Why A Shared Server is not Good Enough for WooCommerce

My clients are taking advantage of proven-strategies to speed up their Woocommerce store and it is giving them an edge over their competitors. Today I’ll be sharing these secrets with you. 

But first, why is the speed of your WordPress e-commerce site important? Apart from Google rankings, which is all important when it comes to how people find you online, it’s about your customers.

Your customers expect a fantastic experience every time they come to your website.  It has never been easier for your customers to pick and choose the sites they buy from.  You and your competitors may already have the perfect design, but if your site lacks speed you falling behind and here’s the big reason why.

Your customers are spending money on high-speed web connections at home, at work and on their mobile phones. 4G and LTE mobile connections deliver mobile websites at incredible speeds.  Your customers expect your smart website to load fast because every other website they use loads fast. They easily tire of websites that take too long to load. In the end, if your website is too slow, they will go somewhere else.

 

Here’s the first secret we share with our clients – A faster website will give you more customers

Not every visitor who comes to your online store is going to buy from you. Some come to look around and get a feel for your products and services.  Some come to price compare.  Others come to buy.  it comes to visitors to your online store.

According to analytics and conversion rate optimization specialists Invesp, the average e-commerce conversion for websites is somewhere between 2 and 3 percent.  For websites viewed on a desktop is 3.83%. Tablets see an average conversion rate of 3.84%, while on mobiles sales conversion drops to 2.03%. That means for every 100 visitors your site manages to attract, on average only three of them will convert into a paying customer.  If your website is getting 500 unique visitors a day, you could reasonably expect 15 sales a day.  

Alarmingly, the data scientists tell us that as much as 40% of all traffic to your website can be lost if your website takes more than three seconds to load. This means that the success or ultimate failure of your business is a numbers game. 

Now imagine if you could nearly double the number of visitors to your website, just by improving your website’s speed.  You could be turning that 15 sales a day to 25 overnight!

 

Here’s the second secret – Increasing website speed increases your total sales.

Simple SEO strategy tells you that lifting your search engine rank by just a few places will increase the number of people who find your site.  

One factor Google places importance on is how fast your site loads. If your website is slow to load, Google sees this as a poor visitor experience and may rank it lower than better-performing sites. Your website speed, therefore, impacts what page your site is listed on.

By lifting your results even a few places, you could end up on page 1 instead of page 2, powerfully lifting the chance for more people landing on your website.

So in our experience – we see two critical improvements when you improve website speed:

  1. You regain the 40% of people who didn’t reach your site because it loaded too slowly.
  2. You increase your total potential audience, because you’ve increased your search engine rank, and more people are finding your site and clicking through.

It’s an amazingly simple sales multiplier for a small amount of effort. 

If you are selling products or services through your site, you should be sweating over your site speed. It is the most important thing you can do. Find out what is slowing your site down and fix it so you are maximizing the number of people hitting your site. The more conversions you have, the more money you make.

Here’s the third secret – getting faster hosting is not expensive.

Smart website owners who are eager to gain more customers are switching from Shared Server hosting. They are happy to spend a little more money to get better website performance because they understand why server speed is so important to their success.

Many of my clients are cashing in on the speed breakthroughs, and seeing sometimes exponential lifts in customer numbers – all because they are focusing on satisfying their customer’s expectation of a fast running website.

They are focusing on the customer experience first.

My clients know that spending a little bit more on dedicated Virtual Server Hosting is an investment in their long term success. 

 

Why Woocommerce needs more…

Woocommerce is one of the world’s most popular open-source e-commerce platform. It may surprise you to know that nearly 40% of the world’s online business sales flow through Woocommerce. Just like WordPress, it can be extended within its own plugin-based add-ons that allow you to pick and choose the functionality you need to customize your site. New payment gateways, parcel tracking, and comparison pricing can all be added with plugins.

These features make your installation much heavier than a standard WooCommerce site and it requires more memory and resources to be able to run effectively.

If you are using a shared server, then your website needs to compete for resources. There can often be more than 1000 websites on a shared hosting server. If you run a resource-intensive site like Woocommerce, you only have a thin slice of the total server resources to use. Your site will wait to access your share of those resources, and this results in a slower website. It may not stall your website, but it will mean that your site isn’t super fast at processing client orders. 

