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How Much Traffic Can WordPress Handle? (+ Expert Scaling Tips)

Are you wondering how much traffic WordPress can handle?

When equipped with the right set of tools, WordPress can handle virtually unlimited traffic. We have seen it handle billions of impressions every month.

In this article, we’ll talk about how much traffic can a WordPress website handle, and how to prepare for heavy traffic on your WordPress site.

Analyzing the amount of traffic WordPress can handle

Here is a quick list of topics we’ll cover in this article.

How WordPress Manages Website Traffic?

A WordPress website stores content in a database. When a user visits a page on your site, WordPress fetches that content and generates the page which then appears on the user’s screen.

As you get more traffic, WordPress has to repeat this process for every user.

As software, WordPress is just code, and it needs some hardware to run on. This hardware is provided by your WordPress hosting company.

It includes a type of computer called a server with software to handle website traffic (Apache and Nginx tend to be the most popular server software). This machine is connected to the internet 24/7 to make sure that your website is always online.

A faster web hosting server allows WordPress to process more requests faster.

A slower web hosting server limits WordPress’ ability to generate those pages quickly.

For more information, take a look at our tutorial on how WordPress really works (behind-the-scenes infographic).

How Much Actual Traffic Can WordPress Handle?

WordPress can handle virtually unlimited website traffic, depending on your hosting platform and caching setup.

The only limit on how much traffic your WordPress website can handle is your hosting platform.

And that’s not just WordPress. All websites, regardless of what website builder they are using, need to rely on the hosting provider to handle more traffic.

Depending on how much traffic you are getting, you can then add more resources to your hosting plan to manage more traffic.

That being said, let’s take a look at some real numbers.

We’ll break it down into different types of hosting plans and how much traffic your WordPress website can manage on those platforms.

How Much Traffic Can WordPress Manage on Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting plan used by the majority of WordPress websites.

It is suitable for small business websites, new blogs, and low-traffic websites.

Shared hosting plans are budget-friendly because they split sever resources among several customers.

To make sure that all customers get good service, shared hosting companies place different limits on how much traffic a customer can get on their websites.

These limits vary from one hosting provider to another, and they are not made public to prevent abuse.

Some shared hosting providers have incredibly fast servers, and access to larger data centers with high bandwidth. This allows them to provide generous resources to their shared hosting customers.

Other providers may cut costs by choosing low-cost data centers with restrictive bandwidth caps. They may not be able to offer much flexibility and will start blocking requests more frequently during peak hours.

Our top pick for shared hosting providers include Bluehost, SiteGround, and Hostinger.

All three of these companies provide generous resources for small businesses, and they each have hosting plans to grow with you as your business grows while keeping the costs affordable.

They have ultra-fast servers operated by state-of-the-art data centers, higher bandwidth, and superior technical expertise to provide a much better user experience to their customers.

They deploy in-house solutions to handle traffic, with built-in caching and behind the scene server tweaks.

We ran our own tests on Bluehost servers to see how much peak traffic they can handle. Here are the results:

Bluehost stress test

We gradually increased traffic to 100 users at a time within a 5-minute period. As you can see that it didn’t crash and remained quite stable throughout the test.

The folks at Bluehost are offering WPBeginner users a generous discount on hosting with a free domain name. You can start with just $2.75 / month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

How Much Traffic Can Shared WordPress Hosting Handle?

A good shared hosting company can comfortably handle traffic between 10,000 pageviews to 100,000 pageviews per month.

However, you’ll need to optimize WordPress performance to get better results. Some hosts automatically add WordPress acceleration and optimization to help you handle more traffic.

For example, Hostinger on their shared Pro plan can handle up to 200,000 visitors monthly.

Whereas, SiteGround on their GoGeek plan can handle upwards of 400,000 visitors monthly.

Your experience may still differ from the estimates above based on how complex your website is and what resources it requires, but the above estimates are true for vast majority of small business websites.

Don’t worry, we’ll talk later about saving those server resources to efficiently use your hosting plan.

How Much Traffic Can Managed WordPress Hosting Handle?

Once you have utilized your shared hosting plan to the maximum, you will need to upgrade your hosting plan.

Managed WordPress hosting is like the concierge service for WordPress websites. Your hosting provider will take care of updates, security, backups, and more.

Since they are focused on WordPress websites, they deploy additional tweaks to their server technologies to make WordPress run faster and perform reliably under stress.

On top of that, managed WordPress hosting plans make it super easy to scale up your server resources when you get sudden huge traffic spikes.

WP Engine is our top recommendation for a managed WordPress hosting platform.

They are pioneers in the managed WordPress hosting industry and leading the way with state-of-the-art infrastructure and top-notch customer support.

We ran our own tests on WP Engine by sending up to 100 virtual visitors within a short period of time. Here are the results:

WP Engine stress test

As you can see, our test site remained stable throughout the period with a very low response time.

