E-commerce optimization: A deep dive into hosting features

Choosing a great hosting service is not always an easy decision. There are many and diverse types of services, and it is not always clear which of them may best suit the needs of our website.

This decision is not vital for every type of site. For a personal blog or a small showcase website, having an online presence and decent page loading speed may be enough.

However, when a site produces income, as in the case of an e-commerce website, you need to carefully evaluate the features and tools of the hosting service and choose the service that guarantees maximum performance, security, and ease of use.

In this article, we will delve into features and tools to look for in a web hosting service that allows you to perform advanced tasks while minimizing the time and effort required to manage a complex e-commerce project.

Performing advanced tasks quickly and easily can be crucial and is more important when the site has to handle a growing volume of traffic. The availability of advanced but easy-to-use tools is also essential for small businesses and start-ups with a limited budget. Therefore, services such as free migrations performed by experienced engineers and advanced management tools such as one-click staging environments can be crucial for your business.

Why is the web hosting service so vital for an e-commerce website?

Choosing web hosting for a business site is not an easy choice for three basic reasons:

• Your web hosting service can be crucial for your website’s performance: a state-of-the-art hosting service provides the infrastructure and services that can help speed up your website. This is essential for delivering a good user experience and increasing conversions.
• A great hosting service provides enhanced security measures: A hosting provider adopting security best practices is a shield for your website from cyber-attacks and protects your customer data and brand reputation.
• A premium web hosting provider should help you streamline your site management: By offering optimized configuration, a hosting service specific for WordPress makes it easier to manage your website, so allowing you to focus on your business instead of spending time and resources on configuration and troubleshooting.

We have dedicated two specific articles to hosting features that help you speed up and secure your WordPress e-commerce website.

In today’s article, we provide a deep overview of several services and tools a premium web hosting provider should include in their offer to help you run a successful online business. Let’s dive in!

Optimized configuration

When choosing a hosting service for WordPress, it is good to start with a preliminary check of the server setup. Having a server configured and optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce provides a number of benefits in performance and security and relieves you of the need to configure the server and the platform yourself.

Here is what to look for in a hosting service suitable for an e-commerce built with WordPress and WooCommerce:

• Specific PHP configuration that ensures faster script execution speed.
• Database optimization to better handle typical e-commerce loads.
• Advanced cache configuration specific to WordPress and WooCommerce.
• Integration with a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Implementation of additional security measures, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
• Dedicated resources (CPU, RAM, disk) that can be scaled according to site needs.

Kinsta configuration is optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce

It is not easy to provide a complete list of all e-commerce optimizations we have in place for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. Being a web hosting specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce, we provide our clients with the best configuration that modern technology has to offer to ensure maximum performance, security, and ease of use of WordPress websites.

Here is a list of our main optimizations for e-commerce.

PHP optimizations

Kinsta provides multiple versions of PHP. Our customers can choose from all officially supported versions of PHP and two additional versions that have reached the end of their lifecycle.

This allows WordPress and WooCommerce site owners to select the PHP version that best suits their theme and plugins without having to deal urgently with any incompatibilities between core, theme, and plugins. In addition, you can always change the PHP version with a simple click.

At Kinsta, Opcache has been available for all PHP releases since 7.3. When a PHP file or script is processed, it must first be compiled into machine-readable opcode. OPcache stores the converted opcode so that PHP will be able to skip the compilation step the next time that specific file or script is needed. Using OPcache improves PHP performance because it significantly reduces the time required to execute the same requests multiple times.

In addition, Kinsta gives you the ability to customize many aspects of the PHP configuration, such as memory limit, maximum execution time, and other parameters to fit the specific needs of your website.

Database optimization

Database optimization is crucial for ensuring high performance for an e-commerce website, especially when dealing with large volumes of data and a great number of requests. An optimized database is configured to increase query execution speed, reduce server load, and improve scalability.

At Kinsta, each Managed WordPress site is backed by an open-source MariaDB relational database. The MariaDB/MySQL technology and its InnoDB storage engine use data caching to speed up responses to queries. Caches use chunks of RAM, as do other database actions, like wrangling connections.

We also have an automatic database optimization routine running 24 hours a day. This routine optimizes critical database parameters for all WordPress websites hosted on our platform and adjusts settings to maximize database efficiency.

By tweaking the settings on the fly, our automated optimization helps ensure customer databases are ready to handle the loads they can expect without gobbling up memory they don’t need.

