Daily ArchivesSeptember 7, 2021

Not all hosts are created equally. You need a hosting provider that will meet your specific needs.

If you don’t vet your hosting provider before signing, you could find yourself stuck in a long-term hosting plan (which, by the way, we buy you out of).

Before deciding on a web hosting provider, be sure to ask these questions so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Here are the top questions to ask a cloud hosting provider — and why you need to ask them.

10 Essential Questions to Ask a Cloud Hosting Provider 

1. What Support Services Do You Offer?

If you get stuck, how can this web host help you? Are there humans you can speak with, or do you have to dig through knowledge base articles by yourself?

Your web host should be more than just a necessary utility. It should be your partner, who you know you can rely on when a problem comes up any time of the day. 

For example, at Hostdedi we’re here for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Hostdedi support features include: 

• Easy and quick access to support. 
• Award-winning customer care.  
• Three tiers of support based on your business’s needs.
• A comprehensive knowledge library of resources.

2. Can I Do Ecommerce On This Plan?

If you plan on launching an ecommerce store on your website, be sure to ask a potential hosting provider if it’s included in that plan, or if you have to buy a different hosting plan.

3. Do You Help With Site Migrations?

Site migrations can be a real pain — time consuming, headache inducing. But they’re a necessity when changing hosting providers. 

Luckily, some hosting providers will do the site migration for you. You can just sit back and let them take care of it. Hostdedi, for example, provides free migrations.

Hostdedi’ white glove migration system, you don’t have to raise a finger to migrate your websites over to Hostdedi. Our migration specialists do it for you quickly and with minimal downtime.

4. What Version of PHP and WordPress Are You Running?

You’ll want to make sure that you’re running your site on the latest PHP and WordPress versions. Ask the web hosting company how often they update too.

At Hostdedi, we take care of staying updated thanks to automatic core WordPress and plugin updates.

5. What Do You Do to Keep My Site Secure?

Security breaches always come at the least convenient time. And when they happen, most hosting providers tell you you’re on your own. 

That’s why it’s important to find a web hosting provider who will help you keep your site secure. Find out if they conduct malware/virus scans. You’ll want to be sure your sensitive data is safe with this host.

For example, at Hostdedi we offer constant monitoring of threats and stay proactive against the ever-evolving landscape of cyber attacks. In fact, Hostdedi facilities block over three million attacks per day. 

6. Do You Provide SSL?

Another important component of site security is a Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Ask the hosting provider if they offer an SSL certificate in their web hosting plans. If the web host does not have one, you will need to get an SSL certificate on your own.

SSL certificates not only provide an added layer of protection to your site — but search engines love them too. Most search engines punish sites that don’t have an SSL certificate set up. They’d rather feature SSL certified sites on Google to provide a safer internet experience.

Fortunately, Hostdedi web hosting plans include free SSL certificates.

7. How Big is Your Support Team and When Are They Available?

A small support team can easily become overwhelmed with too many requests coming in. You’ll want to make sure the web host has a sizable support team — and one that can be reached at any time.

For example, at Hostdedi we’re here for you 24/7/365. Our constant support is there to help you whenever you need it.

8. What Happens If My Site Grows?

You may have a small audience now for your website, but that can change over time. When choosing a web hosting company, you need to consider how they’ll help you scale as you grow. 

A good question to ask your web hosting provider is whether they can help you scale your site. Ask if they have different sized plans to meet your changing needs. Selecting a web hosting provider that can allow you to upgrade plans means you won’t have to leave your hosting provider down the line if your needs change.

9. What Happens if My Site Gets Hacked?

You need to prepare for any amount of security breaching on your website. When choosing a web host, ask about their backup policy and if they provide backups of sites. Also be sure to ask if they backup your database, not just your files.

Unfortunately, some hosting providers perform infrequent backups. But these are essential to saving your website’s data. At Hostdedi, you get instant, daily backups as well as 30-day backups included in your hosting plan.

10. How Do I Know If My Site is Running Slow or Gets Hacked?

Slow sites will lose you visitors. If your site takes too long to load, they’ll bounce. Slow sites also hurt your SEO and Google rankings. You need to know that your site is fully optimized — and secure — at all times. Ask the hosting provider if they have a system in place to alert customers in the event of a hacking or if you encounter slow load times.

Choose the Right Web Host

At Hostdedi, we value your website’s performance above all else. We’re committed to consistent and optimal service you can rely on. That means better:

• Scalability — Ready for volume spikes.
• Speed — Fast, reliable performance.
• Security — Vigilance to keep your websites safe.
• Support — Here for you anytime you need us.

Explore fully managed web hosting plans from Hostdedi today.

In 2020, the U.S. ecommerce industry expanded by 44%, with consumers spending over $860 billion online. 

There’s never been a better time to focus on improving your ecommerce presence to maximize your chances of success with your online customers. 

Whether you’re thinking of building an ecommerce website to monetize your business or looking for ways to improve your website, focusing on these seven ecommerce website features will help you create a website that your customers love visiting.

What Do Customers Want From Ecommerce Sites?

• An easy, intuitive online shopping experience, from landing on your homepage to making the final purchase.
• An aesthetically pleasing design.
• A personalized experience.

