Website traffic management describes the process of controlling the number and/or type of visitors to a website. Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website (from a desktop or mobile browser) as well as users of native mobile apps.
Website owners use web traffic management solutions to maintain an acceptable level of website performance and/or gain control over the order and type of visitors who enter their website, usually for purposes of fairness.
53%
of global IT decision makers think their company will experience an outage so severe that it makes national media headlines
91%
of enterprises report downtime costs of $300,000+ per hour
96%
of global IT decision makers have experienced at least one outage in the past 3 years
Increasing website traffic is a common goal since it often results in more customers and sales. However, overwhelming surges in online traffic can often overwhelm website infrastructure. The two of the most prominent ecommerce bottlenecks are the inventory system and payment gateway. These systems are often difficult to scale and in many cases out of the direct control of the website.
Site traffic management solutions like Queue-it throttle the rate at which traffic arrives to a website or app to preserve satisfactory web performance.
Let’s say there are 100 pairs of sneakers available during a sale. Because of the sneakers’ popularity, there are 10,000+ visitors who arrive for the online sale.
Many of these visitors will be bots that malicious actors use to scoop up as many products as possible to resell at huge markups. They use a massive volume of the bots’ and their programmatic speed to beat all real customers to payment confirmation. How do you handle this traffic on your website?
The business owner needs to separate bots from genuine customers and needs a fair way to assign an order to the genuine customers who want to buy. A virtual waiting room can help achieve both goals.
"By implementing Queue-it, we are able to process major ticket onsales smoothly, using the virtual queue system as an effective overload management tool."
Andy Perkis, Business Development Director EMEA
Example: There are many ways to do this including: using a CDN, toggling features, running load tests.
Considerations: A higher performing website is always beneficial. But these tactics focus on better handling website traffic that has already arrived, not on web traffic control—managing how traffic enters the website.
Example: Business owners could configure their CDN to serve a generic error page if the server response times out.
Consideration: This would effectively block access to the website for newcomers. However, the visitor gets no transparent information on when he or she will have access to the site.
Example: A virtual waiting room is the quintessential digital traffic management solution.
Consideration: Waiting in line is not anyone’s favorite thing to do, but a virtual waiting room keeps visitor levels below where the website slows and crashes. Visitors exceeding the thresholds are offloaded to an online queue until the website can handle them. The online queue keeps users informed with information on wait times and number of people ahead in the virtual line.