Cache configuration

The cache is a portion of memory used to store copies of resources that can be served on future requests without downloading the full page multiple times. When a visitor requests a page, the server first checks to see if it has a copy of that page in the cache. If it finds it, it sends it directly to the visitor without regenerating the entire page.

When working with a WordPress and WooCommerce website, you can install a third-party caching plugin for WordPress. These plugins can be very useful if you opt for a shared hosting service or when your web host does not provide more efficient cache management solutions.

Opting for web hosting with preconfigured caching for WordPress and WooCommerce makes your life much easier because you don’t need to deal with all the oddities of caching plugins. After all, the service provider has already optimized caching on the server to ensure the best performance.

Kinsta takes care of the cache on the server for you, thus offering better performance and easier management for all your websites. All caching settings are easily accessible in a single section of the MyKinsta hosting dashboard for your customizations.

You can read more about cache management on Kinsta in our previous article about performance requirements and best practices for e-commerce websites.

Cloudflare CDN integration

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that store static resources such as images, scripts, and style sheets so that they can be delivered to site viewers from the nearest geographical location.

A CDN is a must-have for modern e-commerce websites because it typically provides services and features that can significantly improve performance and security.

Normally, you would purchase a CDN service such as Cloudflare and configure it yourself. This involves modifying your domain’s DNS to direct requests for static files to the CDN’s servers, selecting files for distribution, and customizing numerous settings, such as caching rules, file compression, image optimization, WAF configuration, and more.

At Kinsta, you won’t have to worry about any of these because Kinsta provides a free Cloudflare Enterprise CDN integration to all customers, regardless of their plan. This means that all our customers will have a CDN with 260+ points of presence around the world, Edge Caching, automatic image optimization, Cloudflare firewall with DDoS protection, Brotly compression, and much more.

You can read more about Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration in our previous article.

Dedicated resources

“Dedicated resources” means that a specific portion of a server’s hardware resources (such as CPU, RAM, and disk space) is allocated exclusively to a specific website. In other words, your website does not share these resources with other sites on the same server, as is the case in a shared hosting environment.

Having dedicated resources is vital for an e-commerce website for several reasons, all of which are vital:

• Performance: Performance is not affected by other sites sharing the same server.
• Scalability: Because they are dedicated to a single site, the allocated resources can be scaled up as needed. This means that if your website’s traffic explodes, you can easily request additional resources to cope with the increased load.
• Control: With dedicated resources, you have more control over server configurations. You can customize server parameters to optimize your site’s performance.
• Security: Having dedicated resources can help strengthen the security of your e-commerce website, as it protects your environment from potential attacks from other sites hosted on the same server.

Kinsta uses Linux containers (LXC) and LXD as the underlying container technology for our WordPress hosting infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform.

Each site runs in a dedicated, isolated software container equipped with all necessary software resources (Linux, NGINX, PHP, MySQL), guaranteeing 100% privacy and no resource sharing, even between your own sites.

Expert migrations

After checking the infrastructure and configuration of the hosting service, the next step is the setup. If you are creating the site from scratch, then a managed hosting service will most likely allow you to create a new WordPress installation with a few clicks directly in the control panel. But if you are going to move an existing WordPress e-commerce website, then you will have to worry about your WordPress website migration.

There are several options for migrating a website, but be careful. Not all hosts provide a migration service performed by experienced engineers. Many hosts provide this service for a price, and the user who does not have an adequate budget has no choice but to perform everything manually or rely on a migration plugin.

The problem with many migration plugins is data integrity. Migrating your e-commerce website with a plugin can cause data loss, and this is not acceptable for an online business.

You just need to create an account and gain access to the MyKinsta dashboard. Once there, head on to the Migration screen and fill in the form with your site details. An engineer will get in touch with you in a few hours. Then, you can monitor the status of your migration in MyKinsta, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s complete. Finally, you’ll be able to test your WordPress website at Kinsta before it goes live.

Our service also includes a malware check-up. If we detect malicious code during the migration, our malware removal specialists will clean your sites for free. You can read more about our free migration service in our documentation.

Staging environments

A staging environment is a hosting environment distinct from the production environment that allows you to develop and test your website before pushing it live.

The availability of a staging environment is crucial for an online business because any changes you make to your website can be tested in a secure, isolated environment before being moved to production. Think, for example, of updating the WordPress core, plugins, or theme. You can easily perform all updates in your staging environment and, if all goes well, push the updated version of your website to production without risk.