Generally, what customers want in an ecommerce site can be broken down into the above three points.

When a customer visits an online store, they make snap decisions about the brand within a few short seconds of landing on the homepage. 

9 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for Fast & Effective Sites >>

An engaging and captivating website will increase your dwell time metrics — in other words, customers will stick around to browse and hopefully make a purchase, and your conversion rate will improve.

So, while focusing on the quality of your products is key, your website also does a lot of heavy lifting. To begin or improve your ecommerce business, you need to start thinking,  “What do my customers want from my ecommerce site?”

Top 7 Ecommerce Website Features

Let’s discuss some practical ecommerce website features that will help you achieve these three pillars of ecommerce success.

1. User-Friendly Design

Perhaps the most important feature customers want in an ecommerce site is a good user experience. If your customers can’t find their way around your website or they struggle to find what they’re looking for, they will likely move swiftly on to one of the many other online retailers.

Prioritize customer experience by:

• Creating a simple, straightforward, high-quality homepage.
• Including a search bar.
• Clearly listing category pages in the navigation bar.
• Focusing on creating a responsive website. 

2. Mobile-Friendly Features

In the modern marketplace, ecommerce consumers are increasingly reliant on their mobile devices. According to SaleCycle, mobile devices were used in 56% of all online purchases in 2020.

In other words, most customers want to browse online stores on their phones, so including mobile optimization in your ecommerce website design is vital. 

Ensure your web design is automatically modified for the screen size and shape of phones to increase your conversion rate and keep customers happy.

3. Multiple Payment Options

Cart abandonment is often a big issue for online retailers. 

To improve your chance of sealing the deal in the final checkout process on your website, be sure to make the purchasing stage as easy as possible for your customers by offering multiple payment methods in the shopping cart.

In addition to offering debit and credit card options, consider adding options for payment providers like PayPal or Stripe. You could also add plugins that have a buy now, pay later functionality to encourage customers to press the “purchase” button.

4. 24/7 Customer Service

A big part of a successful customer experience is providing helpful, accessible customer service. According to Microsoft, 90% of Americans consider customer service an important feature when deciding whether or not to purchase from a company. 

Include a 24/7 customer service chatbot as one of your ecommerce website features to address customer needs at any time. Plugins like Zendesk or LivePerson make it easy for you to add this feature to your website for a small fee.

5. User Reviews

Include a section on your ecommerce website where customers can read real product reviews. 

With 79% of customers trusting reviews as much as recommendations from their friends, reviews are essential for any successful online business. 

Because your customers won’t have the chance to see a product in person, they’ll often rely on what previous buyers have said about it. 

6. User Features and Discounts

Customers like to feel that they’re getting a good deal and being treated differently from other customers. Offer personalized deals, offers, and other user features to give them this type of attractive, customized experience.

Offer user accounts where customers can access loyalty pricing offers, their personalized wishlist, and account history. You can also use an ecommerce platform automated emailing system to send targeted special offers to loyal customers.

7. Extensive Product Information

Shopping online has become extremely common, but many consumers still feel hesitant about making online purchases — especially from smaller brands that they may be unfamiliar with. 

A big disadvantage of online shopping for consumers is that they are unable to see or try the product before making a purchase.

In order to convince your customers that your product is high-quality and worth their money, be sure to offer as much product information as possible. 

On your product pages, include detailed product descriptions that offer information about size, material, color, ingredients, and place of origin. Offer high-quality product images that show the product from every angle. For clothing, be sure to include images of a model wearing the item. 

Add related products sections on product pages, as this functionality can help consumers find other products that feel personalized to their tastes and needs.

Final Thoughts: What Customers Want in an Ecommerce Site: Top 7 Ecommerce Website Features

With these seven key features on your ecommerce website, you’ll be sure to satisfy even the pickiest new customers. 

Looking for a reliable host for your online business? Try our fully hosted WooCommerce packages with Hostdedi. We’ll get you set up with a WordPress-based website and a professional ecommerce platform so you can start growing your business today.

Get started with a scalable package to find out why retailers around the world love building their websites with us — or give it a try yourself.

Better is Built In with fully managed hosting from Hostdedi. Try it free for 14 days.

Everyone wants their WordPress site to function and perform its best. No business owner wants to be forced to sacrifice function for performance or vice versa. If your site isn’t getting the attention you think it deserves, you may need to learn how to create a WordPress performance tuning strategy.

Why is a WordPress Performance Tuning Strategy Important?

A WordPress tuning strategy is vital because you’re likely to use too many features and way too many plugins for unnecessary functionality when you self-host your WordPress site. Installing all of that stuff you’re not using means your site won’t perform as well as it should.

Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization >>

When your site slows down, it negatively impacts search engine optimization and visitor experience. Therefore, it’s up to you to enact a performance tuning strategy to ensure your site is up to speed.

