WooCommerce is an extremely popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. If you have an online store or are looking to setup one you will most likely be somewhat familiar with it. Woocommerce has a reputation for being harder on server resources that regular WordPress, and many people recommend a good sized VPS (2GB Ram+) for running a WooCommerce store. While I agree that it is more resource hungry than your regular WordPress site, I don’t agree that you need a VPS for your store, unless of course it is a large store that sees a lot traffic.
Why Does My WooCommerce Store Need To Be Fast?
We are in the days of high speed everything. Nobody wants to wait, whether it be for a coffee, a burger, or for a page on your store to load. When people want to buy something, and especially online they generally want to do it fast. If your page is taking more than 2-3 seconds to load you stand to lose a good portion of sales, and you also stand to lose future sales from those same customers as they most likely will not return.
I’m Convinced, Will My Store Be Fast Wherever I choose To host It?
Unfortunately it will not be, not all Web Hosts are suited for running a WooCommerce store. A few things you may want to look for when choosing a host for you WooCommerce store are:
- OpCode Caching: On your store there are more pages that should not be cached, Opcode caching will help serve those pages quicker and more efficiently.
- Web Server Level Caching: This level of caching is faster and more efficient than a caching plugin and the difference is significant. A few examples would Nginx, Varnish, and Litespeed Lscache.
- SSD Storage: Your store when it gets busy will be using Mysql fairly heavily. SSD will make the databases access and actions much faster and increase the speed of your store.
- PHP 7: PHP 7 offers substantial performance improvements over PHP 5.6 and earlier.
- HTTP/2: Your store should be served through https which is a bit slower normally than http. Having a host that supports HTTP/2 gives you yet another performance boost that your customers will appreciate.
So now you know what to look for, but finding a host out of the 1000’s out there that meets all these requirements can be difficult. Don’t stress, Kickassd has you covered! All of our Web Hosting plans cover all of the above and more, we are especially suited for WooCommerce.
How fast Will My WooCommerce Store Be At kickassd?
Let’s find out shall we, rather than just saying yes our web hosting is fast we will put it through the paces and show you.
WooCommerce Load And Performance Testing
Testing will be carried out at our test site and strictly on WooCommerce pages, and only with https. The test site is located here: https://kickassd.net/wp/shop/
The store was populated with dummy data which you can find here: WooCommerce Dummy Data If you want to use that dummy data simply download and rename from .txt to .xml. For the load testing as usual we will be using Siege which simulates real users browsing your store. Siege will be set to have simulated users hit 15 different store pages with a random access time of of 1-3 seconds. Siege is also configured to grab files such as images and CSS to more closely mimic real use and traffic.
First Let’s Run GTMetrix On Our Store With No Caching On (OpCache is on)
Pretty respectable! Time to throw some simulated traffic at it. I started at 45 Concurrent users and worked up until I hit 100 Concurrent users. At 100 concurrent users I was seeing steady 13% CPU and 183MB of Ram which is great considering how hard it was being hit. As an example let’s see how 100 concurrent users translates to hits.
100 concurrent across 15 URL’s @ 1-3 second random access, with a test time of 5 minutes resulted in a total of = 49311 hits. This would work out to 14,201,558 hits per day and 426,047,040 hits a month.
WooCommerce Load Test With Litespeed Cache
I increased load until I was at 600 concurrent users and both CPU and Ram were not even registering so use was under 1%, I was barely tickling it! At 600 concurrent users that would be a substantial amount of hits in a month (2,555,282,240). Here is a test from Gtmetrix while WooCommerce was getting slammed with 600 concurrent users.
As you can see the load times have increased, and this is mainly do to network congestion during the testing. Considering it is being hit with what would be the equivalent of 2 billion hits a month this is some serious performance for WooCommerce!
Add CloudFlare For Additional Performance
CloudFlare is in 99% of cases a smart move and will add additional performance benefits due to CDN and caching. Adding this in conjunction with our hosting and caching makes for an extremely potent combination. Here is a test result after adding CloudFlare while again the WooCommerce store is being hit with 600 concurrent users.
WOW! So now we have a WooCommerce store capable of taking 2 billion hits a month while staying well under 1 second in load times, while using next to nothing for CPU, Ram, and IO.
Have questions or just want to come hangout with us? Join us on our new SlackChat! (psss, Even Chuck Norris is there)
Ready to give us a shot?