Note: Before you purchase a hosting service for your e-commerce website, check that they offer one-click staging environments.

Every regular WordPress site hosted by Kinsta has its own free WordPress staging environment that is completely separate from the live production site. You can create a dev site in minutes and share it with your team from your MyKinsta dashboard.

In addition, you have granular control over the content and updates you’d need to push from staging to live environments. Thanks to Kinsta’s Selective push, you can move your changes from staging to production, choosing from files only, database only, or both. This is a useful feature for all website owners, especially for WooCommerce and membership websites that manage orders and subscriptions.

You may also need additional staging environments or set up a staging environment that more closely matches your live environment requirements. Or you may need to do resource-intensive site development or testing. In such cases, you can purchase our Premium staging environment add-on, which allows you to add up to five Premium Staging Environments to each WordPress website.

Advanced backups

A failed update, an unintentional error in site management, or an unforeseen event of any kind can make your site temporarily unavailable, and this can result in lost sales or ruin your brand image.

This is why it is vital to make sure that your hosting service performs regular backups of your site on at least a daily basis.

While the availability of backups is now the standard in the industry, the ease of restoration and advanced backup features can make ecommerce business owners’ lives much easier.

At Kinsta, we provide six different types of backups:

• Daily: We create a backup automatically every day.
• Hourly: We offer an hourly backup add-on for site owners who need more frequent backups.
• Manual: You can create up to 5 manual backups, which are stored for a minimum of 14 days.
• System generated: An automatic system backup is generated when you restore a backup, push a staging environment to live, perform a search and replace on your database, update a theme or plugin from MyKinsta, or reset a site.
• External: With our external backups add-on, you can send weekly or monthly backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
• Downloadable: You can create a downloadable ZIP file containing only your WordPress database and files once per week.

With the exception of downloadable backups, each backup option provides a snapshot of your website, which you can restore to staging or live with a single click from your MyKinsta dashboard.

Powerful site management tools

The availability of advanced management tools can save you hours of work and relieve you from complex tasks, allowing you to focus on your business.

Making comparisons between hosting companies is difficult, given the diversity of services, but make sure your host provides at least some of the services listed below. These services are all available to Kinsta customers and are included in all hosting plans.

Plugin and theme bulk update

For agencies that manage multiple websites and for e-commerce sites with multiple plugins, having the ability to monitor and update themes and plugins in bulk is a considerable advantage.

Kinsta allows you to bulk update multiple themes and plugins for one or more sites at once, saving you a lot of time and work. In addition, before performing the update, the system generates an automatic backup that can be restored with a single click in case of failure. If you use this feature in conjunction with staging environments, you can perform any update quickly and securely without any risk of breaking your website.

Now, suppose you have an identical copy of the production site in a staging environment and imagine this process:

1. Update all your plugins in the staging environment.
2. Verify that your staging site is working properly.
   • If you detect a problem or the site stops working, hop over to the backups page, restore the last backup to staging, and start the process again.
3. If the update is successful, push the staging site to production.
4. Check your website.

Updating all themes and plugins for all your sites hosted on Kinsta is just that easy.

Other bulk actions

On Kinsta, bulk actions are not limited to updates. At the time of writing, Kinsta users can perform the following bulk action in MyKinsta:

• Clear cache: You can clear server cache, CDN cache, and Edge Cache.
• Update plugins: You can select one or more plugins to update on one or more WordPress websites. Only plugins that have available updates are shown.
• Update themes: As with plugins, you can select the themes with available updates and update them individually or in bulk.
• Change Edge Caching: You can enable or disable Edge Caching on individual or multiple websites at once.
• Change CDN: Enable or disable the Kinsta CDN.
• Change PHP version: You can change the PHP version on all sites selected. This can take up to 3 minutes to complete.
• Export to CSV: Exports a list of selected sites to a CSV file.
• Change labels: Use this option to update site labels.

Site Preview Tool

You can preview a migrated website before pointing it to its live domain via the temporary URL sitename.kinsta.cloud, even if the database or hard-coded links still point to the old domain or a different domain.

This feature should make it even easier to move your WordPress website to Kinsta.

To enable Site Preview in MyKinsta, open your site’s Tools tab, find the Site Preview widget, and click on the Enable button.

You can read more in our docs.