Identify Potential Issues with Your Website

The first step in a WordPress performance tuning strategy is to identify potential issues with your website. Some of the most common performance issues with WordPress sites are:

• Browser Caching. A cache is a copy of your website information stored on your computer to make it load faster upon subsequent visits. But if older versions of the page are stored, it can decrease speed instead. Therefore, you need to understand how caching for WordPress affects your site.
• JavaScript. This programming language helps you add features to your WordPress site. But it also can slow down your page rendering speed.
• Minify CSS. When you minify CSS files, you cut out unneeded parts of code, reduce file sizes, and speed up the site.
• Image Optimization. Images use a lot of data. You need to optimize them, making them smaller and preventing pages from loading slowly. One way to do this is with WebP images.
• Using a Content Delivery Network. A content delivery network (CDN) is a web server platform that reduces the distance between the user and the server, generating faster processing and load times.

Repair Common Issues Through Performance Tuning

You don’t automatically have performance tuning features pre-installed when you run a self-hosted WordPress site. That means you’ll need to take those steps on your own. Here’s how.

Ensure Your Host is Optimized for WordPress

Working with an optimized WordPress host is a huge benefit. Being optimized means they’re experts on WordPress sites.

To find out if your host is optimized for WordPress, ask:

• Does the host have browser caching enabled?
• Will they use a CDN by default?
• Do they scan and protect your site against WordPress-specific hacks?

Hostdedi takes care of all of this and more with fully managed WordPress hosting services.

Clean Up Plugins

Plugins add functionality and features to your site. The myriad of plugins available is one of the perks of running a self-hosted WordPress site. But, unfortunately, plugins also can slow down your site.

The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

To clean up your site’s plugins:

• Check Usage. Make sure you’re using the plugins you enabled on your site. If not, uninstall them.
• Review Compatibility and Updates. Check to be sure the plugins you kept are still compatible with the WordPress version you’re running and that they’re updated regularly. If the plug-in isn’t updated regularly, they could have bugs. These bugs can slow down your site and make it vulnerable to attack.

Consider Multimedia Elements

You want to work with a host that uses a content delivery network, as described above, if your site includes a lot of multimedia. That’s because load times differ based on distance from servers. 

When your site is located far away from a server, just compressing your images isn’t enough to ensure fast loading time.

A CDN has servers located around the world, storing unchanging (static) files from websites. These static files mean the webpage doesn’t have to be loaded completely every time, and the server doesn’t have to do as much work. Thus, a CDN ensures that load time is fast, regardless of where you are.

Why You Need a WordPress CDN >>

In addition to using a host with a CDN, use PNG files when possible. PNGs are of higher quality and easier to compress. Also, be sure to compress your photos before you upload them to your site. Compressing photos and using a CDN will help your site load quickly.

Check Redirects

Did you recently rebuild or audit your site? If so, you may have removed pages or posts. If you didn’t correctly set redirects, you’re likely to lose out on traffic until you fix them.

You should review the new site after a rebuild or migration to make sure the URLs go to the correct pages and identify any broken links. You also should look for redirects that create chains because those slow down your site.

Ensure Security

Your hosting company needs to be WordPress optimized to avoid hacks and security breaches.

To ensure that your WordPress site is secure, ask your hosting company about:

• Automatic Updates. Ask your hosting company if they run automatic WordPress updates. If so, make sure you are notified of any updates. 
• Security Scans. Find out if they regularly run website scans to discover and repair security holes.
• SSL Certificates. Ask if they include SSL certificates for free with a site.
• Auto Repairs. Can they fix any issues they discover automatically? You want to make sure this happens because unresolved issues put your website at risk.
• Backups. Ask if the host company will back up your site. If so, be sure to find out how often. It’s standard for a hosting company to back up your site daily. These backups allow your site to be restored to a recent version if something happens.

Strengthen Your Performance Tuning Strategy With Hostdedi

Creating and running a WordPress performance tuning strategy means being aware of many intangibles that can impact your site’s functionality and performance.

The simplest way to make sure that visitors to your site don’t run into slow loading pages or other issues is to host your site with a company that runs the performance tuning strategy for you.

Hostdedi provides fully-managed WordPress hosting that includes:

• Automatic updates.
• SSL for security.
• Built-in CDN.
• Image compression.
• Caching.
• And more!

With Hostdedi, your site is optimized, secure, and fast. Contact us today to learn how Hostdedi can take on-site performance tuning for you automatically.

Or, give it a try for free. Start your two-week trial of fully managed WordPress today.

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Learning how to write a product description is an essential skill for ecommerce store owners.

Besides describing product features, well-written product descriptions can entice customers to buy, increase sales, and boost the visibility of your online store.

As crucial as it is, coming up with great product descriptions can be difficult, especially when there are a lot of details to note.

What Is Product Description?

A product description provides essential information about the features and benefits of a product and why it’s worth buying.

An effective product description:

• Boosts product sales.
• Attracts your brand and audience.
• Helps your online shop rank higher in search engine results.

A winning product description informs and excites, appealing to a potential customer’s logical and emotional sides.

Understanding the Ecommerce Decision-Making Process

Before potential buyers make a purchase decision, they undergo a decision-making process called the buyer’s journey. 

Ecommerce is unique in the sense that ecommerce business owners have the opportunity to optimize the process and influence customers every step of the way.

The buyer’s journey has three stages, namely:

• Awareness.
• Consideration.
• Decision.

