The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being hit with Traffic Spikes

Visitors spikes could be amazing and they could be a nuisance. You might see a traffic spike and rejoice, but that same traffic spike can then be a step to far for your web site. Find out why.

Site traffic is very rarely flat. One day you are getting a lot, the next day you are wondering where it has gone and then a day or two later you are amazed at where it is all coming from. As your search engine position changes and influences on the people's that visit your website change, so does your visitors.

For example, on a mortgage site I noticed that the traffic varied throughout the month, dropping in the days before the announcement of the base rate changes and picking up quickly when banking problems were in the news. Then when the banking crisis started, traffic quadrupled!

These traffic spikes above the normal reader levels are fabulous if your site and business can cope. Suddenly you are receiving more enquiries and sales, possibly more Google Adsense or affiliate revenue. But, you have to be prepared.

First, you have to be prepared in terms of ensuring that these traffic are encouraged to keep coming back to your site. This is relatively straightforward and something that should be done anyway.

You also have to be prepared for an increase in enquiries. Have you got enough staff resources to handle 2, 3 or even more times the normal volume of enquiries or are all of these extra traffic going to be lost because you could't help them? The same with stock and dispatching orders - you need to be ready to make the sales.

And that is a major problem with traffic spikes - being prepared to deal with them in terms of sorting the higher amount of enquiries and sales that are suddenly arriving. It is not so much the extras that are the problem, but more what do you do on the days when there are not spikes and you have staffing and stock levels ready to cope?

But the other major problem that is cause by traffic spikes affects every web site, regardless of whether they are ecommerce website, brochure web-sites, affiliates or informational sites. And this major problem is the internet resources.

You may have hosting that permits a certain amount of bandwidth and if a spike exceeds that, your web site might be closed by your hosts. Or a large spike of a load of visitors in a short time may only push all of your hosts' resources to the limit, causing the site to crash. And if you are on shared hosting this might also bring down other websites on the same servers! I have seen it happen.

Website traffic spikes are magnificent to see if you could manage for them. A sudden influx of new visitors that you might hopefully tap into and convince to keep coming back and long term turn into lots of profit. But they might also push your site resources to the limit and the world about your website could come crashing down!

Article Source: http://www.article-voip.com

If you want to know more about finding website visitors, call over to our website to learn more about free website promotion. There you will find load more ideas or you can read more of our website promotion services if you prefer. Written by Keith Lunt

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