What is the difference between WordPress Hosting and WooCommerce Hosting?
Do you use WordPress for your website? If so, are you using the best WordPress hosting available? Or is WooCommerce hosting a better option for you?
In this blog post, we’ll compare WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting to help you decide which is the right choice for you. Keep reading to learn more!
Difference between WordPress hosting and WooCommerce Hosting
LiquidWeb was one of the first service providers to offer a fully managed WooCommerce hosting. Similarly, not all hosting providers have this unique facility.
WooCommerce hosting plans are unique.
One of the most significant differences between WooCommerce hosting and WordPress hosting comes in the performance. Keep in mind that WooCommerce website and stores have their unique requirements; thus, you cannot assume that traditional WordPress hosting can meet those needs of WooCommerce stores.
Woocommerce Optimized Caching
Caching is a vital element to enhance your website’s performance and scalability. It significantly speeds up your website and reduces the additional strain on your web server by storing static HTML versions of your favored web pages.
Due to this reason, many WordPress hosting providers provide built-in caching solutions, and mostly you will see them in managed WordPress hosting plans.
Unfortunately, you can’t use blanket caching with your WooCommerce site like you can with your WordPress sites. If you do, you’ll break the site’s work.
Instead, you will see other built-in optimizations for a WooCommerce site caching especially designed for WooCommerce stores.
Solutions For Heavy Database Usage
Most of your WooCommerce site’s content is located in its database, including details of various items available for sale with their descriptions, prices, stock status, etc., order data, and so on.
Overall, WooCommerce websites are more dependent on their database than the standard WordPress site.
We agree that it might not be the best approach to rely on your store’s cached pages, but at least your host can handle queries from your database.
However, even If this caching issue was not present, WooCommerce websites will still put too much burden on your site’s cache.
Apart from this issue, WooCommerce stores are also dependent on search, and most of your store’s customers will use product search to get what they are searching for. Each search request puts more weight or burden on your site’s database.
A standard WordPress host cannot handle all of these database queries, and as a result, your site will load dead slower, and you might also encounter some reliability issues.
WooCommerce Emphasis on Reliability and Support
Hosting is essential for any type of website, but for a WooCommerce store, you need a reliable host that can withstand high traffics and use flows.
If your average WordPress site is down for a few hours, you’ll be annoyed, but it might not be a significant issue for your business. On the other hand, if your Woo Commerce site remains down for a couple of hours, it will impact your sales and lose some revenue. Besides, this will be a reliability issue from your user’s perspective.
Basically, a 99% uptime guarantee works flawlessly for almost all WordPress sites, but that’s not even close for a WooCommerce online store. These online store demand much more than the guaranteed uptime.
WooCommerce online stores demand a 99.9% guarantee, at least backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that mentions what remedies will be provided to your site. If the host is unable to meet that specific is available to you if the host doesn’t meet that guarantee.
Beyond offering reliability, fast, responsive, and timely support is also compulsory for a WooCommerce store. Due to this exact reason, you will find almost all reliable WooCommerce stores are hosted on the managed WordPress hosts, and rightly so. When you are hosting a reliable online store, you should look out for that exclusive managed WordPress experience.
WooCommerce Hosting Is More Expensive Than Traditional Hosting
Overall, WooCommerce hosting costs much more than standard WordPress hosting. Due to these extra costs, you can enjoy all those extra features and optimized caching solutions with 99.9%+ guaranteed uptime, awesome support, and much more.
If you are managing a basic blog or business website, the hosting’s price might be the deciding factor, but when you’re choosing to host for your WooCommerce online store hosting price shouldn’t be a deciding factor for you.
Think of hosting as managing a physical business. Let’s say you have invested tens or hundreds of dollars into preparation, equipment, marketing, stock, and more.
Now, you need an ideal physical location for your shop. Would you just go out and find the cheapest location possible? No, I guess. Instead, you will work harder to find the ideal location that keeps your business in the best shape, even if it’s more expensive than other locations.
Well, you can apply the same rule for your online WooCommerce store. You shouldn’t put money into building your online store only to cut costs for the hosting that keeps it running. Apart from high uptime and reliability, there are various other factors to consider as well that might affect your business when you have a cheap Woocommerce host.
Remember, a non-reliable host means a significant drop in conversion rates and loss of income, so trying to use a cheap host for your Woocommerce store might have a negative effect on your online presence.
For a normal WordPress site, the difference between $15 monthly and $400 monthly is massive, but for a WooCommerce store, it shouldn’t be a big deal for you.
Moreover, hosting is an expense for most users, and they are always trying to minimize the cost. But you need to think of WooCommerce hosting as an investment, and you must try your best to get a high return on investment (ROI), even if that’s possible by spending more money.
So, if you need to spend $500 monthly to get a reliable speed, great performance, and solid reliability, you should not deny that investment.