WooCommerce Hosting Made for Online Shops

Will a shared plan cope with an online shop?

In most cases it will, with room to spare. A WooCommerce shop with a few hundred products and a steady stream of orders sits well inside what shared hosting can handle. Many shop owners are persuaded to buy much more than they need.

The size of your catalogue is not what decides it. What matters is how many people are doing something demanding at the same time. Browsing costs little because pages can be cached. Checkout, search and the cart cannot be, since each one is specific to the shopper using it.

These are the real signs that a shared plan is no longer enough:

• More than a handful of people are often at checkout at once, not merely looking around the site.
• You list thousands of products with variants, and the admin screens have become slow to work in.
• Your promotions bring in a month's worth of traffic in a single afternoon.
• You have installed so many plugins that the site is slow even at quiet times.

If at least two of these sound familiar, moving to a VPS is the right step and we will tell you so. If none of them apply, a shared plan is no compromise, and the money you save stays in your pocket.

Getting paid, plus two other things that cost you orders

People like to pay the way they always do. If your shop offers a single payment method, you will lose orders from buyers who can afford it but would rather not pay that way at a shop they have never used. Card payments run through your card payment gateway, and for customers in Kenya we can build M-Pesa checkout integration too.

The remaining two get less attention. A shop cannot skip SSL: without a certificate, browsers flag the checkout page as not secure, and shoppers really do give up at that point. Yours comes included and renews on its own. The second is product photos, which are usually why a shop feels slow. A picture taken on a phone runs to several megabytes, while the same image sized for the web is about 200KB and looks no different on screen. Resizing your images tends to be the cheapest speed gain a shop can make, and it costs nothing except an afternoon.

Questions About eCommerce Hosting