About to get slammed with traffic - halp! | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

Please please please let there be somebody online this late at night who can help me. I just got an email from a certain major website that they're going to be posting one of my recent articles on that certain website (I'm guessing sometime today) that will surely cause a huge one or two day traffic slam.

 

And holy crap holy crap holy crap. I need to:

A. Clean up the article

B. Clean up my site

C. Make sure my site can handle the load

 

And my head is spinning and I'm lost and need help. With somebody else's perspective.

Thanks Mark. I'm going to give W3 Total Cache a go. Somebody in #wordpress was kind enough to compress my header image for me, too (don't like how fuzzy Thesis made it on upload, so it'll only be temporary).

 

And when I said clean up the article, what I really meant was make it more presentable. It's one of those "write it because you just thought of it" articles that wasn't supposed to get much of any attention. Re-do the paragraphs, add another picture to better illustrate things, that sort of thing.

 

I also made the intro message show on every page, instead of just the front page, so that I can capitalize on the traffic somehow. Just gotta figure out what to write there.

Thanks, Forest, but the header image was the main one. I was using a png that weighed in at a whopping 500k (yikes!). I'm also fully capable of doing it myself, and I didn't even ask the guy – he just threw me a link and said "use this."

I did hop on a live chat with my host, and about the only info I was able to get out of them was that yes, there is a possibility that they'll knock my site offline temporarily if things get out of hand. I don't know how much traffic is enough to do that, though, and seeing as I'm going to bed right now, and only waking up around 1500 (or when Google Analytics hits my phone to tell me my traffic has exploded), I likely won't even be around to see if it goes down or not.

Definitely have some kind of caching plugin goin on.  See if you can get back in youch with your host to see if they will extend temp. resources in case the traffic is huge.

 

Also, see what you can do to capture the new visitors.  Maker sure they knowwhere they can subscribe to your RSS.

 

I like to use WP Greet Box to cater a call to action message to visitors from different sites (I need to re-vamp mine now that I think of it).

Sorry no technical input here, congrats on getting your article picked up though.  Mind sharing with the class later?  Would love to read it.  Good Luck!

 

Jake – Debt Sucks said:

Please please please let there be somebody online this late at night who can help me. I just got an email from a certain major website that they're going to be posting one of my recent articles on that certain website (I'm guessing sometime today) that will surely cause a huge one or two day traffic slam.

 

And holy crap holy crap holy crap. I need to:

A. Clean up the article

B. Clean up my site

C. Make sure my site can handle the load

 

And my head is spinning and I'm lost and need help. With somebody else's perspective.

---

Heh, I don't even know how. It's The Consumerist, by the way. Didn't want to say it and jinx myself, but so far it hasn't been posted yet – I'm hoping that's because they schedule their posts well in advance, and not because they changed their mind. One of their editors just emailed me out of nowhere Thursday night saying "bravo on the article, I'm posting it on The Consumerist." I don't know how he found it, and like I said either here or elsewhere (don't remember), it isn't exactly a spectacular article, and wasn't supposed to garner any attention – and didn't. Not like it was in any roundups or anything.

 

So, we'll see what happens…

So, uhh, for those that didn't notice…. it happened today! You wanna talk about a nice bit of traffic, Craig? Lifehacker picked it up this afternoon (like 8 hours after Consumerist) and completely blew them out of the water in terms of referrals!

It's a good thing I was at work throughout all this, otherwise who knows what would've happened ;-) but, here's the numbers from yesterday (still trickling in today):

 

As per Google Analytics - 

8,541 Visits

8,470 Absolute Unique Visitors

11,583 Pageviews

 

lifehacker.com (referral) 6,162 72.15%

consumerist.com (referral) 1,166 13.65%

(direct) ((none)) 636 7.45%

google.com (referral) 239 2.80%

lifehacker.com.au (referral) 152 1.78%

 

And the WordPress stats give a total of 11,947 pageviews for yesterday. Here's hoping that each and every one of them have Alexa installed! And, you know, subscribed of course. I'll have a more detailed writeup on my blog later this week, so unless something comes up, this'll be all I've leave you with in this thread. Thanks so much for your help guys! Oh, and by the way – as far as I know, the site didn't go down at all!

Thats a great surge – hope they stick around and keep coming back.

Craig – Free From Broke said:

Beautiful!  I had a Lifehacker link happen on my last birthday.  To say the least it was one of the best gifts I got!

 

Oh, and you should really make sure you throw in some links to Free From Broke in the article!  Not sure why but I think it will help!!

---

I have a feeling some BFS links would look really pretty too, lol.  :-)  I love this group – you all make me smile.

Craig – Free From Broke said:

Oh, and you should really make sure you throw in some links to Free From Broke in the article!  Not sure why but I think it will help!!

---

Actually I had thought of something along those lines – since I had advance warning of it, maybe I could've sold an ad in the article to someone for gobs of money?

Oh, and it turns out something *did* come up – I got hit by Lifehacker AGAIN today, on a different article, giving me another 9,925 pageviews today (about half of which was purely residual from yesterday still). So if they stop doing that now, I'm figuring a few more 4 digit days til I drop down to my usual 30 or 40. Except for the part where my subscriber base doubled to 200 (for now, anyway), so maybe my new normal will be 60-80?