If you're running a WooCommerce store, you should be aware of some special features when it comes to hosting and optimizing your WordPress website. That's why today we'll show you what you should look out for in your WooCommerce hosting to optimize the user experience, the search engine ranking of your store and your conversions.
According to the latest data from BuildWith, 25% of the top one million e-commerce websites use the WooCommerce store system . This means that the popular WordPress plugin has the largest market share, followed by Shopify (19%) and Magento (8%). This success is no coincidence: the free plugin allows you to transform your WordPress website into a fully functional online store. With over five million active installations, it is one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever.
You can read about the advantages and potential problems of WooCommerce compared to other store systems in our article "WooCommerce: The advantages and disadvantages of the popular store plugin".
An overloaded WooCommerce store hurts your business
According to an infographic by Truconversion, just one second of additional loading time leads to a 7% reduction in your conversion rate and 11% fewer page views. This often quoted statistic clearly shows how important website performance is for your success. A negative user experience not only leads to more abandonment in the checkout process, but also reduces the referral rate.
Optimizing the performance of your store not only improves the user experience, but also your visibility. After all, the speed of your website has been an official ranking factor. Since July 2018, Google has been taking page speed for mobile searchessearches.
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You should consider these 4 things for your WooCommerce hosting
Since WooCommerce websites usually generate a lot of data and requests, they place special demands on hosting and also require you to take one or two optimization measures. That's why today I'm going to show you four things you should consider when hosting WooCommerce:
1. caching
With the help of caching, a regular WordPress website can withstand a load of thousands of calls. The cache temporarily stores static content such as stylesheets, JavaScript and images and delivers them when the website is called up. In our Starter plan, for example, up to 75,000 cached calls can be answered within one minute.
How does the cache work in WooCommerce stores?
For WooCommerce stores to function properly, there must be certain exceptions regarding caching. A clear example of such an exception is the shopping cart. Caching this area of your store would not only lead to total chaos with orders, but would also be problematic from a data protection perspective. This is why it is simply necessary with WooCommerce hosting to systematically exclude certain areas from caching.
It is therefore crucial that you develop an understanding of the load your store can handle. You can check this with Loader.io, for example. The tool simulates visits to your website and shows when your store is at risk of collapsing under the load. Or slow down so much that the visit to your store is canceled. If you prefer to work with the command line, you can also use the Apache Benchmark Tool.
Another area that cannot be cached is the WordPress backend. Without optimization measures, this results in long loading times, especially for large actions such as bulk uploads of product images or editing lots of product information.
Simultaneous calls in your shopping cart or large actions in the backend are therefore directly reflected in the processor performance. To optimize these dynamic areas, you therefore need to make adjustments other than caching.
2. wooCommerce hosting needs powerful servers
Since a WooCommerce store generates a lot of dynamic content and requests that cannot be cached, a correspondingly strong server performance is required.
Depending on the size and popularity of your store, there may be tens of thousands of people on your website at the same time during peak shopping hours, searching for products, filtering items by different product categories, filling their shopping cart and making purchases.
Your store hosting should be prepared for precisely this eventuality. After all, every second that your WooCommerce store takes longer to load, is overloaded or even offline means a loss of potential revenue.
More CPU power for many calls and high order volumes
An important optimization measure for your WooCommerce hosting is to increase the CPU cores. After all, the server must be able to handle more load with many visits and corresponding database queries (such as displaying products according to various filters). We like to use the metaphor of a chip shop to explain the principle:
Imagine that the server of your WordPress website is a chip shop. Each person at the counter of the chip shop represents a CPU core. If there is only one person behind the counter, only one request can be processed at a time. If there are only a few guests, this is not a problem at first.
However, if the number of guests becomes so high that the chip shop is overwhelmed by the requests, more people (i.e. more CPU cores) are needed. The more people there are at the sales counter, the more orders can be processed at the same time. To prevent guests from becoming frustrated or simply leaving, at a certain point several people behind the counter are even a prerequisite.
In this context, it is important to understand that more CPU cores do not automatically improve the loading time of your WordPress website - after all, the individual cores work at the same speed. Rather, increasing the number of cores ensures that several requests can be processed simultaneously and your store is not overloaded.