If you want to look for an alternative, then we recommend SiteGround. They are also a WordPress-recommended hosting provider.

How Much Actual Traffic Can a Managed WordPress Hosting Plan Handle?

A managed WordPress hosting plan can easily handle traffic of 400,000 visitors into millions of page views per month.

For example, SiteGround on their GoGeek plan can handle upwards of 400,000 visitors monthly.

WP Engine on their Managed Scale plan can also handle upwards of 400,000 visitors monthly.

And both of them offer custom plans for sites that are larger than this.

For example, our WPBeginner website along with other sites are hosted on SiteGround’s custom managed platform, and we receive hundreds of millions of requests each month.

We also know several super large websites that receive tens of millions of visitors that use WP Engine.

When you’re on a managed WordPress hosting platform, they can handle any amount of traffic needed. You just have to pay the additional hardware costs.

How Much Traffic Can WordPress Handle on Cloud Hosting?

For shared and managed WordPress hosting, you share server resources with other customers.

On a cloud hosting platform, you get guaranteed resources on a cloud platform made up of several servers. If one server fails, your website will remain available on other servers.

Due to this redundancy, guaranteed resources, and enterprise-grade availability, cloud hosting is suitable for large businesses, busier eCommerce stores, and other enterprise clients.

We recommend using SiteGround Cloud Hosting. They use the Google Cloud Platform and offer free CDN, unique IP address, enhanced security, and priority support 24/7.

WP Engine, Kinsta, Rocket.net, and others can also create custom cloud platforms based on your hosting needs.

How Much Actual Traffic Can WordPress Handle on Cloud Hosting?

A proper cloud hosting platform can allow WordPress to handle millions of pageviews per month without any hiccups.

For example, Rocket.net public pricing shows that they can handle upwards of 5,000,000 visitors on their Enterprise plan because they use 20+ server locations along with a smart Cloudflare cache.

You can see our performance test results in our detailed Rocket.net hosting review.

Handling Billions of Monthly Requests in WordPress

Now when most people think about WordPress, they think of it as a blogging platform, but the reality is that WordPress is the most popular website building platform on the planet with over 43% market share.

There are even full-blown SaaS apps that are built using WordPress.

For example, we built a popular conversion optimization software OptinMonster which underneath is powered by WordPress.

We process billions of requests each month, and that’s all WordPress.

So when someone says WordPress doesn’t scale, they are clearly misinformed, or simply lack the expertise themselves to do it.

You should challenge their perspective and find another WordPress consultant that has the expertise to scale WordPress.

What do you need to handle really large traffic in WordPress?

This is where you need Enterprise Custom Cloud Hosting on platforms like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.

These companies provide cloud servers that you can sign up for and create your own custom hosting environment.

You can add as many CPU resources, memory, storage, or geographical locations as you need.

You will be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis for the resources you have utilized. That’s why you’ll need your own team of server admins to efficiently use these resources.

Luckily, you don’t have to become a DevOps team either. Companies like WP Engine, SiteGround, and others can build and manage these custom clouds for you.

How Much Traffic Can Enterprise Cloud Hosting on AWS or Google Cloud Handle?

Enterprise custom-built cloud hosting on AWS or Google Cloud can handle extremely large volumes of traffic.

They can be configured to handle millions of hits per day or even billions of pageviews per month.

Our app OptinMonster runs on AWS and powers billions of requests without any hiccups.

You can combine it with a CDN and web-application firewall like Cloudflare for further scalability.

For example, our WPForms website is hosted on Google Cloud managed by SiteGround. We use Easy Digital Downloads to handle our eCommerce and software licensing which means for a plugin with over 5 million active installs, we’re receiving billions of requests each month across our portfolio.

Aside from Google Cloud, we’re using Cloudflare to efficiently scale our WordPress eCommerce site.

Tips on Managing Heavy Traffic on a WordPress Website

WordPress does a very good job of reducing the server load and processing requests so your users can get to your website as quickly as possible.

However, there are so many things that you can do to further optimize that performance. Below, we outline some of the most important practices that you can implement on your website for the best performance.

1. Always Get The Best WordPress Hosting for Your Budget

The web hosting industry is highly competitive, and there are tons of companies offering unlimited bandwidth, unlimited this, and unlimited that.

Don’t fall for false advertisements. Do your own research and sign up for the most trusted hosting providers in the industry. Unlimited rarely actually means unlimited.

For instance, if you were looking for a shared hosting provider, you can compare these top WordPress hosting companies as a starting point.

Choosing an unreliable WordPress hosting company will make your website slower, and it will not be able to handle much traffic.

2. Turn on a Caching Plugin

What if instead of generating pages repeatedly, you save them temporarily on your WordPress server and reuse them?

