WordPress
WooCommerce hosting checklist for a growing online store
A WooCommerce store is more demanding than a static brochure site because customers create sessions, carts, orders, payments, emails, stock changes, scheduled jobs, and database writes. Hosting needs to be evaluated around those dynamic paths, not only the homepage.
Test the uncached parts of the store
Page caching can make catalogue pages fast, but cart, account, checkout and other personalized requests still need application and database work. Measure those paths under realistic conditions rather than relying on a cached homepage test.
Watch PHP workers and database load
Traffic spikes can create many simultaneous dynamic requests. Slow plugins, expensive product queries, search, reporting, imports, and background tasks can compete for the same CPU, memory, I/O, and database capacity.
Treat email as part of the transaction
Order confirmations, password resets and customer notifications need intentional delivery. Test messages with real external mailboxes and make sure the sending domain is authenticated for the service that actually sends them.
Back up both files and the database
The database contains orders, customers, product state, settings and other changing business data. Recovery planning needs to account for the frequency of those changes and the risk of losing orders between restore points.
Use staging for risky changes
Plugin, theme, PHP and WooCommerce updates can interact in unexpected ways. Test material changes away from the live checkout when possible, and keep a rollback path for the production deployment.
Scale after measuring the bottleneck
If the store is healthy but consistently reaches CPU, memory, worker, database or I/O limits, move to a larger shared plan or VPS with a clear understanding of what resource the extra capacity is intended to solve.