During the awareness stage, buyers realize the need for a product. In the consideration stage, they look at and compare products. It’s likely at this stage that they visited your website and product page. 

A good product description is able to capture the audience at the consideration stage to help them convert to the final decision stage. 

Thus, marketers and retailers alike will benefit from learning how to write a product description.

How to Write a Product Description

1. Define your target audience.
2. Do keyword research.
3. Use brand voice to tell a story.
4. Ensure readability.
5. Include high-quality photos and videos.

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step in writing a good product description is to define your target audience.

By doing so, you’ll determine which features are most attractive to your potential customers, and you’ll learn how to write a product description that highlights these product details.

Establish buyer personas for each target customer segment. Imagine what they’re like and list the following to come up with an ideal customer and brand voice:

• Demographics. 
• Behaviors. 
• Motivations. 
• Pain points. 

2. Do Keyword Research

Part of learning how to write a product description is to figure out how to optimize product descriptions for search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be an effective way to attract customers to your product page, and every SEO strategy begins with keyword research.

Keyword optimization depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey you’re in, but because you’re writing product descriptions for product pages, long-form and specific keywords with navigational and transactional intent are your best bet.

To further optimize your product page, place these keywords strategically in:

• Product title tags. 
• Meta descriptions.
• Image ALT tags. 
• Product copy.

3. Use Brand Voice to Tell a Story

Although the ecommerce decision-making process seems like a rational and straightforward journey, it’s actually an emotional journey.

A winning product description appeals to two sides of a customer: logical and emotional. 

The logical side describes a product’s benefits, while the creative description appeals to the customer’s emotions.

The brand voice you came up with in the first step comes in handy when writing a creative product description.

Be descriptive. Use superlatives and “power words” that influence customers to buy, but do so in a natural and conversational tone.

Telling a story that appeals to a customer’s emotion is what makes them buy.

4. Ensure Readability

Over the years, people’s attention spans have gone down. Because so much information is available, most people resort to scanning instead of reading.

To make it simple for customers to find information, use bullet points to describe product benefits and features. Creating bulleted lists also makes it easier to create product description templates.

For example, an Amazon page for a T-shirt lists the product’s features in a bulleted list for customers to skim through quickly.

Incorporate a lot of white space and use different font styles and sizes that follow the best practices for combining fonts.

5. Include High-Quality Photos and Videos

The best product descriptions always include high-quality product photos and videos, and the majority of customers consider visuals to be an essential part of their purchasing decisions.

Not only do visuals support what’s written in your product description, but they also show customers what the product looks like and how it works, which is crucial when customers can’t physically examine the product.

Outstanding photographs don’t always require a product photographer — you can learn how to use your smartphone to take product images for your ecommerce site.

Final Thoughts: How To Write a Product Description That Grows Sales

Learning how to write a product description is an essential skill to have when you own an online store.

The best product descriptions attract customers to your ecommerce site, boost product sales, and contribute to website visibility.

Writing effective product descriptions requires an understanding of your target audience’s buyer’s persona in order to address pain points and offer value propositions.

As a full-time business owner, you have a lot on your plate. Let Hostdedi take care of your ecommerce website.

Try fully hosted WooCommerce with Hostdedi today. With Hostdedi, you’ll get: 

• A fast, high-performing site.
• Instant auto scaling.
• Always-on security.
• Automatic plugin and platform updates.
• The strongest WooCommerce support around.

Better is Built In with fully managed hosting from Hostdedi. Try it free for 14 days.

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When it comes to your WordPress site, one seemingly small thing can make or break traffic — speed. 

Your WordPress site should load in three seconds or less. Slow loading means visitors will leave your site, abandoning any purchases they planned to make.

Luckily you can use WordPress performance plugins to make sure your site operates quickly, and loading speed doesn’t cause you to lose visitors.

Why Use WordPress Performance Plugins?

WordPress performance plugins make your site run and load more quickly. But that’s not all they do. They focus on key features that make your site perform better and faster.

Here are some of the areas in which WordPress performance plugins help optimize your site:

• Cache. A cache for WordPress is commonly accessed data that are temporarily stored to speed up processing. A computer can access this information quickly while retrieving any new information related to the site. Caching is the most common way to get your website to load faster and generally perform better.
• WordPress HeartBeat API. WordPress’s built-in server polling Application Programming Interface allows applications to talk to each other quickly. It allows for almost real-time updates.
• Reducing or Disabling Ajax. Ajax updates part of a web page without reloading the entire page. It can be helpful, but it also can slow down your Central Processing Unit, making it necessary to reduce or disable Ajax usage.
• Deferring Scripts. To defer scripts means you load your CSS or JavaScript files last, making your site accessible to visitors more quickly.
• CDNs. A Content Delivery Network distributes the work of delivering content to your web browser, making it more efficient by increasing the number of sources, their closeness, and caching.
• Lazy Loading. Lazy loading loads the parts of the website visitors are viewing first. Lazy loading means avoiding loading the whole page at once, which may take a long time.
• Minification. Reduces website load time by eliminating unnecessary content in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
• Concatenation. Combining files to reduce the number of requests on your site.

