that one right away.
5. Finalize Payment Details
Lastly, you need to finalize the payment details of your scaled-up hosting server. The following screenshot is an example of what you will see in front of your screen after you select your upgraded hosting plan. Go through the details and confirm the payment amount. Once all that is done, you will simply on the “Submit” button.
You will see a prompt saying “Account upgrade order placed”. Now you can proceed to verify the plan upgrade invoice. An example of what you will see is provided in the attached screenshot.
Wrap Up
Your presence in the digital world can sometimes become unpredictable but one that’s for sure is growth. It comes sooner or later if you are implementing the right strategies and providing value to your online audience. But growth needs to be managed skillfully as you will now need to handle a larger audience.
In this article, I first provided tips and explained strategies to plan for your website’s growth and then how to handle that growth. I also provided a step-by-step guide on how to scale up your hosting plan as your website grows. I hope you have found what you were looking for in this article.
Leave a comment below if you still have any questions!
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