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Wooassist Reviews the Best WooCommerce Hosting Services

June 16, 2016 By John Leave a Comment

The right hosting service should be secure. Your hosting service should be able to help you solve hosting-related problems and quick. Your hosting service should be fast because quick page loads are critical in retaining site visitors. So what is the best WooCommerce hosting service?

Here is our review of some of the more popular hosting services around.

GoDaddy

Our rating: 7/10

GoDaddy has one of the cheapest plans available for website owners. They have a basic plan for those on a tight budget. Their basic plan has limited features and may not be a good choice. Make sure to check if these features will fit your needs as you might end up spending more with add-ons. Choose their higher priced packages if you need better functionalities such as a staging site to aid in development work.

Its performance and speed are acceptable but not that outstanding. As for support, it is not as good as other hosting services. All in all, it’s a decent hosting service. There is not much to worry about if you decide to go with them.

Bluehost

Our rating: 8/10

Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting services. For us, this popularity is reasonable. We haven’t had much trouble with the sites hosted in Bluehost that we’ve handled. Its server response time or speed can range from average to fast. It is still better than other shared hosting providers.

Their basic plan has less storage compared to GoDaddy’s but they offer more features. Features include a Global CDN, domain privacy, and SiteBackup. Your online store can benefit from better speed and security. In a hostbenchmarker study, Bluehost support takes some time to respond compared to other hosting services. We haven’t had much opportunity to work with their support though. To us, this gives them more value in that we or our clients haven’t had much to complain about.

Web Synthesis

Our rating: 7/10

Synthesis is another good hosting service for online stores. It is a managed hosting service so it’s a bit pricier than others. They offer features that optimize site performance and security. Their speed is one of the fastest around. They also have an efficient support team.

The downside is that they don’t provide a staging site feature. This might complicate the development of your site. The usage of a staging/development site is best practice for website development. With a staging site, you’re able test your website updates before applying them to your live site.

Their processing power is also great but they have metered bandwidths. It’s not much to worry about as they provide 2TB-6TB plans. Unless you get huge bursts of traffic from content going viral, you’ll be okay. Overall, it provides a reliable hosting service.

Siteground

Our rating: 9/10

We consider Siteground as one of the best hosting services for online stores and websites in general. Other review sites have pegged it as their top hosting service. Our experience with it has also been great.

The prices for its plans are reasonable. It has a metered bandwidth but the speed is top-notch with their super-caching feature. At the time of writing, they have servers in 3 continents and offer free CDN to each account.

All plans provide a decent backup service. Based on our experience, their customer service is good. You won’t find many hosting services giving the same value for money as Siteground.

WP Engine

Our rating: 9/10

WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting service. This makes it work well for WooCommerce sites. It’s our hosting of choice for Wooassist.com. We chose this as it works great and comes with a host of other features.

In our experience, speed has not been a problem. They use EverCache for speed and massive scalability. They are also CDN-ready and this helps in delivering global content. They also offer good security and backup features to boot.

In addition, they also have the best support service compared to other hosting sites we have worked with. They don’t have the cheapest plans but they have reasonable and flexible value-for-money plans. We consider it the best hosting for low to medium volume online stores.

VPS Hosting Services

Our rating: 5/10

This isn’t a review on a particular hosting but VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting in general. This type of hosting service is well suited for large websites. It is also a type of shared hosting that benefits most advanced users. Its pricing is not as cheap as the hosting services we reviewed in this post, but it’s not as expensive as dedicated servers.

The downside is its standard interface requires a lot of digging. Some services may be inflexible or frustrating because of its steep learning curve. Most VPSs do not come with a myriad of features, unlike the hosting services we reviewed in this post.

Not exclusive to VPS, but bursts of traffic tend to slow down a VPS-hosted site too much. The entire website could also go down because of this. They have failed in speed and reliability. For your WooCommerce store, we’d recommend to stay away from VPS hosting services in general.