Search and Replace

In the lifetime of a WordPress site, you may have to make changes directly in the site’s database. It may be that you need to change URLs to point to a different domain or URLs that were using http need to be changed to https.

Normally, you would perform these operations directly on the WordPress database. This is not necessary for Kinsta customers, who can use our handy Search and Replace tool available in the MyKinsta dashboard.

In your website section, click on the Tools tab, find the Search and replace widget, and click on Search and replace.

In the text field, enter the value you want to look for in the database and then click the Search button. You’ll be shown the number of occurrences of that text string. Now you can check the Replace select button if you want to replace that string with a new one.

Multiuser dashboard

When you manage a team, you may need collaboration tools so that each team member can safely perform their assigned tasks. WordPress’ user and role and capability system allows you to assign tasks to team members based on their roles, but this system alone is not sufficient to manage a team effectively. There are upstream tasks that are more specifically related to the hosting service, such as DNS configuration, CDN activation, database access, and much more.

If you work with a team of admins and developers with different levels of responsibility, then you will want to make sure your hosting provider has multiuser features and tools.

Kinsta provides a hosting admin panel built in-house specifically for WordPress, MyKinsta, which allows you to manage all your web projects in collaboration with your team.

There are two types of users in MyKinsta:

• Company-level users can access company-level information.
• Site-level users can access only individual websites.

We offer four user roles at the company level.

• Company Administrators have access to everything, including all sites.
• Company Developers can manage all websites but don’t see company billing or settings.
• Company Billing users only have access to company settings and billing information and do not have access to sites.
• A Company Owner has the same permissions as Company Administrators and the additional capability to close the account.

For site-level users, we offer two user roles.

• Site administrators have access to all environments (live and staging) for specific websites.
• Site developers only have access to staging environments for assigned sites.

Thanks to MyKinsta’s multiuser features, each user will only be able to perform the tasks assigned to them on the sites they work on. This brings great security benefits and ensures operational efficiency.

Analytics Tools

When it comes to e-commerce websites, there can never be enough data. Data is vital for tracking the results of your marketing efforts and checking the effectiveness of your sales strategies during promotional offers, end-of-season sales, and so on.

For business websites such as e-commerce, having data on page load times and script and query execution times is crucial to keeping the site healthy and ensuring adequate performance for your business.

For these reasons, if you run an e-commerce or any kind of business website, make sure your hosting service provides you with all the data you need to run your site and your business at its best.

Kinsta provides analytics tools that dig deep into any and every aspect of your website activity. First, you can monitor your global resource consumption in your MyKinsta dashboard.

This section provides an overview of the number of monthly visits, bandwidth consumption, CDN usage, and disk usage so you can check in real time whether the resources allocated to your sites are sufficient.

You can dive into more detailed reports for all sites in your plan by heading to your username > Company settings > Analytics page.

You can also view analytics for specific websites. Navigate to WordPress Sites > sitename > Analytics.

In the top right dropdown menu, you can then set the interval to check between the past 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or the current billing cycle.

For a more in-depth view of MyKinsta Analytics tools, check our Analytics docs.

Scalability features

If you plan to launch and grow an online business, it’s important to know a thing or two about scalability. This term refers to a system’s potential to handle increased demand while still maintaining the same level of performance.

To put it simply, if a business website is scalable, it can grow safely and successfully. On the contrary, when a business hasn’t been built to scale, it can experience delays in delivery or the degradation of customer support.

The following are just a few measures to adopt to guarantee the scalability of an e-commerce website:

• Pick a premium cloud hosting service. This will allow you to increase or decrease computing power, memory, and storage space according to your needs.
• Prefer managed hosting that takes care of optimizing the infrastructure for security and performance.
• Use an enterprise-level CDN.
• Choose a database that can easily handle increased data and queries.
• Use cache.
• Optimize images.
• Minify code.
• Use performance monitoring tools. (APM)
• Continue optimizing over time.

As you may have gathered from reading this and the previous two articles on the best hosting for e-commerce websites, Kinsta is the perfect partner for creating highly scalable online stores and high-demanding websites. Your WordPress site will always have all the resources it needs to cope at peak times when it is vital to deliver pages quickly and securely to customers around the world.

Read more on how to choose the right hosting for high-traffic websites and WooCommerce stores, how to use the Kinsta API for predictive resource scaling, and how simple it is to scale a website on Kinsta.

