On the night of August 6, 2024, a county clerk in West Michigan sent out an alert that the first primary results were posted. In one hour, about 30,000 users refreshed the page roughly 129,000 times, and it stayed down for more than an hour.
Nobody attacked that site. People just wanted to know who won.
Tonight, as polls close in the 2026 midterms, the same thing will play out on results pages and local news sites. Your own big moment might be a sale, a news mention or Black Friday, which is 24 days away.
Here’s why sites fall over when everyone hits refresh, and how to keep yours up.
Why refreshing knocks a site over
Election night barely moves the internet as a whole, but it hits a few pages very hard. In 2024, Cloudflare saw overall US traffic rise 15% after the first polls closed, while DNS lookups for news sites later ran 325% higher.
In 2014, Virginia’s results site drew more than 300,000 visits and 25 million page views, roughly 80 pages per visit. People weren’t browsing. They were reloading.
Each uncached page view on WordPress or Joomla runs PHP and database queries, and a server can only do so many at once. Past that point, requests queue, memory fills up and visitors see errors. So they refresh, which adds to the pile.
How your hosting keeps up
- Page caching. A cached page is ready-made HTML, so most visitors never touch PHP or the database. At 100 requests per second, a 60-second cache turns 6,000 page builds into one. Our WordPress hosting uses advanced caching. On a WooCommerce store, leave cart and checkout pages uncached.
- Fast storage. When a request does reach the database, storage speed decides how quickly the server moves on. That’s why Eleven2 moved its servers to NVMe.
- Dedicated resources. Web hosting suits most cached sites. If you run big sales or take a lot of orders, a managed VPS gives you resources of your own. Bigger sites can step up to Enterprise or Cloud.
- A plain fallback. The Michigan county had results back up as PDFs within 15 minutes of its crash. Simple pages keep working when fancy ones can’t.
Spike or attack?
Most surges are real people. Cloudflare found that 80% of the traffic to state and local government sites on the 2022 Election Day was human. A real crowd follows an email or news story and loads your popular pages. An attack tends to have no clear trigger and hammers one URL or random ones.
A crowd needs more capacity, while an attack needs filtering. If you can’t tell which you’ve got, ask your host before you change anything.
Your checklist before the next big night
- Turn on page caching, then test it while logged out.
- Stagger your emails and texts. The Michigan county’s traffic hit all at once because its alert did.
- Load test a staging copy, and tell your host first.
- Take a fresh backup and hold off on plugin updates until the rush is over.
- Set up uptime monitoring from outside your server.
Ready before the rush
However tonight’s races turn out, the sites that stay up decided to stay up weeks ago. Not sure your plan can take a busy date? Talk to our team. We’ll look at your site and tell you whether caching will do the job or it’s time to move up to a VPS.
We hope this helps you get the most out of your site. Come back soon for more on WordPress, hosting and more!