Conclusion

Choosing a hosting service is something that you should do after thorough consideration. Read the fine print and the features before you pay for the service. This will keep you from wasting your time and money for hosting that is not a good fit for your WooCommerce store. Please note that even if we are affiliates with Siteground and WP Engine, we chose them based on years of experience. We have dealt with these hosting services for our clients’ and our own sites. We can attest that these two are among the best. If you were to sign up to either of them, we’d be grateful if you did so by clicking either of the links above.

Improve Website Page Load Speed by Optimizing Images for Web

February 15, 2015 By John Leave a Comment

Optimizing images on your website whether it’s an e-commerce store, a blog, or both is one of the most important things thing that you can do to improve its performance. And it shouldn’t be a complex task really. Sure, high-res images look great but when you’re loading a 2MB image, it’s going to do more harm than good.

Essentially, you’re going to want to aim for a small image file size without compromising quality. As a rule of thumb, don’t let the images look bad or pixelated just for the sake of being smaller in size. You should strike a balance between a good-looking image and an acceptable image size. Here are a few ways on how to optimize images for the web.

Optimizing Images for Web Using Photoshop

Optimizing images for the web is not at all difficult. If you have Photoshop (or any other image editing software), it’s a very simple process. Open the image on Photoshop and resize or crop your image to the appropriate size. Remember, when sizing images, the images you plan to use should not have a larger resolution than the image placeholder.

When you have resized your image to the appropriate resolution, click on File and Save for Web (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + S). Here you’ll be able to set the quality of the image while being able to see if the image still looks good. The image should not look pixelated and not have artifacts. In the bottom left section, you can see the file size of the image. You’re going to want to aim for an image that looks good, is not pixelated, and is less than 100kb in size — the smaller the size the faster the image loads on the page. On the upper right-hand section of the “Save for Web” window, you can use available presets or set the quality to your desired quality. Make sure you have the Optimized box is ticked and choose the correct file type. When you achieve a small file size with a good-looking image, click on Save.

A Note on Image Types

An important thing to note to make images look good even as you scale them down is to set the correct file type. Notably, the JPEG type is used for photos as it supports the most number of colors at 16 million. PNG is the better choice if you’re working with graphics such as logos and icons since it makes use of lossless compression. Lossless compression means that the image can be made smaller without affecting quality. PNG supports thousands of colors as well as transparency. JPEGs don’t support transparency.

GIF images are similar to PNG. It uses lossless compression and supports transparency. It however can only store a measly 256 colors. Using GIF images on web pages is generally not recommended.

Serve Images in WebP Format

We also recommend converting your image files to the modern webp image file format since these are smaller in size and are thus recommended for achieving optimum site performance. Uploading webp files are still not recommended however as there are still devices and browsers that do not support it. There are however plugins and services that allow converting regular image file types to webp and serve these images when it is supported by the user’s device. WP-Optimize is one plugin that provides free webp conversion.

Optimize Images Using WordPress Plugins

We also recommend having an image optimization plugin installed on your WooCommerce store. There are many image optimization plugins to choose from such as EWWW Image Optimizer, reSmush.it, Robin Image Optimizer. Once you set up these plugins, they will optimize your images on upload. Do note, however, that these image optimization plugins will not alter image resolution so it is still recommended to upload images in the correct resolution not exceeding the image placeholder size.

Properly Naming Files

A thing to note when naming files is to name files as they are. Don’t name files after a keyword when it is not appropriate. If you’ve got an image of a child playing the violin, name it something like “child-playing-violin.jpg” and not something like “learn-violin-online.jpg” or “free-violin-course-online.jpg”. If you try to force your SEO keywords on your image file names, your site may be flagged for overoptimization.

Optimize your images to ensure your site performs well. A fast e-commerce website provides a good user experience which translates to better SEO rankings and improved conversion rates.