Tools for developers

The basic features available out of the box in the WordPress core and plugins may be sufficient for a start-up or small business, but as a business grows, the complexity of the site could require a team of developers to take care of more advanced tasks.

Therefore, you need to check ahead of time that the hosting service provides developer services and tools, such as an API that allows you to interact with, a local development tool integrated with your hosting, and other tools that allow you to perform complex tasks with little effort and zero risk.

Kinsta empowers developers with a suite of tools to streamline workflows and enhance site performance. Here is a list of some dev tools available to all Kinsta clients:

Kinsta API

Kinsta API is a powerful developer tool that allows you to easily access and interact with your Kinsta account and projects. You can integrate your Kinsta hosting with your favorite third-party tools and use the many endpoints available to create reports, schedule tasks, create and manage WordPress websites, check operation status, and much more. (Read more about Kinsta API in our blog, documentation and reference)

DevKinsta

DevKinsta is a local development tool designed specifically for WordPress. With DevKinsta, you can create a local WordPress site in seconds, testing every aspect of your website, from email testing with MailHog to database management with Adminer. DevKinsta allows you to automate many steps in your workflow by synchronizing your local sites with your WordPress installs on Kinsta, pushing and pulling sites from local to remote environments, and vice versa. Check our DevKinsta intro page and check our docs.

Reverse proxy

Reverse proxy (available as an add-on) allows you to serve multiple websites or applications from a single domain regardless of where they are hosted. For example, if your main website domain is mainsite.com and your subsite is mystore.kinsta.cloud, you can set up the reverse proxy to display the subsite on mainsite.com/mystore. (Read more in our documentation)

Cron jobs

Every Kinsta-hosted website runs in a private container with its own crontab. Our users are allowed to add real server cron jobs to each site container. (Read docs)

SFTP and SSH connections

SFTP and SSH allow you to perform administrative tasks, transfer files, and update your site remotely. SFTP and SSH connections are available for all Kinsta clients, no matter their plan. Check our docs and learn more on how to use SSH and advanced SFTP and SSH security features.

WP-CLI

WP-CLI v2 is installed by default on all of our servers. To access WP-CLI, you need to connect to your server with SSH and navigate to your site’s document root. Kinsta provides SSH access with all of our Managed WordPress Hosting plans. (Check our docs)

GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

We have the Git client available at Kinsta, so you can access your site with SSH and pull your Git repo down from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or any other Git provider. SSH access is available on all Kinsta hosting plans.

Other Kinsta tools for developers

Other dev tools available for all our clients include:

• IP Geolocation
• htpasswd protection
• Search and Replace
• HTTP Status and Redirect Checker
• What is my IP address
• WordPress Theme Detector
• And much more…

Expert support

During the lifetime of a sophisticated website, such as an ecommerce site, anything can happen. The site can go down during a time of high traffic; conflicts can arise between plugins or with the theme; there can be security breaches on the site, and much more. In addition, you may need to perform complex configurations that are beyond what a site owner can do on their own.

In these cases, how helpful can an AI-based support service be? And how timely can a tiered support service be?

When it comes to e-commerce, every minute of downtime can lead to lost sales. This is why it is vital to choose a hosting service with expert support available 24/7/365.

Kinsta provides expert support 24/7/365 in 5 languages. Our support engineers cover every time zone, working around the clock to assist thousands of customers in over 120 countries. We have only one level of support, so no matter if you are a blogger or a Fortune 500 company, we treat every website as mission-critical.

We offer support via an online messaging platform, which you can easily access in your MyKinsta dashboard.

According to G2’s independent reviews, in 2024, Kinsta ranked as the world’s best WordPress hosting provider in the categories “Best for Small Business,” “Best for Mid-Market,” and “Highest User Satisfaction,” with special emphasis on our support service.

Summary

In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, a robust and efficient hosting solution is paramount for the success of your online store. This article delves into the essential features and tools that power high-performance, scalable, and secure e-commerce websites.

Kinsta tools and features are designed to optimize the performance, security, and scalability of WordPress websites, particularly those powering e-commerce stores. By leveraging advanced technologies like Google Cloud Platform, LXD containers, and our Cloudflare integration, Kinsta ensures that your e-commerce store can grow seamlessly, handling increased traffic and data volumes. Additionally, the platform offers a range of developer-friendly tools to enhance productivity and streamline workflows.

By choosing Kinsta, you can focus on growing your business, knowing that your e-commerce store is backed by a reliable and high-performance hosting solution. Check our plans!

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