Server Overload
If your website receives too many visitors, you may experience server overload from your Web hosting company. Their servers may not be sufficient to handle the visitors if you have a dynamic website that loads scripts and a database for each visitor. These can take up an enormous amount of room on their servers and, if you experience peaks in your traffic, they may not be able to handle them. Shared hosting is also bad news for very busy websites. Although shared hosting is cheap, excess traffic may cause more charges and your website to be down during peak periods. If your Flash website experiences problems because of increased traffic and the inability of your hosting company, any real-time features such as forums or chats will slow down, if not completely stop. This will adversely affect user experience and hurt your website’s traffic.
When you start out and make your own website, it may be tempting to use a cheap hosting company. This is okay until your website takes off and you start to get peaks in traffic. It may be a wiser choice to invest in a hosting service that has enough server room to handle large websites with a lot of traffic. Changing hosting companies can be a pain, and you will have to update your entire site if you do, which can cost more than if you just chose a company that is large enough to handle traffic peaks from the start.
Black Hat May Produce Quantity…But Not Quality
If you have engaged in black hat SEO, you may have links on completely unrelated websites that cause your numbers as well as your bounce rate to increase. There have been website owners that have hired people to do SEO for them only to find out later that they had placed backlinks on unrelated websites. It is important for you to get a list of the sites that your backlinks reside on so that you can be sure that your links are related and will generate productive traffic. This will also ensure that your backlinks are not on websites you would rather not be associated with.
For example, a website owner hires someone to do postings and backlinks. They later find out that their backlinks reside on pornographic sites. Now they have to hire someone to remove these links and find more relevant sites to place links on. This scenario not only wastes your money and time, but it also creates a network of links that you may find less than desirable. Search engines will index your site and place it lower since the sites that your links reside on are in no way related to your actual website. Even after your links are removed, there is still a trail in the search engine’s databases that will only expire after a significant amount of time has elapsed.
When you decide to hire someone to optimize your website, cheap is not always better. Ask them questions about their tactics and how they plan to do SEO. If it is not white hat or organic SEO, pass. Black hat tactics will kill your rank in the search engines after an initial influx of traffic, and if the traffic coming to your site is not converting, you are wasting your money. Worst case scenario: your website gets dropped from the search engine databases or flagged as spam. This means that the website you spent all of your time and money on is virtually invisible.
The Upside of Traffic
If you do your SEO organically and have a Web hosting service that can handle the traffic, having peaks in your traffic is, as Martha Stewart says, a very good thing. It is the goal of all website owners, especially those who have a business. So, to answer the question, “Can too much traffic be bad for your website?”, the answer is mixed. Yes, if you don’t have a good hosting plan and it comes from black hat SEO; no, if you’ve done your homework and obtained a good plan and quality SEO. You have to have a plan before you start to make your own website. Once you have that in place, the sky is the limit.
