WooCommerce hosting for your webshop
WooCommerce turns WordPress into a webshop, and a webshop asks more of its hosting than a business site: more PHP memory, object caching for cart and product pages, a reliable cron for order mails and stock, and an SSL certificate for payment. Our plans with 256 or 512 MB PHP memory include all of that, with Redis and the Jaan Performance Engine thrown in. Small and medium-sized shops run on shared hosting; as you grow, you move to a managed VPS.
The basis is ordinary WordPress hosting. The difference lies in what a shop adds: every visitor with a cart gets their own, uncached page, every order sets off a series of emails and stock updates, and every payment has to go over a secure connection. Here is what WooCommerce therefore asks of its environment and where it usually goes wrong.
What WooCommerce asks of its environment
Generous PHP memory
A shop with hundreds of products, variations and a handful of add-ons quickly hits the memory limit of a small plan. Choose a plan with 256 MB, and with a larger catalogue or many add-ons 512 MB. You see it first in the admin area, which is the first to slow down.
Object caching
Cart, checkout page and logged-in customers cannot come from the page cache; there WordPress recalculates everything. Redis object caching keeps the database answers in memory and keeps exactly those pages smooth. It is included with every plan.
A reliable cron
Order confirmations, stock adjustments, expired carts and scheduled promotions run through background tasks. If you let those depend on chance visitors, they get left behind on a quiet shop. A real cron on the server solves that and can be set up in the control panel.
SSL for payment
Payment providers refuse an integration without a secure connection, and browsers mark a checkout page without SSL as unsafe. The Let's Encrypt certificate is included with us as standard and renews automatically.
Which environment does WooCommerce belong on?
A small or medium-sized shop runs fine on shared hosting, on the same basis as our WordPress hosting but with the memory a shop needs. If the catalogue grows to thousands of products, peaks with many simultaneous orders arrive or you need your own server software, a managed VPS is the next step. We do the transfer, without the shop going offline.
About shared hostingWhat most often goes wrong with WooCommerce
Too many plugins
Every add-on runs on every page view, including the checkout page. Thirty plugins for filters, badges, pop-ups and shipping options make a shop slower than the hosting can ever make up for. Keep what you actually use and remove the rest.
No caching
Without page and object caching, the server recalculates every product page for every visitor. The Jaan Performance Engine, our own WordPress plugin, comes free with every plan and handles that caching together with Redis. Switch it on before blaming the hosting.
Images not optimised
Product photos straight from the camera are often several megabytes each. A category page with twenty of those photos loads slowly, however fast the server. Resize and compress images before uploading; the Jaan Performance Engine helps with deferring their loading.