Have you ever heard that you shouldn’t use WooCommerce for a busy store? Or perhaps you’ve heard it’s not for stores with a lot of visitors, which makes you wonder how much traffic a WooCommerce store can really handle.
With the right setup, the fears about WordPress and WooCommerce are unfounded. Let’s dig into the scalability of WooCommerce and how to set up your site for success.
Is WooCommerce Scalable?
Scalability is how well your site adapts to handle traffic and transaction volume growth. People with high-traffic sites or stores with thousands of different products should consider how well a platform scales when selecting their eCommerce platform.
Because WooCommerce is an open-source platform powered by WordPress, people often assume it can’t handle large sites. But that’s simply not true. Check out the WooCommerce showcase for examples of enterprise-grade sites powered by WooCommerce.
There are stores with more than 100,000 products processing thousands of transactions a minute, working flawlessly on WooCommerce. These are proof that WooCommerce is highly scalable and can handle virtually as much traffic as you can generate, but only if you’ve done the prep work.
What Determines How Much Traffic WooCommerce Can Handle
WooCommerce can handle enormous waves of shoppers, but you must prepare your store in advance. How well your site scales and handles high traffic comes down to four basic elements:
- Traffic. How much traffic and, just as important, how it’s distributed plays a large role in your site’s performance. If one of your products goes viral on TikTok, you could experience high traffic on that product page and your checkout page. Or, if you’re running a holiday sale, you could end up in a situation where the traffic is more evenly distributed across the site. You need to prepare for both scenarios.
- WooCommerce Core Code. The system code that runs WooCommerce will determine how well it works in high-demand situations. The WooCommerce team puts a lot of effort into optimizing the code for peak performance.
- Other Code You Add to the Site. The culprit behind a poor-performing WooCommerce store is most likely in the code you add on top of the core WooCommerce software. Plugins, themes, and custom code can all weigh down a site or cause issues with scalability.
- Your Web Servers. Your web host matters a lot when it comes to scalability. Many cheap hosting plans aren’t cut out to handle high traffic volumes. You need servers that are reliable and configured to handle high-traffic events.
How to Prepare WooCommerce for Traffic Spikes
If you want to make sure your WooCommerce site can handle a lot of traffic, follow these best practices to ensure your site scales.
Keep Your WooCommerce Software Updated
WooCommerce works best when you use the latest version. WooCommerce developers continually add new features that improve site performance and security. If you’re not keeping up with the latest releases, you could miss out on vital performance-boosting enhancements.
WooCommerce is part of the Automattic family, like Pressable, so in addition to keeping your WordPress system updated, Pressable customers enjoy automatic updates for WooCommerce too.
Test and Monitor Your Site
You need to regularly monitor and test your store’s performance to ensure it can handle your volume of traffic.
WooCommerce recommends you use the following tools to monitor your store’s technical performance:
- Google Search Console and GA4. Google offers two free tools to help you measure and track the performance of your website. If you’re not using these tools, you’re missing out.
- Google Chrome Dev Tools. Use the timeline tool to see how long your store takes to load. It will show which elements are contributing the most to your load time. Pay careful attention to see if any plugins are contributing the most to slowing down your site.
- Google PageSpeed Tools. This Google speed test shows the speed of a particular page on your store and provides suggestions for optimizing your site for faster loading.
Check Your Plugins and Themes
In addition to keeping your WooCommerce and WordPress systems updated, you also need to update all plugins and your theme. Plugins are a leading cause of scalability issues. They add a lot of code to your site, often for features you don’t even use. The more plugins you use, the more likely you are to experience compatibility issues. Read our post on how many plugins are too many to learn how to optimize your plugin usage.
Pick the Right Host
You need a host that can handle high-volume traffic. If you pick a host on price alone, you’ll likely end up with a site that can’t scale. Bargain hosting plans are often shared plans that suffer from performance issues. One server will handle multiple sites. If one of the other sites gets a large influx of traffic, your site will slow down as a result.
WooCommerce can handle a lot of traffic, but you need to find the right host. When shopping for a managed WooCommerce host, look for these five qualities in this blog post.
Have a Dedicated Development Team
WooCommerce is a beginner-friendly platform, but if you’re building a complex store with a high traffic and transaction volume, you’ll need a dedicated development resource to keep it running smoothly. A dedicated development team is worth the investment when you’re running a large store. They can help you avoid potentially costly downtime and other issues.
Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network improves site performance by caching static assets at data centers across the globe. When visitors log on to your website, the static content gets served from the closest CDN server and decreases the number of calls to your web server, allowing it to handle processing dynamic content and transactions. All Pressable plans include our free CDN.
Pressable Can Handle All Your Store’s Traffic
Pressable’s servers were built by the same people behind WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce. We know what it takes to make WooCommerce work fast and scale easily.
Other hosting services don’t offer our innovative server architecture designed specifically for making WordPress sites faster. We use an optimized NVMe server infrastructure that is nearly 10 times faster than standard SSD technology.
Schedule a demo today to learn why Pressable is where WordPress and WooCommerce work best.
Alfred Bassetti
With over a decade of invaluable experience. Alfred is not just about numbers; he's dedicated to bringing customers closer to their hosting needs through his expertise in Inbound sales, WordPress support, and Google Data Analytics Certifications. His skills in project planning, web design, and development make him a well-rounded contributor to the Pressable team. He focuses in helping people get the best possible experience with hosting by bringing customers closer to their needs!