How to Set up AMP for WooCommerce and Speed Up Your Mobile Site

October 28, 2018 By John 2 Comments

For WooCommerce store owners, it is important to present your customers with a fast WooCommerce store. This is especially important for mobile the mobile platform. One means of achieving top speeds is to set up AMP. In this post, we’ll show you how to set up AMP for WooCommerce.

What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or simply AMP, makes websites load faster on mobile devices. This is an open-source initiative that Google started.

As Google pushes for a faster web experience, it approves of websites that have fast page loads speeds. And since AMP is a pet project of Google, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by adopting it. To be clear, AMP is not yet a ranking factor for SEO. However, you and your customers would still benefit from AMP since more searches are now being done on mobile devices.

How to Set Up AMP for WordPress

Before you can set up AMP for WooCommerce, you first need to set up AMP for WordPress.

To set up AMP for WordPress, you will need to use a plugin. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins then Click on ‘Add New’. Search for AMP for WordPress. Once you find the plugin, click on Install Now and then activate it.

You can also download the plugin directly from the WordPress plugin repository and upload it on your site. After that, you will need to activate the plugin from your plugins page.

If you are running a multisite network, you can install the AMP plugin on the multisite and activate it for the network.

Now that you have set up AMP for WordPress, you can get started on setting up AMP for your WooCommerce pages.

How to Set up AMP for WooCommerce

For integrating AMP for WooCommerce, you will need another plugin. Currently, there are no free plugins that add AMP functionality to WooCommerce so you will have to purchase a premium plugin. You can choose between the WooCommerce Pro for AMP plugin or the Publisher AMP plugin.

To enable AMP for WooCommerce, simply install and activate the plugin.

As you can see, setting up AMP for WordPress and WooCommerce is easy. But the work doesn’t stop there. You will still need to test your AMP site.

How to Test AMP

There are a few tools that can help you test your AMP set up. Simply input any of your AMP pages on the two sites below and you will be provided with results.

https://search.google.com/test/amp

https://validator.ampproject.org/

You might also want to check Google Search Console for any errors in your AMP set up. If you are not connected to Google Search Console, you can use Yoast SEO plugin to connect your WooCommerce store.

If you find any errors in your AMP set-up, you can get started on fixing them. If you are stuck and need help fixing any errors, you can contact the Wooassist team and we should be able to help out.

Check Your AMP Speed

You can also check your AMP site for any improvements in site speed using GTmetrix or Pingdom.

Ensure Your AMP Pages are Indexed by Google

One way to ensure that your AMP pages will be indexed by Google is to generate a sitemap that includes the AMP pages. You can then upload it on Google Search Console. Just log in to your Google Search Console and then click on sitemap. In the field, just indicate your sitemap URL and click on “Submit”.

Ensure AMP Works with Yoast SEO Plugin

If you are using Yoast’s SEO plugin, which we recommend you do, you will need to integrate Yoast SEO with AMP. This is a simple tasks and just requires that you install the Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP.

Final Notes

Now that you’ve set up AMP for your WooCommerce store, the mobile experience should be much faster. If you are having issues setting up your AMP, you contact us and we’ll see what we can do to help.

If you are looking for other ways to speed up your site, you can check out our post on how to speed up your WooCommerce store.

How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rates for Your WooCommerce Store

January 21, 2020 By John Leave a Comment

Over the last few years, optimizing for mobile devices has become increasingly more important. More and more users browse the internet using their phone. According to Statista, 52.2 percent of web traffic comes from mobile phones and it has only been increasing from the previous years. As a WooCommerce store owner, you must optimize your website for conversion on these smaller screen sizes. Learn how to increase mobile conversion rates for your WooCommerce store by following the tips below.

