We’ve optimized 500+ WordPress sites now and have deep experience optimizing WooCommerce sites. The three hosts below are the providers we recommend the most when asked by customers. Which is best for you really depends on your budget, how big your site is and the specific features you’re chasing that are important to your business.
The best Woocommerce hosting is:
- Cloudways – best price vs performance
- Kinsta – fastest of the big managed WordPress hosts
- SiteGround – fast and best suited to beginner and small sites
Object Caching is a MUST!
To get the most performance out of Woocommerce you really need to have Object Caching (a type of database caching) to speed up the backend of the site and the database-heavy things users do like adding to cart and processing their checkout – these three hosts all have Redis and/or Memcached to support object caching.
Use Cloudflare with APO
We also STRONGLY recommend you use Cloudflare’s APO Edge Caching service for WooCommerce to squeeze maximum performance for your site. This service is only $5/month and will significantly reduce the load on your hosting and speed up the site for visitors. As a side note, we’d recommend adding the Cloudflare firewall rules detailed in this post to help reduce the load on your site too.
There are more hosts listed below these three that we’d either recommend for a non-Woocommerce site or we’re asked regularly about – we’ve included some notes as to why we would or wouldn’t recommend those hosts.
How to choose the best Woocommerce Hosting for your business
Choosing a Woocommerce host is a little different from regular WordPress hosting. The performance of the web host has a huge impact on customer experience, conversion rate, and also on your and your staff productivity.
With a Woo site both the frontend and the backend, speed is important as a slow Woocommerce backend can really slow cost you lot in terms of lost productivity as often you or your staff will be working in the backend for hours each day.
In this section we’ll talk through some of the key features you need to consider when choosing the best Woocommerce hosting provider for your site and circumstances.
As is the case with a lot of our technical articles, we’ve included an audio walk-through, click play below to listen.
Some of the key considerations when choosing Woocommerce hosting include:
- Server or Hosting Location – Server location is important, you ideally want your hosting located at close as possible to the bulk of your visitors or target market
- Backups – Woocommerce sites have changes happening all day so you probably want a backup more frequently than nightly, we recommend using two backups. Blogvault is who we recommend and they have a real-time backup option for Woocommerce.
- Object Caching with Redis or Memcached – object caching is a form of database caching and is really important for Woo sites which do a lot of database processing as it speeds up the cart, checkout, add to cart functions, and WordPress backend so order management will be faster.
- Raw Server CPU Horsepower – the amount of CPU power available makes a huge difference to Woocommerce speed, you probably want 2-6 cores for a small to medium Woo site. Any less and customers will probably experience intermittent slowness.
- Staging Areas & Intelligent Patching Features – you really must update your Woo site on a regular basis, many hosts have intelligent patching and update features on top of standard staging area features
- CDN – a content delivery network is essential for Woocommerce as it relieves load on the hosting, Cloudflare’s free plan is great, but we recommend the $5/month APO service which will give you a significant additional speed boost
- Security features – because you’re storing customer data and payment info security is extra important. Even using the free version of Wordfence plugin will give you a reasonable boost in security. These Cloudflare Page Rules will help boost security too
1. Cloudways
Cloudways is one of the fastest hosts we’ve ever worked with. They’re different to most hosting platforms in that they combined the power of a dedicated server with an easy-to-use management console that effectively makes them a Managed WordPress Host.
They’re the fastest because of what they call their “Thunderstack”. A highly optimized server configuration that is built for speed.
Typically for a Woocommerce site you want to be looking at their 2 core servers and larger ones, a single-core server is probably not going to cut it and speed will yoyo around somewhat.
Key Features:
- The Fastest WordPress Host By A Long Way
- Host Multiple Sites (not charged on a per-site basis)
- Advanced Caching Capability with Redis & Memcached
- Dedicated Server In A “Managed” Style Environment
- Dirt Cheap!
Be Mindful of:
- Not Cpanel so not an interface many will be familiar with
- A Little More Complex Than Other Hosts
- Support Is Just OK
- Email Hosting by Rackspace
- Don’t cheap out on CPU cores, minimum 2 CPUs for Woocommerce
2. Kinsta
Kinsta is a high-end Managed WordPress Hosting provider and a great choice if you have a high-traffic site. They’ll scale up to larger sites but annoying Redis object caching is only available at an extra $99/month
Key Features:
- Lots of locations to choose from
- Secure
- Can scale up to Enterprise grade
- Daily backups
- Built on top of Google Cloud platform
Be mindful of:
- CDN can be slow, they’ve recently moved to direct Cloudflare integration
- Weird bandwidth charging based on “visits”, again Cloudflare can reduce this
- Price
- Redis costs extra ????
3. Siteground
Siteground is a great entry-level host and is a fantastic option if you have multiple low-traffic sites and want a fast host that won’t break the bank.
One thing that sets them apart from other similar cheap shared hosts is that they have a more advanced caching capability powered by Memcached.
Typically we’ll get the site with a high-quality theme and relatively low traffic (300 or fewer visits per day) loading in around 1 second on Siteground.
Key Features:
- Best Option If You Have Several Sites With Low Traffic
- Can Host Non-WordPress Sites & Email Too
- Host Multiple Sites (not charged on a per-site basis)
- High-Quality Caching Capability (for a shared host)
- Good all-rounder host
Be Mindful of:
- Server Load, Not Great For High Traffic Or Load
- Reliability Can Vary Depending On The Server You’re On
- Support Is Just OK
- TTFB can vary, recommend using Cloudflare’s APO service