That’s why technically a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a better option.

Why a Virtual Private Server is the right answer…

A Virtual Private Server gives you your own dedicated memory, storage, and processing on a bigger box. The resources that are allocated to use, are yours to use exclusively. Unlike more expensive Dedicated Servers, a Virtual Private Server’s resources can be increased at any time, simply with a press of a button – so it’s a far more flexible server to expand as your business or resources need to grow.

This instant scaling is one of the best features of Virtual Private Servers, it allows you to start small and grow as demand on your server grows.  If you get a huge uplift in traffic, scale your server up at the press of a button.

When choosing a provider, you want one that offers you a Virtual Private Server with full root access.  All Asporea VPS plans offer this. It’s your guarantee of a reputable provider and that your server isn’t being shared with other sites.

Root access gives you another big benefit – you can get into the backend of the server and modify your hosting environment without waiting for your hosting company to get around to it.

 

You get better security with a Virtual Private Server

Protecting customer security is always a big part of protecting your business’ reputation.  With shared servers, you rely on having good server-neighbors to keep your own data safe. If someone on your server doesn’t update their files, your website and data could be at risk too. With a VPS, only you are using the data, so you’re completely in control of your site’s security. If another site on the VPS gets a virus or suffers a malware attack, it will not spread to you.

Having a VPS installation gives you more options to install SSL certificates, that will avoid browser website security warnings that potentially block traffic to your site. Installing your own custom certificate also provides customers an extra sense of confidence that shopping on your website is safe to do.

 

Virtual Private Servers put you in control…

With you in control of your server and your resources, you have complete control of your website speed. On your own server, you’ll reduce server lag, because you’re not waiting for another site to finish serving a request before getting to yours.

And we’ve left one of the biggest Virtual Private Server advantages until last. With Asporea VPS you can choose your data center.  If your customers come from Asia or Australia, why would you choose a server that is further away in the United States or Europe?

When you choose an Asporea VPS plan you choose your server location.  If you want to be hosted in Australia you can choose our Sydney data center.  If you are in Asia, maybe Singapore or Tokyo is a better option. The choice is yours when you choose a VPS through us.

 
 

What would a Virtual Private Server cost me?

A Virtual Private Server costs a lot less than you’d think. Our general recommendation for a small-business Virtual Private Server for a growing Woocommerce business will cost you about USD$20 per month. This is a web server that exclusively hosts your site, with all allocated server resources exclusively at your disposal. 

As your site grows, these plans scale to allow you to grow cost-effectively. 

 


Moving WordPress to a Virtual Private Server isn’t hard

If you have an existing WordPress or Woocommerce installation you’d like to move to a Virtual Private Server we can do this in just a couple of days, and migrate you for free. To take advantage of the free migration offer we would need access to either a backup of your site or to your site itself for us to take a backup. 

After copying your site to a new server, we give you the opportunity to check the site to ensure that your site meets your expectations in terms of speed improvement. When you tell us, we make the necessary Domain Name changes to point your web address to the new server – making your site live.

Asporea VPS 1CPU/1GB RAM

  • Balanced virtual machines with a healthy amount of memory tuned to host and scale applications like blogs, web applications, testing / staging environments, in-memory caching and databases.

$20 /1 Month

ASPOREA VPS 2CPU/2GB RAM

  • Balanced virtual machines with a healthy amount of memory tuned to host and scale applications like blogs, web applications, testing / staging environments, in-memory caching and databases.

$40 /1 Month

ASPOREA VPS 4CPU/4GB RAM

  • Balanced virtual machines with a healthy amount of memory tuned to host and scale applications like blogs, web applications, testing / staging environments, in-memory caching and databases.

$70 /1 Month

Virtual Private Servers make WooCommerce Faster

Considering all the factors, it’s clear to see why VPS is a better choice for your Woocommerce store. With a astronishingly-fast Asporea Virtual Private Server, you could be discovering the tricks others have been taking advantage of today. We will even help you migrate your site for free.

If you’ve got questions about Woocommerce or Virtual Private Servers, or any hosting question – leave it in the comments below, or chat with us.

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin