ECommerce

Optimizing WooCommerce Performance for High-Traffic Stores

When you own an eCommerce store, traffic is vital to your business’s success. But if only it was that simple. Large spike in website traffic is every store owner’s dream come true. Whether you’re garnering traffic organically through social media or search engine optimization, just directing traffic to your website won’t do you any good. In fact, it will do your brand more harm than good if your store isn’t equipped to handle bulk traffic. So how do you equip your WooCommerce powered eCommerce store to deal with high traffic? You can keep reading this blog to find out how, or you can get in touch with a WooCommerce Development Company to do it for you. That being said, first, let’s start by diving into how much traffic WooCommerce can handle.

How Much Traffic Can WooCommerce Handle

Being the powerful platform WooCommerce.com is, it begs the question, how much traffic can it actually handle?

In general, there are no restrictions on how much traffic you can handle on your WooCommerce website. To manage increased traffic smoothly, it all depends on your hosting server’s hardware, maintenance, and support skills. WooCommerce is capable of handling many page views and transactions each minute. Several WooCommerce sites accommodate massive amounts of traffic every minute. Yet, it is important to note that elements like on-site performance optimization and web hosting selection might have an impact on your store’s capacity to provide optimal performance even in the face of high visitor levels.

Thus, the short answer is yes, WooCommerce can manage millions of visitors to your website. To prevent your WooCommerce store from crashing when too many people try to visit it, there are some crucial measures and safeguards you should take.

How to Prepare Your Online Store for an Increase in Traffic

You need to prep the following aspects of your website when preparing for a spike in visitor traffic: tech adjustments, testing, and inventory.

Technical Adjustments

1. Get In Touch With Your Hosting Company

You need to examine your website hosting bundle as a first step. Several servers place restrictions on how much traffic and resources your website can use, especially if you’re on a shared hosting plan (meaning you share server space with other customers). It could be time to switch from a shared hosting plan to something more powerful, like cloud hosting, if you’re to anticipate an increase or spike in website visitor traffic.

It’s a good idea to consider cloud hosting plans with load balancers in place, but if you’re unsure or don’t know where to begin, ask your hosting provider for advice. The ideal solution will entirely depend on how much you expect your website traffic to grow and how much it now is.

Ask them what happens if your resource limit is reached as well. In comparison to hosting providers that shut down your website entirely if it is consuming too many resources, other hosts will upgrade your account to a higher tier and charge you for it.

2. Make sure your website is up-to-date.

While updating your website is vital all the time, it becomes even more crucial before a spike in traffic. Upgrade your PHP version as well as your themes and plugins. To find out what version you’re presently using and ask that it be upgraded to comply with WordPress standards, get in touch with your hosting provider.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Your website’s material is kept on servers spread out throughout the world via a CDN. When someone visits your website, the content is quickly delivered by coming from the closest available server. Even while it may seem challenging, your visitors will profit from the speed boost, especially if you cater to a global audience.

Overall, since you’ll have “copies” of your website on many servers, this technique is ideal for potential spikes in website traffic because one “outage” won’t prohibit people from visiting your site.

4. Install a Caching Plugin

Another technique to assist steady the performance of your website is through caching. Making a temporary, static HTML version of your page reduces the amount of “conversation” between WordPress and your database.

So, WordPress may serve your clients the cached version of the page rather than running to your database to obtain information—especially during periods of high traffic—resulting in quicker load times and improved performance.

Testing

1. Run a Website Performance and Speed Check

It’s crucial to take a baseline test of your site’s performance and speed, especially if you anticipate a spike in visitors.

A free tool like Page Speed Insights by Google or GTMetrix can be used to check the speed of your website. Each of those solutions will examine your website and provide you with suggestions for enhancing speed. Moreover, you can use the free P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin to undertake a plugin performance analysis.

2. Running a Stress Test

When your website’s technical aspects are adjusted, you may perform a “stress test” to see if it can manage an increase in visitors.

How exactly?

Use a load testing tool to simulate a spike in traffic to your website and evaluate how it responds. This will help you determine the volume of traffic that your website can manage without having a noticeable impact on performance by testing this with various sets of traffic volumes.

Inventory

Next, think about your inventory as you get ready for a possible increase in traffic. Even though you might not be able to forecast when or how big a surge will be, it’s always preferable to be ready than to pass up a significant chance.

Look at your most recent traffic spike’s sales. You can use this to get a sense of what to anticipate in terms of inventory.

Then, double-check the settings for your WooCommerce inventory.

  • Do you want to tell your consumers how many things are still available?
  • Would you like them to be able to purchase backordered items?
  • Do you have alerts set up to notify you when stock falls into the buffer inventory or is depleted?

Overall, WooCommerce offers a wide range of inventory options for your products. By clicking here, you can view the official documentation that will assist you in configuring WooCommerce settings to manage stock levels.

Conclusion

Overall, an increase in website traffic is quite wonderful! But if your website isn’t ready for it, it can also be stressful. Hence, it’s crucial to be aware of your alternatives in advance so that you have a game plan in place in case your website has a small traffic spike or a significant rise in clients. Since you can’t foresee when a surge will occur, it’s a good idea to stay up with best practices for keeping your website updated, backed up, and speed-optimized. If you’re not a user of WooCommerce, you can check out our WooCommerce vs BigCommerce blog to help you understand why WooCommerce is regarded as one of the industry greats.

 

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