Picture this! You’ve been developing the content on your website for months, perhaps even years. The content that you’ve been providing has been for a niche audience and has gained more and more web traffic over the years when suddenly there is a social trigger that floods traffic to your website. Your website should be able to handle the amount of traffic that has come in and be the trigger for greater success, only it doesn’t because the infrastructure supporting the website has failed to deliver the content to the audience and the window of opportunity to gain new customers, subscribers and a wider audiencethe that social trigger has opened will never be realized.
This story is one that is experienced all too often by businesses that have failed to provide a solid infrastructure setup for their web content. If your website was to receive an extra 100,000 visitors tomorrow, would it be able to handle the influx? For this reason, content marketers must commit to developing a strong foundation of web infrastructure that will support and maximize the content delivery for the website.
The Pursuit Of Web Traffic
Any business or individual with a presence on the web wants more web traffic, though the irony is that even though most people want more web traffic they aren’t prepared to make the necessary investments to support it over the long term. In Australia, this affects thousands of businesses and several thousand web entrepreneurs. By investing in the support infrastructure, this empowers the content host to push their content marketing activities and drive consumer engagement.
Managing Web Traffic Growth
Australian web hosting companies are working hard to close the content marketing and delivery gap that so many businesses are facing at the moment. The main challenge has come about from the technical side where web servers and hosting packages cannot accommodate for the sudden spikes in web traffic. For shared servers, this has a domino effect as it impacts the site that is receiving traffic as well as the other sites that are sharing the same server. Alternatively, some web hosting companies offer automated upgrades to accommodate for traffic increases, although many of these lie within a dedicated server or VPS packages.
Social Triggers That Content Marketers Need To Be Aware Of
There are a bunch of online communities that can vastly influence the amount of web traffic that your site will receive. Some of the most popular social triggers include:
- Youtube – Additional increases in traffic may come about from shared and referred video content.
- Facebook – The website content may get shares or referrals from groups or pages with loads of followers. With millions of active users on the website, things can change in an instant if people start being referred to your web content.
- Twitter – The world’s largest microblogging service has the ability to make content go viral quickly.
- Pinterest – The web’s largest moodboard can easily put your content in front of hundreds and thousands of people that want to actively engage with you.
- Reddit – The visitors from this site have the power to drastically change the traffic performance of your website. The tight-knit ‘redditors’ command a social engagement army of millions across several sub-niche groups.
- Google + – While not as big, it still does provide influence and you can potentially receive increased traffic through this channel.
These are just a few of the most influential social triggers – there are several sub communities online that can also trigger a sudden influx in web traffic.
SEOs Have Been Warned About Page Loading Speeds
Back in 2010, Google made in clear on their Webmaster blog that page loading speeds would be a ranking factor. Google is committed to providing their web users with a positive experience and that involves valuable content delivered in a timely manner.
Matt Cutts, the former Head of Webspam at Google, even added to this in 2013 when he talked about how significant page loading times are when it comes to mobile search:
Gaining new traffic is a constant challenge, but you don’t want the opportunity to become wasted due to having the wrong infrastructure setup. By ensuring that the infrastructure supports the needs and requirements to stay online, support web page speed and security it will allow you to seize any opportunities from the success of your content and maintain a presence regardless of traffic spikes.