How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rates for Your WooCommerce Store

How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Store for Mobile Devices

Use a Responsive Theme

All modern themes are now built to be responsive. A responsive theme adjusts to various screen sizes. You can check with your theme developer if your theme is responsive. You can also do a quick test by going to your WooCommerce store and then try scaling down the size of your browser. If you see the elements on your website move to adjust to the smaller window, then you are using a responsive theme. If you find that your theme is not responsive, don’t worry. You can switch to a responsive theme. We can recommend Storefront and the Genesis framework.

Storefront was made by the same developers that developed WooCommerce. It is built specifically for WooCommerce so you can expect full compatibility with WooCommerce and official WooCommerce plugins.

Genesis, on the other hand, is a framework. You need to use a Genesis child theme with the Genesis framework. Genesis is well-maintained, responsive and compatible with WooCommerce.

User Test Your Mobile Site

Open your WooCommerce store on your smartphone and do some user testing. Perform actions that you expect your customers to do on your WooCommerce store. Important elements to test are:

making a purchase
subscribing to your newsletter
sending a message using your contact form
filling out the checkout fields
updating your shopping cart
commenting on blog posts
tapping on call-to-action buttons

There may be more that you need to test that is specific to your website. Take note of any difficulties that you encounter and get them fixed. Should you need help fixing any issues, the Wooassist team can help.

Use White Space and Large Fonts

Don’t skimp on using white space on your mobile site. Use it to your advantage. Since mobile devices have small screens, it makes it hard for the user to navigate or read your site if the elements are too close together. Also, make sure your site is easy to read by increasing font size.

Optimize Your Checkout Page

Your checkout page is one of the most important pages on your website. Limit your checkout form fields to only the necessary details. Remove any distractions to completing checkout. Make sure that the form fields are tall enough that they are easy to tap and fill out. Make the checkout button large enough so it is easy to tap. Don’t make the checkout process a burden to your customers.

Remove AutoPlay Videos and Pop-ups

Pop-ups and autoplay videos are annoying for desktop sites. Even more so on a mobile site. Don’t burden your customers with extra data charges from autoplay media. In some cases, these elements may be necessary. But if they don’t help you increase your sales, consider removing them. Instead, focus on making your customers click on your call-to-action buttons.

Improve Your Site Speed

Site speed has become very important as it is now a ranking factor for SEO. On the mobile platform, site speed is critical with mobile data speeds being slower than a wired internet connection. If your mobile site takes too long to load, the user will just leave. There are a lot of tools at your disposal to determine how you can improve your site speed. Google PageSpeed Insights even shows recommendations specific to your mobile site. Other tools that we can recommend are GTmetrix and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Optimize Your Images

This is related to site speed but deserves its own section. Many WooCommerce store owners neglect optimizing images and just upload willy nilly. If you upload large images without optimizing them, your mobile conversion rates would take a hit. You can use a plugin to optimize the images you’ve already uploaded. However, if you’ve uploaded images that have dimensions bigger than the image placeholders, they will need to be manually optimized. If you’ve been doing this for years, then you’ve got a big task ahead of you. To manually optimize images, you can follow the instructions in this blog post.

Optimize Your Site Navigation on Mobile

Poor navigation can make or break a mobile website. Make sure that your mobile website is easy to navigate otherwise your customers will leave your site out of frustration. Use a hamburger menu. If you are using a responsive theme, the hamburger menu should be built in. If not, you can custom code your mobile menu or use a plugin.

Offer Multiple Payment Gateways

It is important to offer the payment gateway that your customers prefer. On the mobile platform especially, depending on your location, mobile wallets are a thing. If you can tap into that market, you can improve your conversion rate. For iPhone users, there’s Apple Pay which you can enable on WooCommerce.

Just follow all the tips above to increase your mobile site’s conversion rates. If you have any tips that you can add or any questions at all, let us know in the comments.

Why is it Important to Keep Your PHP Version Updated?

December 18, 2020 By John 4 Comments

The WordPress ecosystem is built on the PHP programming language. PHP is continuously being developed to improve security and make code execution faster among many other improvements.

