The biggest reason for the drop in speed of WooCommmerce sites is always the web hosting service itself. While there are other significantly more minor problems that might arise here and there, there is nothing that can affect the performance of WooCommerce sites quite as much as a web hosting service that doesn’t have servers which are capable of providing the right support these sites require.
In order to explain the difference between the best WooCommerce hosting services, we’ve provided short reviews so that you can choose the best ones for you. We’ll also go over why you should avoid certain web hosting services, and add a few other points of interest that you might find useful when selecting a competent WooCommerce host.
Recommended WooCommerce Hosting Services
A good choice for a WooCommerce hosting server would be one that can manage to put out plenty of processing capacity for your website. This processing power is vital when it comes to allowing the site to not drop in terms of load times, especially when it tries to display multiple media files or when it has to work under the strain of trying to host a large number of site visitors at once.
The following web hosting services can provide such servers, on top of a platitude of other useful options in their plans that can really boost site performance and potentially allow more monthly visitors to your site.
Siteground
Siteground provides a free SSL certificate, free WP installation, free WP migration, and unmetered traffic in every plan that it has to offer. Each client also gets access to free CDN and email, daily backups, and an unlimited number of databases.
This service has been in the web hosting business for quite a long time now, and as you can imagine, there is a reason why it continues to thrive in this market. Siteground is unquestionably one of the best options when it comes to site speeds and load times, all the while charging incredibly low prices for each plan.
Cloudways
The plans that are on offer by Cloudways all come with built-in CDN, PHP 7.3 ready servers, 5 cloud providers, and even automated backups. Cloudways also provides all of its clients with an innovative control panel, unlimited applications, auto-healing servers, and 24/7/365 support.
While Cloudways isn’t as much of a well-known name in the hosting service market as the previously mentioned entry, all of the functions and features that it can provide can match up to any other high-end provider, and even surpass quite a few. One of the main reasons for this is the dedicated VPS servers that they can offer, which run on speed optimized server stack and can make your site load times lightning quick.
WPX Hosting
All of the plans on WPX Hosting include high-speed custom CDN with 26 global edge locations, daily malware scanning and removal, and DDoS protection. You’ll also gain access to 24/7 customer support with a 30 second average live chat response time, manual and automatic backups, staging areas and email addresses, and even unlimited SSLs.
WPX Hosting plans come with access to the data centers in the UK, US and Australia, meaning that the speed of your site can easily be boosted if you’re anywhere near the three data center locations. The service also provides a great all-round balance between speed and affordable prices across all of their plans.
WPEngine
WPEngine has 24/7 chat and phone support, Dev/stage/prod environments, transferable sites, and more than 30 StudioPress themes that come as standard with each plan. The service also comes with global CDN, an SSh gateway, Evercache, as well as software and servers that are PHP 7.4 ready.
While WPEngine is a bit more pricey than the other options that we’ve listed, the features that it can offer for those prices are more than worth it for any company that has the necessary funds to procure their services. Luckily, you won’t even need to splurge on the most expensive plan, since the cheaper alternatives also come with a plethora of useful options for your site.
Bad WooCommerce Hosting Services
We’ve grouped all of the subpar web hosting services together for one simple reason – they all share the same problems that make them a poor choice for WooCommerce.
The hosting services in question are:
- Bluehost
- Hostgator
- Godaddy
- eHost
- Dollar 2 Host
- Crazydomains
- Any other subsidiary of EIG hosting
The 3 common factors among almost all bad hosting providers are the following:
- Price vs Quality
The more expensive web host options aren’t always the best. Instead of looking for the most expensive options, it would be better if you focused on the exact perks and features that each plan can provide for your site. There are many cases where certain services will offer unlimited bandwidth and storage in their cheapest plans, while another service will limit both of these features even on the more expensive plans.
That being said, bargain hunting isn’t the smartest choice either. A balance needs to always be present because most of the time the quality of the service will be worth the extra few bucks that you had to spend on it.
