Why go with a VPS for WooCommerce?

Milou de Kleijn, September 7, 2017

Speed is a core concept in our modern, largely digitalised society. The concept features often and clearly on the Internet in terms of websites’ or online shops’ loading speed. Websites that load faster often generate better search result positions on Google, more visitors, and higher conversion rates. A VPS (virtual private server) can often be a solution for WooCommerce and can help make your online shop a lot faster. What are the most important advantages of VPS for WooCommerce? And what can Savvii offer you in this respect? We explain it all in this article.

The importance of speed

Speed and ease of use are prerequisites for a successful WooCommerce online webshop, for the following reasons:

  • Fast online shops offer the best user experience. If visitors are satisfied with their experience and the shop’s speed, this will automatically translate into longer visits and more page views per visitor.
  • Fast online shops often do better in search engines. For example, the Google algorithm takes a website’s loading speed into account in its rankings.
  • The common adage ‘time is money’ certainly also applies to selling via the Internet. A delay of a mere second can lead to a conversion loss of between 7 and 10 percent. Users of mobile devices are generally even more impatient than people using their PC to shop. For mobile devices, a one-second speed increase results in 27% more conversion. Conversely, a loading time of over four seconds results in a conversion rate of less than 1%.

What do users expect?

To find out what today’s Internet shoppers expect from online shops in terms of speed, KISSmetrics carried out a survey a while back. The results were clear: 79% of respondents said they expect an online shop to load within 2 seconds. Moreover, over half of respondents named speed as one of the most important characteristics of a good online shop, and 79% said they would be unlikely to return to an online shops that they felt was slow. Websites that are slow, crash a lot, or improperly functioning as well as formats and pages that are difficult to read were listed as the most commonly occurring problems on online shops visited. Other research show similar links between website speed and user satisfaction levels.

WooCommerce requirements and hosting

WooCommerce is an open-source solution that runs on WordPress. The WooCommerce plugin enables you to easily turn a WordPress website into a good-looking online shop. The open nature of the plugin allows you to easily add a lot of functionalities, like links with newsletters and software, links with comparison sites, dynamic prices, and various payment methods such as iDeal. Moreover, WooCommerce allows you to add additional online shops to your existing WordPress system.

The WooCommerce software is easy to install and easy to use. However, in spite of the ease of use, using WooCommerce poses a serious challenge for online shop owners. WooCommerce has higher requirements than regular WordPress websites or company websites, because it is a lot heavier and takes up a lot more space on a server. Shared hosting often simply does not cut it to host a WooCommerce website optimally.

VPS as a solution

So the question is this; how can you benefit from the many blessings of WooCommerce without compromising on speed? The answer is VPS hosting. For several reasons, VPS is very suitable for hosting a dynamic environment like WooCommerce and aligns perfectly with the most important WooCommerce hosting requirements:

  • Database and object caching ensure higher speeds, particularly for customised parts of websites and pages that involve users having to log in.
  • VPS offers more resources than other hosting options, which is important for relatively heavy platforms such as WooCommerce.
  • A VPS has a high scalability rate, meaning that it is easier to have the server grow in line with your required capacity. In short, that means that you can quickly add extra capacity if your website booms unexpectedly, without having to be down for a long time.
  • VPS hosting offers complete freedom in terms of installing software and managing technical settings.

WooCommerce (daughter company of Automattic) also recommends VPS above shared hosting.

VPS at Savvii

As WooCommerce requires quite a lot of resources, you usually need specific caching methods to make the most of your website. Varnish, a caching method that is used a lot on the Internet, cannot be used on a lot of the pages of a more complex online shop, due to things such as personal shopping baskets and custom client recommendations. Packages such as the Savvii VPS One package use memcached and Xcache to avoid this problem. Just like our Ten and Twenty VPS packages and VPS ONE L and XL, VPS One also comes with the advantage of having your own server, which has its own IP address and uses an SDD drive, ensuring lightning-fast website hardware. MySQL allows you stable, speedy, and safe access to your website’s database directly.

Want to know more?

If you are curious about the advantages of using VPS for your WooCommerce environment, please feel free to contact us at any time, no strings attached. We would be happy to help you choose the right VPS package for you.

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