Remember, when installing plugins, only install what your site really needs and what you’ll update regularly. Old, inactive plugins will slow down your site, defeating the purpose.

👉 The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

9 Best WordPress Performance Plugins

Now you have a better idea about what WordPress performance plugins do. But having this information may not make choosing a plugin easier with all of the options out there. So we’re breaking it down even further for you. Here are the nine best WordPress performance plugins.

1.WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache has more than two million users, making it one of the more popular caching plugins. It is free and easy to set up. It includes settings for advanced users to allow them to get more out of the plugin. 

WP Super Cache features include:

• Support for multiple caching types.
• Serve static HTML files.
• Cache preload.
• CDN support.

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a popular speed-enhancing plugin with more than a million downloads. The free plugin supports a variety of caching methods and advanced support for some CDN services. But, because there are so many customizable options, this plugin is best for advanced users. 

W3 Total Cache features include:

• CDN support.
• Browser, database, and object caching.
• Minifying.

3. WP Super Minify

WP Super Minify is a free plugin that combines, minifies, and caches JavaScript and CSS files to speed up page loads.

WP Super Minify features include:

• Option to disable compression of CSS/JavaScript.
• Easy to use with simple, three-step installation.

4. WP Smush

WP Smush is a free app used to optimize images and remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It uses a lossless format, so viewers don’t notice any difference in image quality.

WP Smush features include:

• Strips unused color from images.
• Strips unnecessary metadata from JPEGs.
• Optimized JPEG compression.
• Ability to run existing images through the plugin.

5. LazyLoad by WP Rocket

LazyLoad by WP Rocket is a free app that loads specific page elements as the viewer needs them, instead of loading all at once and slowing down the load time. 

LazyLoad features include:

• Replaces post images, thumbnails, etc.
• Can replace YouTube iFrames with preview thumbnails.

6. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is an easy, user-friendly caching plugin. It allows users to cache their site with a single click instantly. Its crawler automatically gathers your WordPress pages to build up the cache. WP Rocket isn’t free. It ranges in price from $49 to $249 a year, depending on how many websites you want it to run on.

WP Rocket features include:

• User-friendly interface.
• Minify CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
• Cache preload, page caching, and advanced caching rules.
• Lazing loading images.
• CDN support.
• DNS prefetching.
• Google Analytics integration to load the code from your server.
• Settings import and export.
• WordPress version rollback.
• Delay Javascript execution time.

“We serve clients with varying needs, budgets and configurations. And WP Rocket is one of our go-to plugins.” — Eric Dye from WP VALET

7. Perfmatters

Perfmatters allows you to disable WordPress options that aren’t necessary for most sites and slow down performance. It also allows you to disable scripts on a per page basis, stopping plugins from loading code whether it isn’t needed. It isn’t free. It ranges from $24.95 to 54.95 a year, depending on the number of sites you want to run it on.

Perfmatters features include: 

• Works with your existing caching plugin.
• Disable WordPress options that are slowing your site down.
• Disable scripts on per page/post basis.
• Supports advanced performance-boosting functionality such as DNS prefetch and preconnect.

8. NitroPack

NitroPack is a complete speed optimization platform. It optimizes everything for you and allows you to choose how aggressive you want the optimization to be. The app automatically implements a global CDN, various caching types, minification, compression, image optimization, serving images in next-gen formats (e.g. SVG), DNS prefetch, deferring of JavaScript, etc. 

There is a free NitroPack plan, but it adds a badge to your footer and has limited resources. Otherwise, it ranges from $17.50 to $146.67 a month, depending on your site’s needs and how many sites you run.

NitroPack features include:

• Automatic website optimization.
• Supports WordPress and other content management systems.
• Global CDN included and automatically configured.
• Various caching types (page, browser, etc.).
• Automatic image optimization.
• Convert images to next gen formats.
• DNS prefetching.
• Defer JS loading.
• HTML, JS, and CSS minification.
• HTML, CSS, and JS compression.

9. WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache is a free performance plugin that focuses on caching. It’s used by more than one million people, probably because it’s easy to operate. You install it, activate it, and run through the settings.

WP Fastest Cache features include:

• Easy setup.
• One-click changes.
• Minify CSS and HTML.
• Set posts/pages to exclude.
• Set expiration times for all posts/pages or certain URL strings.
• CDN integration.
• Premium, paid version available with extra features.

Building Your WordPress Performance Plugin Strategy

Building a WordPress performance plugin strategy is necessary to keep your site operating quickly for viewers. The nine performance plugins above (or a combination of them in some cases) will help keep your site running quickly.

Still not sure about the best performance plugin strategy for your site? Hostdedi can help! Contact us to learn more.

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Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting is designed to make your ecommerce store lightning fast.

Speeding up your WooCommerce store can help prevent customer drop-offs and lost sales —‑ whether you are a store owner on Hostdedi’ managed WooCommerce hosting or a WooCommerce store owner not yet ready for a specialized product.

While you might think that improving your user experience comes with collecting more user analytics and including tools like personalization and live chat, these tools and analytics may actually slow your website.

