What is Managed WooCommerce Hosting?

With so many options for ecommerce platforms, it can be hard to decide on which is right for your business. Heard of WooCommerce, but aren’t quite sure what it is and how it’s different? Let’s walk through it.

What is WooCommerce?

So first, what is WooCommerce? WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that lets you turn your website into an online store. It transforms your site into an ecommerce powerhouse with all the easy-to-use functionality that WordPress provides.

What’s more is that both WordPress and WooCommerce are free and open source — meaning they’re great options to build your store with. WooCommerce powers nearly a third of internet stores, and no other ecommerce platform is as full-featured or economical. There’s unlimited customizability, zero licensing fees, and many more perks to working with the WooCommerce platform.

How Does WooCommerce Work?

From a high level, WooCommerce is a plugin that works on top of WordPress.

WooCommerce for WordPress works seamlessly with page builder plugins like Beaver Builder. This helps you put together page customizations that ensure you set yourself apart from the cookie-cutter stores that no one remembers. The ability to make your store distinct is one of the reasons people will come back to it.

WooCommerce is also SEO-friendly. Being highly calibrated for SEO is a very important feature because it means WooCommerce stores are more easily discovered and promoted by Google.

Other platforms only connect a content component to their carts — WooCommerce allows you to edit your site’s metadata.

Thanks to the innate blogging capabilities of WordPress, your WooCommerce store benefits from the SEO boost.

Can You Run WooCommerce On Any WordPress Site?

Easy answer? Yes. Any WordPress site can utilize WooCommerce and start selling. The thing to keep in mind is that simply because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Other hosts will tell you that you can run a WooCommerce store on their platform. What they leave out is that their platform isn’t actually optimized for ecommerce. Maybe you’ve tried others, realized it, and then got caught in the cycle of upsells that just get more and more expensive.

Think about it. You’re going into it seeing a $20/month price tag, and a few months later you’re being talked into a $1200/month plan.

So What is Managed WooCommerce Hosting?

Convinced? Try Nexcess managed WooCommerce to kickstart conversions and shift your store’s load time into overdrive.

Is Managed WooCommerce Really Different From Managed WordPress Hosting?

There are a number of managed WordPress hosts. When they originally created their platforms, WordPress was in its infancy, and it was still primarily a blogging platform. Blogs don’t have many “logged in” users at the same time, and can handle surges in traffic simply by caching static content.

Sites that do have many concurrent users, such as ecommerce sites, educational course websites, and membership sites don’t really work the same way. Why? Not all the users are viewing the same content, they’re navigating to different parts of your site map, and they’re loading tons of assets from different geographic locations.

These types of sites are a whole different animal that require a different type of web hosting. That’s where managed WooCommerce Hosting comes in.

Why Should I Consider Managed WooCommerce Hosting?

When you choose Nexcess, you’re choosing a Managed WooCommerce host that built a platform differently than others. We didn’t just rely on caching. We created a means of being highly performant while also being secure, customizable, and primed for SEO. We married the best of WordPress with features that supercharge WooCommerce.

We made tweaks and adjustments to the code itself, ensuring our platform can scale to meet high traffic loads whether or not you’re expecting them. We changed how the open source WooCommerce code saves incoming orders. We created a platform truly optimized for ecommerce — and we even give you the most popular WooCommerce theme, Astra Pro, standard on all plans.

We’re fast because you need to be. We’re better than other options because we listen to our users to keep making improvements. All of our managed WooCommerce hosting plans now include Nexcess exclusive performance monitoring: Sales Performance Monitor and Plugin Performance Monitor. Both of these work to keep your store high-performing at all times.

Who Benefits?

Shoppers! Most people are impatient. Studies have shown that the average site visit length will be cut in half if customers spend more than 2 seconds waiting between page loads. If they can find what they want somewhere else more quickly, they’re going to go.

Who Else Benefits?

Store owners. How? When your store is fast, conversions increase. And that benefits your bottom line. Revenue and profit go hand in hand with conversions, and conversions are intrinsically linked to site speed. If you want to get that bread, it’s time to turn on the oven.

What’s Included in Nexcess’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting Plans?

When we set out to create the best solution for ecommerce sites, we thought about our strategy with YOU in mind.

We took all of our favorite features that make our own sites easier, and packaged them for you:

• Astra Pro
• Nexcess CDN
• Image compression and lazy loading
• 1-Click fast checkout
• Plugin Performance Monitor
• Sales Performance Monitor
• WP101 WooCommerce tutorials
• Thank you redirect for WooCommerce
• Daily backups
• Solid Security Pro
• SSL certificates included FREE
• 1-Click staging
• WordPress core and plugin updates

That’s all in our basic plan, too! Higher tier plans have even more features available. We’re so sure you’ll love our platform, we include a 30-day money back guarantee.

Is Managed WooCommerce For Me?

We think so! We’ve been here growing with the ecommerce industry, and we serve store owners of all different capabilities.

Whether you’re hands-on or handing it off to professionals, Nexcess Managed WooCommerce is the fastest, most comprehensive WooCommerce hosting you’ll find.

Take our platform for a spin and try us today. Check out our fully managed WooCommerce hosting plans to learn more.

This blog was originally published in February 2018. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.