How caching works

This technique is called caching. When you update something on your website, the cached version is deleted, and the newly updated content is served to your users.

Most WordPress hosting companies like Bluehost, Hostinger, and SiteGround come with their own built-in caching solutions that are turned on by default. However, if you are unsure, just ask their support staff to turn it on for your website.

Alternatively, you can use WP Rocket, which is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market.

WP Rocket dashboard

It is beginner friendly, and once you turn it on, you don’t need to worry about the technical stuff as it automatically configures the best settings for most websites.

3. Use CDN for Static Content in WordPress

Using a CDN or content delivery network allows you to serve static files like images, javascript, and CSS, using separate servers.

This reduces the load on your WordPress server and frees up resources to process more traffic requests at faster speeds.

We recommend using Bunny.net they are one of the best CDN services on the market. Adding it to your WordPress website is super-easy even for absolute beginners.

Bunny.net

Alternatively, you can use the Cloudflare Free CDN, which some hosting providers such as SiteGround include as a base option within their platform.

4. Filter Bad Traffic with Firewall

Bad traffic is the traffic generated by malicious spam bots, hackers, and DDoS attacks. These are not genuine website visitors, and they could waste a lot of your server resources and make WordPress slower.

A DNS-based website firewall service blocks such traffic even before it reaches your website. This saves you a ton of server resources and your WordPress website can cater to your genuine visitors.

We use Sucuri on the WPBeginner websites and Cloudflare on others. See our list of the best WordPress firewall services on the market.

We hope this article helped you learn how much traffic WordPress can handle. You may also want to follow our WordPress performance optimization handbook or take a look at these tips on making high converting sales funnel.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How Much Traffic Can WordPress Handle? (+ Expert Scaling Tips) first appeared on WPBeginner.

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Let’s Make it Official… Introducing WPMU DEV Hosting!

After two years of development, a solid year of testing, and 6 months of perfect performance behind the scenes we are delighted to finally, officially, launch WPMU DEV hosting.

What makes WPMU DEV Hosting different?

Yep, there isn’t exactly a shortage of WordPress hosting options out there, so why, you might ask, are we launching another one? Well, when we originally looked at the hosting landscape, we figured there were actually a bunch of things that could be done better, a lot better.

So, we gave these a shot.

Dedicated hosting, made stunningly affordable

Up until now if you wanted fully dedicated hosting — with absolutely containerized memory, CPU & SSD resources — you either needed to get a Computer Science degree or pay a hefty premium.

Well, not anymore, because right now every single WPMU DEV member gets 3 (yes, that’s THREE) fully dedicated hosting accounts (1 GB dedicated Memory, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD storage and 1 TB of bandwidth… each) as part of their membership, at no extra cost.

No shared hosting. No shared IPs. Completely isolated and separated from any other sites. Object caching by default, optimized for WordPress, and blazingly fast.

Extra sites at that level are $10/m and you can get up to 16 GB of RAM, 6 vCPUs, 140 GB of SSD and 20 TB of bandwidth for $100 (or just $70 if you don’t use your 3 basic sites). Here’s the full pricing table.

Like I said, unless you’re prepared to unleash your inner Sysadmin you simply will not find anything even close to these specs out there (I dare ya, post them in the comments if you can). This is because we’re doing this pretty much at cost and based on the very latest Digital Ocean architecture (who are amazing, btw, 👋 guys <3). Your other hosts are either making too much of a margin or using (shared) architecture that’s too outdated – you won’t find that problem here.

And even better, if you’re an existing member you can go and enjoy those 3 sites right now for free. Yep, they just got added to your account at no extra charge now or in the future :).

And if you’re not a member already, as we’ve got a 30-day free trial (with no tricky cancellation steps) you can try it out now for absolutely nothing by clicking one of the bazillion CTAs plastered around the site. Don’t take our word for it, take it for a spin!

We really, really know what we’re doing (and this is years, and years in the making)

We’ve been hosting and running Edublogs, with over 4 million sites, since 2005 and CampusPress (formerly Edublogs Campus) since 2006 which now hosts millions of sites for over 250 major universities (like Cornell, Penn State & RMIT), school districts and government departments (like the State of Victoria Department).

We’ve been the biggest WordPress Multisite dedicated and managed host for almost 15 years and now we’re bringing all that experience to you.

And this isn’t just by chance, this is something we’ve been working on since 2016 when we first ran a big old survey of WPMU DEV members and the number 1 request, by some distance was for HOSTING.

In fact, you can check out this special Hello WP video episode that goes into all of that in some detail:

Oh, and if you’d like to tap into that experience even more, we also now offer enterprise WordPress (Multisite and single) hosting to non-educational customers as well.

So, if you’re looking for experience (and effort) you can count on … we’re it!

Talking about Multisite… you can run that on every plan we offer!