Increasing the speed of your store can positively affect your SEO by improving user experience. In fact, a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load will be abandoned by 40% of shoppers. A 2 second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. And a delay of even 100-milliseconds impacts conversion rates by 7%. Delayed loading can lead directly to lost revenue, especially during peak times, such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

Whether you’re using a shared hosting option, or have not grown to the stage where you require a fully managed option, the 12 powerful changes that we include below can help optimize your WooCommerce site, speed up your store, and improve performance. Best of all, these changes won’t take a lot of time, effort, or cost to implement.

1. Test Your Site’s Current Speed

To speed up your WooCommerce store, you need to test your current speed — and you may need to continue to test the speed as you make changes and optimize your WooCommerce site. By testing the speed, you can be sure that your improvements are working.

If you want a simple approach to testing the speed of webpage, try WebPageTest.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights looks at the content of a page and offers suggestions to make the page faster.

Both of these sites offer more complex metrics and analytics. Google has PageSpeed Tools, which includes protocols and standards as well as performance best practices, and WebPageTest has a tool to capture your user’s visual experience.

2. Make Sure You Have a Fast Theme

Having a visually impressive WooCommerce theme with many built-in features may sound like it will improve user experience. However, these features take time to load. Choosing the fastest WooCommerce theme for your store can be relatively simple.

Before choosing a theme, consider all of the features that you’d like to include in your online store. Write these features down, and rate these features according to necessity. This task will help put you in the place of the user who will come to your store — and help you include only what is necessary for your user to succeed.

Make sure that your theme is fully compatible with WooCommerce — and that it’s a theme that is set up for ecommerce.

The fastest WooCommerce themes are often the lightweight themes, and use a page builder to help you include only the features that you need to speed up your WooCommerce store. You might even do well to start with a free theme. These top WooCommerce themes could work for you.

3. Evaluate Your Existing Plugins, Widgets, and External Resources

Do your existing plugins, widgets, and external resources optimize your site, or do they slow down your WooCommerce store without significantly increasing functionality, optimizing user experience, and ultimately, creating revenue?

To figure out how to speed up your WooCommerce site, take a look at your plugins, widgets, and external resources. Plugins can help improve performance. Widgets and sharing tools can connect your WooCommerce site to social media. External resources might make your site look great, but are they improving user experience?

External resources, such as scripts, style sheets, fonts, or even Google Analytics might seem to help organize your site, however, it’s not always possible to optimize performance for these external resources, and they may slow your site down.

To speed up your WooCommerce store, consider replacing widgets to social media with simple share buttons. These share buttons prevent adding additional HTTP requests and limit internal dependency on DNS queries.

Plugins can be helpful in some areas, but less helpful in others. Consider plugins to compress images, improve checkout and shipping options, reduce cart abandonment, and increase sales. Plugins can also clean up your WooCommerce store database — and a plugin can automate this process. Cleaning up your database may also increase the speed of your site. Check out the WP-Optimize plugin.

Plugins can also slow down your WooCommerce site. Only install the most essential plugins, and remember to check the speed of your plugins.

4. Use Snippets: a Great Way to Make your WooCommerce Store Faster

Code snippets are the foundation of easy, common sense WooCommerce modifications. With the Snippets plugin, you can easily download and install snippets created by others, or author your own. There a number of ways in which snippets can help speed up your WooCommerce store, including adding functionality to your store, or by disabling tasks, areas, or widgets that are not used. 

In the examples below, we have removed or disabled items, rather than adding elements to tweak performance. We did this because those tasks take effort, and every unnecessary action that uses backend resources may be impacting the performance of your store.

Note that each of our snippets in this example is tagged. Tagging your snippets makes it easy to stay organized around the changes you make that impact your admin area, WooCommerce, widgets, or your dashboard.

5. Check Out Little Bizzy Plugins

Plugins created by Little Bizzy exist to optimize your WooCommerce store in tiny, meaningful ways. They will disable AJAX cart fragments to help with load times and disable internal and external embeds to speed up page rendering. Again, we are looking to trim excess in order to speed up your WooCommerce store.

6. Take a Look at WP Disable

Optimization.io offers WP Disable, a plugin option that allows you a great deal of flexibility, while being easy to use. Installing the plugin adds an Optimization.iolink to your admin menu, which takes you right into the modification area.

One of the amazing components of WP Disable is the ability to focus on your WooCommerce store specifically, while making overall improvements to other areas of your site with a few clicks. Talk about an easy way to make your WooCommerce store faster!

Let’s look at some examples on the Requests tab, under the aptly titled Remove Excess Bloat section.

7. “Clean” Your Store

Revision checks can slow down your WooCommerce store if you added extensions and created a default revision check on product pages.

Extensions can help, but consider evaluating the performance of your extensions to ensure that they’re relevant and necessary. You might be able to speed up your WooCommerce site by replacing some of extensions with equivalent code. Replacing extensions with equivalent code can also increase performance.

Revision checks on WooCommerce sites are a good place to start. Revision checks allow you to go back and view changes to the product pages. While revision checks can be great, if you’re only making minor changes, such as changing a word or two, those revised copies of your original product page add up and slow down WooCommerce performance. Consider disabling or limiting the number of revisions.