PHP End of Life

At some point, a version of PHP will become obsolete which is referred to as the “end of life” of that version. This means that version of PHP will no longer receive any security fixes.

Unfortunately, many websites are still running on outdated PHP versions. All these websites are at risk.

According to WordPress statistics, 18.5% of WordPress sites are still running on PHP 5.6 or lower. Support for PHP 5.5 ended on December 2018. Another 34.7% of WordPress sites are running PHP 7.2, 7.1 and 7.0. Support for PHP 7.2 ended November 20,2020. That would make 53.2% of WordPress sites vulnerable to PHP exploits.

Why are Majority of WordPress Sites Running Outdated Versions of PHP?

Many users most likely don’t even know what PHP version they have since updating it is more complex than updating themes and plugins. Many non-technical WordPress users are wary of touching their hosting settings or cPanel. And for good reason. one wrong click on cPanel could cause your site to go down if you don’t know what you are doing. This seems to be the biggest barrier to adoption of newer PHP versions.

Some hosts are also slow to adopt and offer newer PHP versions. We recommend WPEngine and Siteground as they are quick on the uptake when it comes to PHP version offerings.

Why You Should Update

Better Security

The main reason that you should update your PHP is for security. As we have already mentioned, older PHP versions are no longer getting security fixes. That means known vulnerabilities are not being fixed on that version which leaves your site open to attacks.

Site Speed

Newer PHP versions will execute code faster so that means faster page load speeds. Faster page load speed means better user experience and good SEO signals. Site speed is an SEO ranking factor. So if you want to hit page one of Google search results, invest in site speed.

Ongoing Support

If you are running the latest PHP versions, you are protected from the latest known vulnerabilities. People work to fix security vulnerabilities in PHP when they come to light. The same goes for known bugs.

How Do You Check Your PHP Version?

Now you’re curious how to update your PHP version. First off, you have to find out what version of PHP you are using. There are several ways to check your PHP version. You can actually check on your WordPresh Dashboard.

Site Health Page

The Site Health page that you can access from your WordPress Dashboard contains a plethora of useful information that you can address to keep your site secure. You can reach it by going to Tools and then clicking on “Site Health”. Or you can just append your domain with:

/wp-admin/site-health.php

WooCommerce Status Page

If you are using WooCommerce, you can also click on WooCommerce and then on Status. You can see your PHP version when you scroll down to the “Server environment” table.

There are other ways to view your PHP version but these are the easiest methods for WordPress users.

You Know What Version of PHP You are Running, Now What?

If you not running an outdated version of PHP, then you don’t need to do anything. If you find that your PHP version is outdated, there are a few things you need to do before you update your PHP version.

Create a staging environment. You can test all your updates here before updating your live site. You will, essentially, also need to test the PHP upgrade on a staging environment so this is a necessary step.
Create a backup of your site.
Update your WordPress core.
Update all your themes and plugins. If you are using premium themes and plugins, make sure you have an active license for everything so you can receive automatic updates.
Remove unused plugins.
Find and remove abandoned plugins. This could get complicated if your site relies heavily on an abandoned plugin. We have a separate guide for removing abandoned plugins.

Now You’re Ready to Upgrade Your PHP

We recommend letting a developer upgrade your PHP version in case something goes wrong or at least have a developer at your beck and call before you proceed.

How you upgrade your PHP depends on your hosting provider so you should consult your hosting provider’s documentation. You will most likely need to navigate cPanel or your hosting account’s dashboard. Some hosting providers will actually require you to create a support ticket to request a PHP upgrade.

Make sure you are testing the PHP upgrade on a staging environment first so you can sort any issues in a controlled environment.

Have your hosting provider’s contact information at the ready so you can reach out to them right away if you encounter a problem.

If you need technical help with any of the steps leading to the PHP upgrade or the actual upgrade, you can contact us.

If you have any questions, you can also let us know in the comments.