Creating an online shop with the WordPress WooCommerce plugin can be a very handy option for any business. This is an advanced plugin that allows you to develop a professional e-commerce site without the need to make any significant financial investment, while personalising the shop to the specific needs of each business.

An online business should have a few specific characteristics in order to offer the best user experience and achieve a greater number of sales – as such, it’s important that your web-hosting provider guarantees a high level of security, rapid loading speeds and total availability, among other important aspects.

On WooCommerce, hosting is a crucial element in offering e-commerce users the greatest performance, facilitating both product searches and the purchasing process.

Why choosing a good hosting service is important for an e-commerce business

Choosing a good hosting service for your virtual shop developed with WooCommerce should be a priority for any project. Hosting services will directly influence many key aspects for this type of business, for which high loading speeds are essential in order to facilitate user browsing and other important aspects for achieving more sales.

The main reasons for which you’ll need to select a special hosting service intended for online shops are as follows:

• High availability.
• Web security.
• Loading speed.
• Web positioning.
• Ease of set up and personalisation.
• Customer service.

How to choose a good hosting service for WooCommerce

Next, we’ll offer a series of tips or recommendations on choosing the best hosting service for WooCommerce, bearing in mind the main relevant factors:

Loading speed and performance

An online shop created with WooCommerce should load its content quickly, streamlining user navigation through its various features and product sheets. If the e-commerce site loads quickly, users will not abandon the shop in search of a better alternative (reducing the bounce rate) and will spend longer browsing its products (increased session duration), significantly boosting the chances of making a sale.

The hosting service chosen for your WooCommerce shop is fundamental in order to guarantee fast loading speeds. For this, you’ll need to opt for a provider who offers web servers with a high process and RAM capacity, using solid state drives (SSD) for storage (which significantly increase reading and writing speed).

It should also offer a wide bandwidth and low latency, allowing users to access the online shop as quickly as possible.

Always-available online shop

An e-commerce shop should be available 24/7, as sales can be made at any time of the day. The hosting service used for your WooCommerce shop should guarantee high availability, ensuring that the online shop is always available for users – regardless of the time or date on which they visit.

Web security

In a WooCommerce e-commerce shop, users make online purchases by entering their payment details (bank cards, PayPal account or other online payment methods). If you want to ensure that users are not afraid or hesitant when it comes to placing an order, you’ll need to offer a high-security environment which guarantees the integrity and privacy of the personal and sensitive data they share.

The hosting service should hold an SSL certificate to allow users to buy from the shop within a secure environment, verifying that the secure-site padlock is shown in the URL bar and that the HTTPS protocol has been activated.

When it comes to security, the WooCommerce hosting service must use modern and advanced systems to protect against the most common cyberattacks, such as denial of service (DDoS), SQL injection and other malware and spam attacks.

Finally, the hosting service for an e-commerce site must provide automatic-backup systems which make period backups in order to quickly and easily recover the site if necessary.

24/7 support

Any problem or incident that affects the WooCommerce shop must be resolved as quickly as possible in order to minimise its impact on sales.

When purchasing a hosting service for an online shop, it’s very important that you select a provider who offers a comprehensive support service, with customer service available at any time of day, 365 days of the year.

If an e-commerce site is offline for several hours, it will fail to make sales and will project a poor image to users, who will subsequently lose confidence in it. If you opt for a hosting provider who provides good technical customer service, you can rest easy knowing that there will always be a qualified technician watching over the site, capable of resolving any incidents that arise as quickly as possible, regardless of when they occur.

Web positioning

An online shop’s visibility on Google is fundamental in order to attract users interested in its products or services. Gaining a better ranking on Google results pages is easier if you have a secure hosting service that guarantees a high loading speed.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that makes it easier to boost your virtual shop’s web positioning on Google. If you combine this with a quick and secure hosting service, you’ll much more easily reach the top rankings on Google, thereby attracting more traffic to your shop and significantly increasing sales.

Type of hosting service

There are several different types of hosting services available on the market, from which you can choose the one most suited to an online business developed on WooCommerce.

For example, a WooCommerce shop with cloud hosting or a VPN-hosting service is a great choice, as it offers you your own resources (as if it were a dedicated hosting service), at a low price (thanks to virtualisation technologies):

For large online-shop projects developed with WooCommerce which expect to receive high volumes of traffic, the best choice will be a dedicated hosting service, which, although it may be more expensive, will guarantee that all of the web server’s resources are made available to the e-commerce business.

Location of servers

The hosting service selected for your WooCommerce shop must make use of web servers in data centres located near your area of operation. This physical closeness guarantees greater performance and higher data-access speeds.

Ease of installation

Another important point to consider when choosing a hosting service for WooCommerce is the platform’s installation and configuration. Having access to an automated system to install WordPress will allow you to have your WooCommerce ready to set up and start adding items in just a few minutes, without the need for any advanced web-programming knowledge.

Latest web technologies

It’s important that the hosting service selected makes use of the latest web technology in order to guarantee that the WooCommerce shop performs better and remains secure. For example, the web server should feature the latest version of PHP, as well as a modern and advanced relational-database management system (such as the latest version of MySQL).

When it comes to launching an online-shop project with WooCommerce, your choice of hosting service will be one of the key aspects to providing a safe and rapid e-commerce site that guarantees users a great experience, facilitating browsing and access to product sheets and conversion pages.