Help! hecklerspray.com keeps falling over…

Hi all,

We’re stuck. We haven’t changed anything but our site, https://www.hecklerspray.com, has been going down on a daily basis.

I think this is largely related to the amount of traffic we’re getting – we’ll have thousands of people an hour when it is busy. Too much strain? I suspect think we need to rethink / re-engineer / rebuild the database? Maybe upgrade to the lastest version of WP?

We have a list of known issues:

1) There is a duplicate content issue. We’re seeing pages both with and without / at the end of the URL – one needs to be removed, only I don;t know which one… which does Google pick up?

2) Image handling problem. Images appear on one of the pages (ie the one with or without the / at the end of the URL). Google News sometimes indexes the right one.

3) Google News indexing issue. For some reason, we only see stories indexed when a reader comment has been added.

4) We also need to get our RSS feeds sorted – this could be another black mark for Google.

5) Upgrade to WP 2.1?

6) After back end fixes, we want to revamp hecklerspray’s theme.

Can anybody help us figure this stuff out? Our skills lie in content / internet marketing, so we’re a bit short of tech / WordPress knowhow (other than using it as our CMS -it is a fine platform. I’m hoping a lot of these fixes are straightforward for anybody who knows their

Please either reply below or email me at hecklerspray@gmail.com if you can help.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Cheers,

Chris