Imagine the immediate website traffic that businesses featured on Shark Tank receive. If you watch the show, there is a very good chance that you’re also simultaneously checking these businesses out online. If you consider that a large percentage of the other millions of people watching the show are also checking out these businesses online, you can imagine that some serious damage can happen to these websites if the businesses are not prepared for the increase in traffic.

While your company may not be going on Shark Tank, you may be attending a networking conference in the near future or are in the works of creating a killer social media campaign. These activities have the potential to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your website, and the last thing you will want to have is a website that is slow to load or unresponsive.

Smart business owners and marketers are proactive with enhancing their website design to accommodate for future growth. To help, here are 4 website design enhancements that you should take advantage of today to prepare for an influx of traffic:

1. Use a quality hosting platform from the get go.
It’s not realistic to expect that a small hosting provider can handle the high volume of traffic that your website would receive from a big promotional event such as your business being featured on Shark Tank. Ideally, you want to select a hosting platform that is backed by a Content Delivery Network that can help to route traffic based on where your website visitors are originating from. Simply ask where your website vendor hosts their websites, ideally not from their own offices, and decide if it’s a suitable solution for your needs.

2. While you should always use high-quality images, make sure the file sizes are compressed.
Yes, large graphics, text, and call-to-action buttons can be visually appealing and effective, but if done incorrectly they contribute to slower page load time. And, with today’s consumers having increasingly shortened attention spans, a slow page load will most certainly cost you business. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to keep your images under 1MB. However, there will be times that you will need to use a larger image (such as a background image), and you’ll want to be sure to compress that file as much as possible.

3. Keep the website as static as possible for the time being.
Static website design is a series of HTML blocks that represents each page on your website, and these pages deliver the information to the website visitor exactly how it’s stored. You can think of this type of website design as being more of a brochure for your business as it’s strictly informational. While your website may not be interactive, it will load quickly and give your visitors the information they need. Once you get the massive influx of traffic under control, you may want to consider moving over to a more dynamic custom web app that provides for a more responsive, interactive, and personalized user experience.

4. Perform a load test.
It’s important to know how quickly your website will load with a large influx of traffic, and you can do this by running a load test. Of course, you’ll want to check with your provider first before doing this. You should also talk to a web developer about which load tests will best simulate a real-life scenario.

In a world with fewer and fewer face-to-face interactions, your website is often the face of your brand. While the prospect of having a large influx of visitors to your website can be incredibly exciting, make sure that you are taking proactive measures with website design to best accommodate this growth and put your best foot forward.