HOW MUCH TRAFFIC IS TO MUCH?

WINMAGAZINE
New Member
4 0 0

We have a magazine company that averages 20k visitors per month, but we are currently using WordPress for that. We are looking to switch over to Shopify and are wondering if 20k would crash the site a lot? Also every March we have national voting, which consists of about 200k people visiting our site over the course of three days. That is what I'm most concerned about is the 200k in 72 hours. So my question is, will the 200k shock the server causing it to crash?

Replies 3 (3)

Lilith
Shopify Staff
603 73 185

Hi, @WINMAGAZINE!

My name is Lilith, I'm on the Social Care team at Shopify.

I'm excited to hear about the growth you've experienced with your business. I'd love to help confirm some information on the capabilities of Shopify as a commerce platform for you. Trust me when I say you'll be in good hands!

If you're familiar with Kylie Cosmetics, you can picture the scale of traffic that we can handle. Her store years ago was one of the first that flexed our servers and since then our capacities have only become even more robust! If you're curious about the fun story behind that take a peek at our blog post here!

We have an exceptionally resilient infrastructure that handles high-traffic events frequently. Shopify can handle a lot of visitors! A lot! We power over 1 million businesses that share the same reliable architecture. At any given time, Shopify is handling several millions of visitors per minute. 200K over a period of 72 hours wouldn't be a problem at all. We would be thrilled to help your business scale and grow!

All that said, there are some rare cases in which things can become tricky. Here are the cases you'll want to keep in mind to avoid in order to ensure your store is functioning at peak performance on our platform and using our server network at its full potential:

 

  • An inefficiently coded theme with an emphasis on liquid looping through collections, products to serve content dynamically

  • A theme with many connected 3rd parties that change the customer experience frequently

  • Misuse of the Shopify API in querying large amounts of content at too fast of a rate

 

Would you say that your site would require several customization options for each unique customer experience? If so, just a tad bit of special care to those areas should be taken to optimize the customer experience and maintain high efficiency.

Here are some of the examples of some individual cases of the approximate values of peaks that Shopify has experienced to date, but these aren't meant to be a measure of maximum capacities in any way:

 

  • Single shops have reached totals of over +1,050,000 unique visitors in 60min, with peaks of over 125,000 unique sessions per minute.

  • Shopify’s request per minute (RPM) count has reached above 2,500,000 at peak for a single shop.

  • The highest single-day pageview count is over 27,850,000 unique pages viewed.

  • The highest single-day created cart total is over 7,400,000 unique customer carts.

  • The highest single-day completed order total is over 400,000 unique purchases.

 

To help give you some further idea of scale, I can tell you that we power Fashion Nova, Gymshark, Jeffree Star Cosmetics, Kith, Staples.ca, and many many more businesses! We have a great blog post on a merchant case study that can help highlight scale. You can check out that blog post about Staples here

If you'd like to explore some resources on our infrastructure we have a list below that can help get you started on finding the information you're looking for:

 

 

I hope that this gives you the clarity and confidence in making your decision. Let me know how you do with the information above! I'm happy to answer any questions you think of as you work on your business.

Lilith | Social Care @ Shopify 
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smingram
Visitor
1 0 0

This was an incredibly helpful response.  I'm looking at the engineering article you linked.  The surviving flashes of high write traffic using... article.  They mention a queue halfway down the article. Is this feature built into every shopify store regardless of pay level?  It looks branded in the article, how does this feature work?

 

saturdayrepub
Shopify Partner
8 1 8

Hi Lilith, 

 

I am wondering if the stats and articles in your comment above apply to all levels of Shopify, not just Shopify Plus? Are there gains in traffic spike management if you are on Shopify Plus or is the load management the same regardless of which plan you are on? 

 

Thanks!

Alexis