Watch this eye-opening expose on how regular web hosting unfairly limits the performance of Woocommerce no matter how much you spend. I guarantee you’ve never heard this before.
There are a lot of moving parts to Woocommerce and there are small fixes that make small improvements. However chances are that it comes down to your web hosting service. This doesn’t mean that by simply spending more for a faster, more powerful server you are going to get some relief for your growing store.
The fact is that most web hosts have built in limits to their hosting accounts. What are some of the reasons?
- They have many thousands of sites on a single server and they don’t one site to crowd out the rest.
- They want to force you to keep upgrading to more and more expensive accounts.
- They sell hardware but don’t want to invest in the costly technical people who can properly program and optimize the server software.
How do they hold back your website performance? By limiting the number of people who can connect simultaneously. A new Apache webserver comes with only 150 connections. Database driven websites like WordPress and Woocommerce need 3 connections for each visitor. 1 for the HTML, 1 for the images and 1 to connect to the database. So in this scenario you could only connect with 50 users at once. Even if you upgrade to a more expensive server or VPS, it is unlikely that they will bother to increase the default number of connections because this ends up requiring more technical support.
So if your Woocommerce store gets busy chances are visitors won’t be able to load the page in a timely manner and hit the dreaded “back” button on their browser before they have a chance to check out what you are offering. Even if they actually add something to the cart they might not be able to complete their shopping experience.
When Google detects that your site loads slowly they will list your website below other faster sites on the search engine results page. They will downgrade your user quality score and charge you a lot more per click if you rely on Google ads.
Also if you have a larger store with many products, some expert tweaks might be needed to optimize the database performance.
Again you need a web host with the necessary human talent on hand to take care of these sorts of things.
Having a huge number of products combined with a limited number of available connections can make the whole store crash and even result in a corrupted database. That’s when you need an excellent backup feature so that a working copy can be quickly restored.
Other factors include malicious code which gets injected by hackers into your WordPress theme. In fact once a hacker gains access to just one website on a server, all the other sites may become infected. Popular websites may get probed hundreds of times per day which diminishes the available resources for legitimate operations. A strong web host has a strategy to deal with these sorts of problems.
Popular theme frameworks such as WP bakery and new plugins may get released without adequate testing and destroy your your entire website in a single click. Again this is where having a recent copy of your website, stored on a separate server can save the day.
WordPress websites and Woocommerce in particular require special kinds of management in addition to being able to successfully run a server. You need an admin team who has “seen everything” when it comes to WordPress so they can quickly spot what is going on and take care of issues effectively.
I like helping people actualize their vision. For me it began with starting one of the first high traffic web hosting services back in 1998. Since then I have also worked with game changers to articulate their message in ways that can be more easily assimilated by their audience. David Cruz