A question that many of our clients ask is the following: “How many users can my Joomla website handle?”
Our answer is: The number of users that your Joomla website can handle depends on the following:
– The server you’re hosting your website with.
– The number of extensions you have activated on your website.
Joomla is a very heavy CMS, much heavier than WordPress. We’ve seen Joomla websites crash when being visited by just 10 visitors simultaneously. Even worse, we’ve soon Joomla websites crash when people refresh the page multiple times. These websites obviously suffer from being hosted on a very crowded server, and from a myriad of unnecessary extensions that are activated.
We’ve seen other Joomla websites receive many thousand visitors at the same time, and yet respond immediately. These websites are usually blessed with being hosted on a dedicated server. Additionally, these websites are usually managed by at least one professional who only activates the necessary extensions, who constantly monitors the load on the server (and makes some tweaks on the server to enhance the speed of the website), who makes use of caching in the right places, and who analyzes bottlenecks on the website and takes prompt actions to neutralize these bottlenecks (such actions may include hiring some Joomla experts to fix the code).
We think that any Joomla website should handle at least 10,000 visitors/day without a hitch (Note: a Joomla website should handle 50 concurrent users), even on a shared hosting platform. If you have a Joomla website that is only able to accept a few hundred visitors/day before crashing/not responding, then probably it’s time to contact us. Here’s how we’ll help:
– We’ll identify and fix the problematic extensions. Problematic extensions are those extensions that use a lot of resources (especially database resources) because of inefficient queries.
– We’ll tweak caching on your website. Caching is a two edged sword. The website can risk being not up-to-date if it’s used heavily, and can risk being slow if it’s not used at all.
– We’ll check if your hosting provided is actually good. Often the problem lies in your hosting provided. Some servers have literally hundreds of websites installed on them, and it only takes one bad apple (website) to ruin the whole bushel (server).
[…] – Installing a Joomla website. The latest version of Joomla was required. – Modifying a Joomla 1.5 template to make it compatible with the 1.7 version of Joomla. – Securing the Joomla website for PCI certification (the website passed PCI certification the day we left Dubai). – Adding a product catalog and a shopping cart to the website, and integrating the checkout process with a payment gateway (non-PayPal). – Connecting the product catalog to the actual physical inventory of the supermarket (The challenge that faced us here is that since the databases are connected, what will happen when a user buys a product online that was physically bought (at the same time of the online transaction) by a shopper while visiting the actual store – the solution to this problem was to connect the database to another, non-displayed inventory, a technique that provided a better accuracy of the availability of the product, but a 100% accuracy was never guaranteed). – Alerting the user when his products are scheduled for delivery after he buys them from the website. – Creating and sending newsletters to website subscribers. – Automatically updating the Facebook fan page with the latest products (this took us a long time – but now we know how to do it) – Allowing users to watch a product. When a user watches a product, he will immediately receive an email when this product is on sale. – Allowing users to review/rate products. – Optimizing and scaling Joomla to handle thousands of daily investors (see our post on the number of users that Joomla can handle). […]
[…] websites only receive a few thousand visits a day (at best) – which is well in the range of the number of users that Joomla can handle without scaling […]