Yep, you are reading that correctly, we certainly haven’t forgotten our roots as the MU provider of choice, and as such Multisite (both subdirectories and subdomains) is available on all of our plans.

Multisite on a $10/m dedicated plan. Yes, you read that right.

And setting it up is as easy as ticking a box after installation.

Security, Optimization, SEO, Reports all white label, all included

Of course, you can use pretty much any plugin on our hosting, but if you’re interested in: a) not paying for a bunch of other services & b) a completely integrated experience containing all the core WordPress plugins and services you are after, then you might well be interested in this.

Devman demonstrating our all-in-one-ness

Every WPMU DEV hosting package comes with the complete WPMU DEV plugin pack, plus all of our services like white label reports, automated (and safe update protected) updates, our CDN and plenty more besides.

If you haven’t already, take a look through our navigation to find out everything a WPMU DEV membership gets you… all at no extra cost.

Migration? We have got that.

One of the reasons we’ve been running hosting behind the scenes for so long is we took the extra time to get migration right, and we think we’ve nailed it for you.

So, first up you can migrate to a staging (or test if you prefer) site on our hosting for absolutely nothing using our internal migration tool, Shipper, SFTP, SSH or any other method you like.

And if you run into any problems, we will troubleshoot it for you and manually migrate your site for you, for free.

And emails? YAAASSS EMAIIIILSSS!

Now, most hosts steer clear of emails beyond recommending G Suite or similar, which we like, but… it costs.

With WPMU DEV hosting you can simply forward your emails to any account (like Gmail) you want and then use that account to send as an alias, here’s a super simple way to get that working in Gmail… it’s amazing and free!

Currently, it just requires you to add an MX record to your domain (amazingly easy) but in the future, our DNS hosting will make it even easier.

Techy, techy cool stuff

Beyond everything else, there’s SSH, phpMyAdmin, and SFTP access. There are automated free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. There is GIT, Composer and NPM integration. There is a one-click staging environment. And you can choose, per site, to use data centers in multiple countries and regions too.

Yep you can choose on a per site basis to host either in:

  • US – East Coast
  • US – West Coast
  • Canada
  • Germany
  • India
  • Netherlands
  • Singapore
  • United Kingdom

And we’re adding new locations all the time.

Naturally you get a dedicated IP, running IPv6 alongside WP-CLI with custom commands included. Oh, and we heard you like logs and analytics, so we’ve included completely comprehensive logs of every aspect of your hosting site alongside some really nifty server analytics that’ll tell you everything you need to know.

And covering all the bases, we’ve designed a new way to handle backups from the ground up — using ZFS file systems which allows you to make or schedule unlimited instant incremental snapshots of your site with no load or downtime. Restores are just as fast as we don’t need to unzip files or import databases.

Find out more here and please feel free to ask us any questions over live sales chat or post a comment… orrrr as I may have mentioned, feel free to take it all for a spin for 30 days for free :D

And last, but by no means least, 24/7 expert support

I’m not one to brag but have you looked at our Trustpilot and Reviews.io ratings

It’s basically a big love-in for our amazing support team, who are there for you, live, 24/7.

Live 24/7/365 expert WordPress support is pretty cool

It’s not like having your own WordPress development team, it is having your own WordPress team there at the drop of a hat, whenever you need them.

If your site has been hacked, we’ll help you fix it up. If you’re having trouble getting the perfect site speed, come along and let us have a crack at it.

And, as with everything WPMU DEV, you can try that out free for 30 days. Yep, free support, for 30 days, and if you don’t like it there’s no obligation to stick around whatsoever.

Plus, should you not like talking to people (I understand), well we’ve got great documentation too, feel free to have a stroll around our docs right now, we’re improving them all the time too.

And there’s more coming soon

If you’re familiar with WPMU DEV you’ll know that we basically don’t stand still, just look at the recent releases at the bottom of our roadmap in addition to the stuff coming up.

And the same is absolutely true of our hosting. We’re constantly working on improving every aspect of what we do, including bringing you some pretty special security features such as a real, genuine (rather than just saying it is) WAF alongside DNS and some mind-blowing integrations with The Hub that will make managing hundreds of WordPress sites in one area – hosted with us or elsewhere – an absolute breeze.

You should also expect to see some different pricing options in the future based around bulk orders and possibly annual options too. However, one thing I should note is that future members won’t necessarily get 3 free sites with their membership but we will, as we always have done, completely grandfather over any existing members on this plan as long as you’re part of it now (:waves: at members still paying 2010 prices who we are currently losing money on lol, we got ya).

So there you go, 2 years of work, ready to roll. I’ve got all my personal sites on it and I absolutely love it (plus I love not paying somebody else for hosting, which makes me very happy).

So why not give us a go and let us know how you like it in the comments and, of course, how we can improve / what we can do to persuade you to use WPMU DEV as your dedicated WordPress host.