8. Disable Unnecessary Elements

Emojis

Emojis can be a lot of fun, but they can slow down your WooCommerce site. Unless you specifically want emoji use to be available, they are unnecessary and can be removed as an option just by clicking the Disable Emojis slider.

Query Strings

If you have ever run a GTMetrix or Pingdom performance test on your store you may have seen a suggestion to “remove query strings from static resources.” This is because some servers and proxy servers are unable to cache query strings, and removing them can make your WooCommerce store faster.

9. Host Affiliated Ads and Products

For ads, consider using a single network — or hosting the images yourself. By hosting the images yourself, you have control over ad placement, can optimize the images, and can reduce the DNS queries.

10. Compress Your Images

Images can be a key part of an ecommerce site, but images can significantly slow your site.

Images are a place where plugins can help, however avoid image compression plugins when you can. WordPress offers a link to a plugin that will compress JPGs and PNGs, and with a single API key, you can get up to 100 free image compressions per month.

Consider compressing your images before you upload them to your site. Use JPG format for photos and high-resolution images where you need a lot of detail. Use PNGs for icons, logos, illustrations, and transparent images — basically, most images that that aren’t or don’t need to be JPGs.

GIFS work well for animations. While GIFs can be used for small images, PNGs usually work better.

11. Use DNS Prefetch

DNS Prefetch is an option that lets your site pre-resolve domains for faster load times. When enabling DNS Prefetch you’ll provide a list of domains you commonly link or redirect to. After those domains have resolved, delays in resolving them again are eliminated.

12. Choose Platform Options that Make your WooCommerce Store Faster

All of the tweaks we just discussed have the potential to make your WooCommerce Store faster, but what about WooCommerce itself?

It’s not likely that you need WooCommerce CSS or scripts to run on pages that don’t have WooCommerce elements. Once again, we can disable something unnecessary and gain a lot in performance because your backend doesn’t have to work to load things that are not needed.

The same concept applies to Reviews and Cart Fragments. For each item, all you have to do is click the slider and then save your changes.

Your store may not be hosted on a Managed WooCommerce Hosting platform, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from some of the same options that we use every day. From code snippets to plugins, we believe these tried and true methods can make your WooCommerce store faster.

We Can Take Care of This for You!

When you’re ready for us to take care of these things for you, check out Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting.

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

Related Content

Make better, data-driven decisions by adding WooCommerce analytics to your ecommerce site.

Setting up a store using WooCommerce has many advantages. Setting up a site analytics package (like Google Analytics) to collect information the day your WooCommerce site goes live will help ensure the success of your online store.

This article will walk you through the process of adding Google Analytics to a WooCommerce site.

Additionally, and more importantly, this article will tell you which metrics are important and what you can do with the data once your site has been up and running for a while.

This article will also include alternatives to Google Analytics that have similar features in case you’re interested in other options.

How to Add Google Analytics to a WooCommerce Site

Setting up Google Analytics for your WooCommerce site starts by having a Google Analytics account. If you have a Gmail address or if you’re using G-Suite for your email, you have a Google Analytics account.

While there is a free version of the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration, the free version doesn’t provide all of the information that you need, such as Checkout Behavior Analysis.

Checkout Behavior Analysis is an essential feature that helps visualize how people flow through your site so you can identify snags in the purchase process.

To get the most out your WooCommerce analytics, you’ll need to:

1. Purchase WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro
2. Create a site profile in Google Analytics
3. Upload the plugin within WordPress – to do this, go to Plugins > Add New, and then click “Activate.”
4. Connect your site to Google Analytics — To do this, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Integrations where you’ll see the Google Analytics Pro section
5. Make sure that Enable Google Analytics Tracking is checked. If this is unchecked, then you will have no tracking on your site
6. Authenticate your Google Account so that Google Analytics can start collecting site analytics. You can also add your tracking code manually by checking the box under the authentication button.
7. If you want to track site admin and store manager activity, check the Track Administrators box. (Note that most site owners opt to ignore this data)
8. If any of your customers will be from the EU, you need to check the Anonymize IP addresses box to stay compliant with the law. Even if you don’t expect clients from the EU, it’s a best practice to check this box now and avoid compliance issues later.

These are the main settings that you should be worrying about to start setting up your WooCommerce analytics. Yes, you can change the naming of the various events that the plugin will track with Google Analytics, but most sites should leave the names as they are.

What Metrics to Track on WooCommerce Analytics

While some of the metrics that you track for your WooCommerce store are specific to your industry or product types, some metrics are particularly useful for all stores.

Checkout Behavior Analysis

With Google Analytics turned on, Google will automatically start Checkout Behavior Analysis.

Checkout Behavior Analysis is essential piece of Google Analytics for WooCommerce. This feature enables you to visualize how people flow through your site so that you can identify areas for improvement in your purchase process.

Sales Conversion Rate (CVR)

Understanding how much of your efforts — your marketing, paid advertising, and site design — result in customers making a purchase is essential to your success. If you’re seeing a low conversion rate coming from email subscribers, but a high conversion rate from social media ads, you might consider putting more money into your social budget.