Give your store enough PHP memory limit!
Optimizing server performance involves not only the CPU cores and RAM, but also an appropriate PHP memory limit. This determines the maximum memory quota that the RAM provides for PHP processes. This set limit prevents the server from being overloaded by a faulty script, for example.
A higher PHP memory limit is a requirement for a more complex website such as a WooCommerce store so that the server can withstand large and simultaneous processes. Therefore, the PHP memory limit for our WooCommerce solutions is 512 megabytes.
The minimum PHP version recommended by WooCommerce is PHP 7.4. With Raidboxes you also have the option of upgrading your store to even newer and faster PHP versions with just one click.
How many CPU cores does your WooCommerce store need?
The question of what exact requirements your WooCommerce hosting must offer depends, among other things, on your monthly traffic and the views per minute and therefore cannot be answered in general terms. On our WooCommerce tariffs page, you will find a small guide to help you choose the right WooCommerce hosting for your store.
Another factor that determines your server performance requirements is the number, size and quality of your plugins. For example, if you use a large plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math, which has to be loaded on each of your websites, this requires a corresponding amount of server power. The same applies if you want to link an analog checkout system to your store and the server has to process constant live queries.
3. many images = great need for optimization
Large images and graphics can be a huge performance hog. Since WooCommerce stores usually need a lot of images to display the products, there is enormous optimization potential here that you should exploit. Fortunately, there are various image optimization plugins that can help you with this task.
Compressing your images correctly not only has a positive effect on the loading time of your WooCommerce store and thus on the user experience, but ideally also improves your search engine ranking and your conversion rate. It is therefore almost a prerequisite for a good WooCommerce store.
As with any website in this day and age, it is also a requirement that you optimize your images for mobile viewing. According to an e-commerce study by Qubit, the mobile web influenced up to 19 percent of total online sales in 2017. In addition, the results of the study show that online sales can be increased by up to 33 percent by improving mobile product discovery.
4. security and data protection
You are always on the safe side with backups and staging
If a plugin update or other change destroys your website, it's important to get your WooCommerce store up and running again as quickly as possible. And this is where your backups come into play: with all our WooCommerce plans, a backup of your website is created fully automatically every night, which you can restore with just a few clicks. You can also create manual backups at any time.
The fact that this saves you a large backup plugin is an advantage for both security and performance reasons. It's not for nothing that our credo for plugins is: "As much as necessary, as little as possible!"
To avoid problems on your live website in the first place, you can use our staging environment to test changes on a copy of your website. If you are satisfied with the result, the staging environment can be switched live with one click. The prerequisite for this is that you exclude the database tables with the orders when overwriting the live website. This is because while you are testing changes in the staging environment, your live website may continue to receive orders that you would lose if you overwrite it.
Data protection is more important than ever for stores since the GDPR
If you run a WooCommerce store, you process personal data such as addresses, account details and credit card numbers on a daily basis. You should take the issues of security and data protection seriously, especially in light of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It's best to look for managed WordPress hosting that includes free SSL certificates, daily backups and WordPress, theme and plugin updates and only uses servers in Germany. In addition, we at Raidboxes have implemented further data protection tools to relieve you of as much work as possible when implementing the GDPR requirements. One example is our WP Session Eraser and Login Protection.
Conclusion: Good WooCommerce hosting has your back
A WooCommerce store has special hosting requirements due to its many functionalities and dynamic processes. To save yourself valuable time, money and nerves, you should choose a host that is familiar with these special features, guarantees the required performance and security and offers first-class WordPress support.
Ultimately, your WooCommerce hosting should have your back so that you can concentrate on the essentials: the further development of your store and your products. In this way, you enable a flawless shopping experience through your store, which is not only gladly repeated, but also recommended to others.
You can find more tips on WooCommerce and WooCommerce hosting in our 70+ page e-book WooCommerce for professionals: Online stores with WordPress.
What is your previous experience with WooCommerce hosting? Which requirements are particularly important for your store? I look forward to your comment!
