World most flexible eCommerce platform.
Huge topic to discuss but we have gathered here few of the most common questions about WooCommerce integrations with WordPress.
What is WooCommerce?
Why do I need a hosting provider which understands WooCommerce requirements?
How performant is WooCommerce?
Hosting your own online store came a long way in the last few years.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin easy to install from WordPress wp-admin interface.
With the release of WooCommerce version, 3 WordPress became a leader in the online store market. As a benchmark WooCommerce powers 30% of the eCommerce stores worldwide making it the most used platform in the world.
When you talk about WooCommerce you need to remember that the WooCommerce plugin is not like any other WordPress plugin.
It has its own set of requirements:
In order to select the right WordPress hosting platform you need to understand what WooCommerce is and the integration with WordPress.
A lot of hosting companies promote WordPress hosting but not many mention WooCommerce hosting because they just treat WooCommerce like any other WordPress plugin. If you go towards that path and assume that WooCommerce is just another plugin you are already set for failure in your online business.
Here at GridGhost, we are fully aware of what WooCommerce is and how it needs to be set up in order to give the end user a smooth shopping experience.
We have a customized plan out of the box optimized for WooCommerce in order to ensure smooth sail.
Why do I need a hosting provider which understands WooCommerce requirements?
Before you decide where to have your WooCommerce online shop hosted there are 3 main things you need to consider..
Caching
Here we are not discussing a WordPress caching plugin even that we do recommend some in our Optimise WordPress Performance blog tutorial.
We are discussing the ability of your current hosting provider to understand what caching is required for WooCommerce and what caching to avoid. You don’t want your cart to stay cached when somebody adds a product to it.
The team at gridghost.com has already benchmark and tested different server configurations to ensure maximum performance for the predefined WordPress + WooCommerce bundle.
If you dig a bit deeper you find that most companies promoting WordPress hosting have a general cache-all setting in order to pack as many sites as they can on a single server.
GridGhost has a different approach towards WordPress hosting, our aim is customer satisfaction.
Database Calls
Another overlooked requirement for a WordPress + WooCommerce dedicated hosting is database optimization. WordPress alone is a demanding application when it comes to database calls if you add WooCommerce to it the number of database calls quadruples.
A standard inexpensive hosting will crumble under the load and this will result in a poor customer experience with pages taking ages to load or timing out when you need them most. Of course, nobody will share this information with you when you are signing up, you will find out the hard way once things start to go slow.
GridGhost platform is using database intelligent query caching for all the WooCommerce sites to ensure maximum performance and minimize data delivery time.
External Calls
A WooCommerce installation in comparison to standard WordPress site will be required to make external calls to third-party applications.
Consider payment gateway integration or google shop or an accounting software. Some of the integrations like the payment are critical integration.
When we talk about payment or data synchronization the response speed of your WordPress hosting platform will play an important role.
All these dynamic requests will need to be handled by your hosting server in a real-time manner to avoid data corruption or denial of service.
Who you are and the level of knowledge you have will dictate what you need for WooCommerce hosting.
If you are an IT Expert
If you are an IT expert or a very good developer then you should be able to configure your own hosting server and tune it the way you like in order to achieve maximum performance out of it.
If you are not an IT expert
Then you have a few options:
If you don’t have the knowledge the easiest way is to hire somebody who knows what they are doing. This can be efficient on a short-term as you will get your custom WordPress + WooCommerce hosting how you want it for a price. On the long term, you will realize that your business depends on a person like that to ensure the functionality of your site or to be available in case you have hosting issues we call it “Single point of failure”.
This involves hours of researching and testing and countless posts on different forums on your quest for help, guidance, and knowledge.
In simple terms, if we use a bit of analogy is like getting advice from a general contractor on how to build your own building so you can have your own office, showroom and warehouse in it so you can sell your fluffy bunny product. We are not saying is not achievable but the return on investment won't be there once you start clocking the hours you spend in understanding how things work.
If you are not a technical person with a lot of time on your hand able understand new technologies and terminology avoid this path.
If you are a small business person and want to start your own online store
As any successful business or even as a startup business you probably know by now that ROI is one of the most import things to keep track off.
The best ROI is achieved when your time and efforts are invested in the business. When you look at the bigger picture to invest a small amount of money on a managed WordPress hosting will be your best ROI.
By using a managed WordPress hosting company such as GridGhost you are renting top-level advice in the hosting field for a very affordable price.
We will ensure that your website is always available and delivers at top speed so your customers can enjoy a flawless shopping experience.
How performant is WooCommerce?
We can assure you that WooCommerce in the right environment can outperform or match most of the other eCommerce platforms.
On the GridGhost platform, we have customers with very demanding eCommerce sites using WooCommerce.
Some of this sites can achieve up to 2500 or more shopping cart events a minute and have hundreds of products available for sale in different geographical regions. We can testify first hand that WooCommerce can be a very reliable and scalable platform if handled properly.
Of course, this didn’t happen out of the box just by installing the WooCommerce plugin, for that level of usage we build custom configurations specific to the business requirements.
Conclusion
In conclusion, GridGhost is proud to confirm that we know how to handle WooCommerce hosting and a WooCommerce website can scale if you are with the right hosting company.
You can always start with the basic and slowly grow your business having peace of mind that we will make our best effort to support you along the way.
What does GridGhost offer for the WooCommerce hosting plans?
We hope that we manage to explain WooCommerce as a hosting requirement and the level of expertise in the hosting filed available at GridGhost.
We would be happy to answer all your questions in relation to WooCommerce and when the time comes you would consider us as your future hosting partner.