Festival Site Crashing? 5 Steps To Crash Proof Your Site


Festival crashes suck. For your brand, for ticket sales… It’s all bad.
Many developers fall short in the planning and development phase of the website. To date not one of our festival websites has crashed. 

Our 5 part crash proof formula is as follows:

  1. Website Health Check + Technical Survey

You must check if your plug-ins, theme and WordPress software are up to date? These are the chinks in your websites armour. Best fix these before you go to launch.

How many users do you expect in your busiest hour e.g. line up announcement, tickets on sale announcement? This is your site’s peak concurrency… When your peak concurrency exceeds your server space that results in a crash.

  1. Use a CDN

A CDN will reduce load on your server and essentially allow you to handle a higher peak concurrency. Additionally it will serve a faster website to a larger area. E.g. if you build a website you choose 1 server location, e.g. Sydney. With a CDN users from around the globe can access your site with the same speed as Sydney users.

  1. Build Light (cache everything)

Building a light cacheable site significantly reduces the load on the server! Saves your server $$$ and making it almost impossible to crash your server. Our sites are 90%+ cacheable.

  1. Scalable Hosting Solution 

Scalability allows a smaller (cheaper) server to perform like a bigger (more expensive) server when it needs to. Saving you $$$ and supporting you when you need it. Getting your peak dates and server planned ahead of time will save you on launch day.

  1. Implement a waiting room 

This is the emergency net. When the well planned, well built website with a CDN, Scalable server is hit with an unexpectedly high amount of traffic, a waiting room can save the site from crashing. The waiting room diverts excessive traffic into a queue, saving the site from crashing and allowing the traffic to enter at a safe pace. 

Need a crash proof festival site?