Are you looking for the best WooCommerce hosting provider to create an run your own online store?
Choosing the right hosting provider may the most important decision you make for a fast and efficient running eCommerce storefront.
What to Look for in a WooCommerce Hosting Provider
Before we can point out optimized WooCommerce hosting solutions based on your needs, let us take a minute to talk about a handful of web hosting features/traits that are particularly important in the eCommerce world.
Hosting plans come in all shapes, sizes and price points. Some of them are as low as $15 a month, while others can be as high $500 or more per month. Knowing what makes them different will help you to understand why you would want to pay more.
The hardware technology used and the number of PHP workers provided by your hosting provider will ultimately affect the overall performance that online visitors experience while navigating through your online store.
Here are the main factors that affect the price and performance of a web hosting plan:
Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated Server vs Load Balanced Servers
CPU Speed and Server Memory
Number of PHP Workers In Effect
Managed Support vs Unmanaged Support
Backup Solution Offerings
Integrated Content Delivery Network
Performance Enhancing Caching and Monitoring Options
Firewalls, Threat Detection, and Security Options
Scalability: Handling the Ups and Downs of E-commerce Traffic
Your WooCommerce store’s traffic is dynamic. It’s crucial to choose a hosting solution that can scale with your business, ensuring smooth operations even during unexpected traffic surges.
- Flexible Resources: Look for hosts that make it easy to upgrade your RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth as needed. Ideally, this should be a seamless process that does not require significant downtime or complex migrations.
- Plenty of PHP Workers: Look for hosts that provide you with upfront information on how many PHP workers your site will be able to utilize. PHP workers do all the heavy background tasks for your site and are directly related to performance.
- Cloud Hosting: Cloud-based solutions are inherently scalable. They can allocate additional resources almost instantly to handle traffic spikes, ensuring your store stays responsive.
- Load Balancing: This technology (also referred to as Clustered Servers) distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers, preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed. Load balancing is especially important for high-traffic stores.
- Auto-Scaling: Some hosts offer auto-scaling features, where resources are dynamically adjusted based on real-time traffic demands. This can be cost-effective as you only pay for what you need during peak periods.
Why Scalability Matters
Investing in scalable hosting offers several benefits:
- Maintain Performance during Peak Traffic: Avoid slowdowns or crashes during holidays, sales, or viral marketing campaigns.
- Lost Sales Prevention: Ensure potential customers can always access your store, even during high demand.
- Improved Customer Experience: A consistently fast and responsive store keeps shoppers happy and more likely to return.
- Long-Term Planning: Scalable hosting allows you to accommodate your store’s growth without major infrastructure changes.
Who Should I Use to Host My WooCommerce Site
We have done the research for you and list the best WooCommerce Hosting Providers that fit the bill of what we consider a worthy host for your online store. Web page loading time is ultimately the biggest part of what you are paying for with a hosting provider. Attempts to google this information on your own will likely lead you to dozens of websites that are making money through an affiliate program and will say just about anything to get you to choose the hosts they are advertising on their links.
Using several reliable sources (such as WP Hosting Benchmarks from Review Signal), we were able to gather real benchmark results and combine this information with the managed plans each host offers. We strongly recommend that our users consider managed hosting plans which offer the convenience of WooCommerce experts to handle all of the complicated moving parts of a shopping cart for you.
As of 2024, here is a list of hosting providers that offer excellent unmanaged and managed WooCommerce Server plans. Each of the providers listed below have slightly different ways in how they handle scalability of high traffic sites. All are acceptable ways of dealing with the unexpected flow of ecommerce traffic.
Nexcess
SiteGround
Pressable
InMotion
Technical Factors that Affect Website Performance (Advanced)
We put together a list of all the things that make an ecommerce site perform well for the user who wants to do their own fine tuning. This is considered an advanced topic meant for IT professionals only.
The following is a technical list of factors that all have an impact on ecommerce site performance and security.
- Select a host with server responses (time to first byte) of around 1000 milliseconds or less
- Select a host that uses up-to-date technology with the latest version of PHP, SQL, Apache Server, etc.
- Select a host that utilizes the latest website boosting and server performance enhancing options like Cloudflare, NGINX, REDIS, PHP-FPM, Brotli compression
- Select a host that provides you with details on PHP workers and hardware technology allocated to your site
- Select a host that offers built-in performance monitoring and auto-scaling capabilities
- Choose a fast loading WooCommerce theme that has a good balance of visual appeal and quick loading pages
- Implement a Content Delivery Network (aka CDN) for quicker loading of images
- Identify, fix, and/or replace bloated WordPress plugins that load their scripts across your entire site
- Confirm that your plug-ins are not interfering with each other or are creating too many server queries. Disabling plug-ins one at a time and then retesting your site performance is an effective way to narrow in on performance crippling plug-ins.
- Minimize the number of WooCommerce plug-ins installed or emphasis on lightweight plug-ins that get the job done
- Confirm with your host if object caching is being done automatically and whether specific cache plug-ins will benefit or hinder your site performance.
- Consider an endpoint firewall and security solution (such as WordFence) to monitor and shutdown malicious website attacks
- Optimize your media JPG image sizes used on site to around 75kb to 150kb max (resolution at 800×800 pixels max.).
- For high traffic sites, ensure that you have at least 30 PHP workers allocated to your site
- Periodically test all plug-in performance using dev tools (like Query Monitor by John Blackbourn) to identify slow database queries, excessive HTTP requests, etc.
- Consider dev tools (like Asset Cleanup by Gave Liban or PerfMatters by Kinsta) to further detect and prevent styles and scripts from loading on every page
- After most performance checks have been done above, consider troubleshooting software like WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool to further determine if your host is actually fast enough to handle your server needs.
SPECIALISTS IN WOOCOMMERCE SITES
The information contained here is simply to provide our customers (along with your ecommerce specialist) the best practices for starting a successful WooCommerce site. In many cases, you may be able to get adequate help directly from the staff of the web hosting provider, but this is not always a guarantee unless you go with a managed WooCommerce hosting plan (strongly recommended).
Some of our clients have had success at finding inexpensive website freelancers using service sites such as fiverr.com or freelancer.com or upwork.com . Alternatively, consider going with proven and trusted agencies that specialize in WooCommerce. WordPress, the makers of WooCommerce, offers a WooExpert MarketPlace which provide a list of trusted agencies you can choose from for help in implementing your WooCommerce site.
