Scaling WordPress for Startups

You need to be ready when you hit the limelight

You decided to invest in WordPress. Good choice. Now it’s time to get ready.
As a proactive founder, you will have run numbers and projected growth overtime to figure out how to sustain growth financially and operationally, factoring in risk, and best-case scenarios.

You also need to factor in unplanned events such as a story going viral on TechCrunch or ProductHunt resulting in the Shark Tank Effect. When a website receives 100 times the normal amount of traffic, can it accommodate the spike of inquiries and orders?

The good news is that WordPress is more than capable of handling shark tank effects.

Plan for scalable, high-performance WordPress website

Here are a few tips to get going.

• Start with a solid foundation: Choose a reputable WordPress host that you can have a conversation with about your long-term requirements before you sign on the dotted line. Ask what scaling looks like, and how much it will cost. Don’t lock yourself in a long-term contract either.
• Keep your website simple and bloat-free. Do you really need that slider on the homepage? Or a video background? If you’re buying a ready-made site, try to find ones that don’t add 5 times the features you need.
• Optimize your website for speed. You’ve done well by building a lean one. You can make your website even lighter and faster by using plugins like Swift Performance or WP Rocket. Hire a pro for a more comprehensive optimization and use a tool like GTMetrix to check your website’s speed.
• Use the ‘edge’ to supercharge your performance. ‘Edge’ is a bit of a buzzword these days but the idea here is to use third-party services to help performance (and security) even before a visitor lands on your website. For example, cache your site on Cloudflare so your audience is requesting a static file off their platform rather than your own server, which needs to process the call, pull content from a database, and render it to the end-user. Ask your hosting provider if this is something they offer.
• Monitor and plan ahead. Check regularly how your server is handling your growing audience. If you have a campaign coming up, make sure your server can handle the increased loads. Again, this is something your web hosting provider can help you with.

The secret to Scaling WordPress successfully

You need good tech in place. What you need most is a partner who understands your business, the audience you are serving, and the growth trajectory you’re taking (and what that means to plan for additional capacity along the way).

This could be a developer or hosting provider, or both. Someone you can trust will take excellent care of your website as you focus on growing your businesses.

This is unlikely to be one of the big web hosting brands with hundreds of thousands of customers where relationships are purely transactional. Find a specialist in WordPress hosting provider and talk to the smaller players, even ones local to you.

Sofian Saoudi of Solusign found a great WordPress dev on Upwork on his fourth attempt. Through him, he found Convesio.

Solusign is an eSignature implementation specialist launching when many businesses are rushing to move their contracts online.

I know little about web design and even less about hosting. But I know that I need to offer a great user experience and underpin that with tech that will not fall over as I ramp up my marketing. I don’t want to be kept awake at night thinking that my website will crash.

Practicing what we preach

We can relate to Sofian’s journey because we were in a similar spot just three years ago.

Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength to a point where over 800 investors trusted our vision, raising over $1M on Wefunder.

Feel free to reach out about this as it’s a bit of a process and there are a few tips we can share if you’re considering this funding route.

You can read more about how we help founders on our WordPress hosting for Startups page, and even test drive Convesio free — no credit card required either.