The problem with a lot of the above-mentioned services is that they do offer remarkable bargains that pretty much any company can afford, but the quality of the web hosting service suffers due to the corners that they had to cut in order to make those plans as cheap as they are.
- The CPU and Caching
Speaking of cutting corners, the most common issues that websites hosted on these providers are facing with are constant experiences of daily crashes and agonizingly slow site load times.
This comes as a result of the limited CPU usage that every site is given due to the thousands of sites that need to be hosted on the same server. The server subsequently buckles under the strain and can’t properly handle the load that is forced upon it.
Caching also causes issues. Most of the better web hosting services make use of advanced caching applications that can allow you to use database and object caching in order to boost both the back-end and front-end operations. Because such caching apps aren’t present in a lot of the other services, this can lead to operations like WooCommerce checkout getting slowed down significantly.
- Updates and Downtime
This point sort of ties in with the previous one. Due to the extreme CPU usage on the overburdened servers, it’s more than likely that the bad WooCommerce web hosting options will experience frequent server crashes. This means that there will be frequent downtime when the servers will be unavailable due to required maintenance.
In truth, downtime for things such as updates is very common in even the most expensive high-end web hosting services. However, these are usually:
- Scheduled ahead of time so that the client knows what’s happening;
- Performed during periods of the day when the site has very little traffic in order to inconvenience as few visitors as possible;
- Upgrades that will make your site better and will improve the overall experience for your visitors.
It should be noted that server crashes are also possible on good WooCommerce hosting services, but they are nowhere near as frequent.
What You Should Pay Attention to
Doing a bit of research will help you learn which services are appropriate for WooCommerce hosting and which aren’t. If you pay attention to even one of the points that we brought up in the previous section on bad services, you should easily recognize which host you should pick.
But what if you don’t want to choose from our list and want to find a service that you’re comfortable with on your own?
Well, then there are essentially 3 points that you should keep in mind when you’re picking out a WooCommerce web hosting service.
- PHP
PHP is the programming language that WooCommerce sites are built on. As the building block of the entire website, the version that you’re using is going to affect the speed at which the site loads and processes requests from both the administrator and the visitors. However, not only are there a lot of services that don’t run the latest version of PHP, but there are actually quite a few that aren’t PHP compatible at all.
Luckily, due to the fact that PHP is also the programming language for WordPress as well, there are a number of services that offer the option to either upgrade to the latest version or offer the latest version of PHP from the start. You can easily find all of this information by looking through the WordPress hosting plans and the option that they offer on the site of any web host that you might be interested in.
- CDN
By using a content delivery network, or “CDN”, the loading performance of your site will be significantly improved for all of your visitors. A CDN will reduce the load on the hosting servers by rerouting a large portion of the information of your site from servers that the CDN controls and which are located closer to the location of each visitor that’s sending requests to the site.
A lot of web hosts provide a CDN service in their plans, but if you have trouble finding it in the features section of their websites, then you might want to look for an included Cloudflare feature instead. Cloudflare is the CDN of choice for most web host services due to them having more than 100 servers worldwide.
- Caching
A cache speeds up the load time of your pages by pre-building them, so that they’re ready to go as soon as a visitor to the site sends in a request. Without a cache the site will still load, but it will take a significantly longer amount of time because the pages will need to be constructed by the host server instead.
In simple terms – the more advanced the cache options that the hosting service provides, the quicker the pages will load for your visitors. Keep in mind that advanced cache options aren’t the only way to accomplish this either, and it’s enough for a provider to have servers that can maintain at least a decent cache plugin. This will make a huge difference in the long run and there really aren’t many services that don’t provide the option to add such plugins.
Conclusion
If you don’t choose any of the services that we recommended, you might at least want to pick one that has the features that we mentioned just above.
Obviously, we don’t know what’s best for everyone and there will be differences between each company in terms of which service will suit their needs the best.
However, when it comes to WooCommerce hosting, we believe that one of the 4 hosting services we reviewed will be the right choice for you.