Google Analytics for WooCommerce can help you collect this information, and ensure that your efforts are working.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Using analytics on your WooCommerce site will help you know how much gaining a new customer costs you. This number differs from the sales conversion rate in that it’s specifically relates to new customers — not returning customers.

While returning customers still frequently have to be convinced to purchase by marketing campaigns, it often takes more effort to convince a first-time customer. It takes money to grow a customer base, and understanding how much you are spending on marketing for that first-time customer counts.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

While gaining new customers is great, lifetime customers — repeat customers — are essential to the success of your WooCommerce store. You’ll want to know how metrics like:

• Revenue per user
• Sessions per user
• Goal completions per user

LTV is an important number when looked at with CAC. It’s the CAC:LTV ratio that you’re looking for. It’s not sustainable if you’re spending more to acquire a customer than a customer is spending.

WooCommerce Analytics Plugins that Track Customer Activity

These WooCommerce analytics plugins work by telling you how your customers think.

WooCommerce Customer History

The first option we’ll look at is WooCommerce Customer History. Just like the title says, this plugin tracks your users on your site. Much like Google Analytics, this means you can see where people drop off and do not complete their purchase as well as the popular pages for your customers.

WooCommerce Customer History also helps you by looking at the purchases a user has made and then calculating their lifetime value to your business. Maximizing the lifetime value that users have is a great way to increase the profitability of your store.

It’s generally much easier to get a customer to make a repeat purchase than it is to find a new customer. Repeat customers already trust you — you don’t have to spend as much time convincing them to purchase from you.

Understanding the history of your customers — what drove them to purchase or what drove them away — can help you optimize the purchase process.

WooCommerce Cart Reports

Another plugin that goes well with WooCommerce Customer History is Cart Reports. Where WooCommerce Customer History tells you what people purchased, Cart Reports shows you what they left in their cart. Customers may leave some products behind in their carts more frequently than others.

With the WooCommerce analytics from Cart Reports, you can reach out to customers and ask them why they didn’t purchase. Maybe you didn’t have the right color or size. Maybe the price was too high.

Armed with this information, you can change your product orders to better reflect what your customers want, and make sure that you match your customer demand.

Cart Reports also allows you to email the customer in an attempt to convert their abandoned cart to a sale. If you’re able to send this kind of email, Cart Reports will identify the converted sale on its dashboard, enabling you to track the effectiveness of a cart reclamation campaign.

The biggest drawback to Cart Reports is that it doesn’t allow you to automate the process of touching base with customers who have abandoned their purchases. You have to find each abandoned cart and manually contact the customer.

For a small store or one with very high-ticket items, reaching out manually may be possible. For a large online store, or one with many lower priced items, reaching out to customers manually may be too time consuming to be valuable.

Jilt, which is included with all Managed WooCommerce Hosting plans from Hostdedi, easily recovers lost sales using cart abandonment technology.

Learn more Jilt and plugins that can help with cart abandonment here.

Recommendation Engine for WooCommerce

Recommendation Engine looks at the products that your customers purchase together and then makes recommendations for other items in your store. If many customers purchase Product A and B together, then Recommendation Engine will show Product B when it sees someone looking at Product A.

You can also configure Recommendation Engine to show customers:

• Products related to their purchase history.
• Products other customers have also viewed.
• Products that are regularly purchased together.

It also provides a few widgets so that you don’t need to dive into the code of your site or hire a developer to add product recommendations to your site.

Using WooCommerce Analytics to Optimize Your Purchase Funnel

With WooCommerce analytics set up on your site, you can dive into one of its most critical uses: watching the funnel of customer purchases.

Generally, the funnel is made up of a user:

1. Adding a product to the cart.
2. Providing a billing email.
3. Selecting a payment method.
4. Placing the order (finishing the funnel).

A rule of thumb for ecommerce sites is that you want to remove every possible barrier to making a purchase. That may mean instead of offering a related product on your checkout page, you leverage Smart Offers to allow a one-click additional purchase after the user has completed their main product purchase.

Use data to analyze your customers’ journey in the purchase funnel. Where do you notice a lot of drop-off in conversion rate? Which new users have the lowest CAC and how did they discover your site?

Increasing conversions can be as straightforward as fixing pages that stop users from purchasing, updating the language on a button, or fixing a broken link.

By looking at the funnel of purchases for your site you can identify where and how you can make it easier for users to purchase.

You can also increase conversions on your site by removing unnecessary checkout fields.

Removing extra fields on the checkout page helps people complete their purchase instead of feeling overwhelmed by the information they need to enter.

For example, if you’re selling a digital-only product, you don’t need a physical address. While you may need the purchaser’s country and zip code/postal code to calculate tax, the specific street this person lives on doesn’t matter.

WooCommerce analytics can also tell you if you have an effective, fast theme. Your theme should be helping you make conversions. It should create a seamless and enjoyable experience for the customer.

If you notice one page has an especially high bounce rate, perhaps it’s because it’s taking too long for the theme to load. Or maybe, the theme is loading incorrectly, so users navigate away.

By having a funnel in Google Analytics, you can view your data periodically and make sure that you don’t have obvious problems with your site conversion process.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

While Google Analytics has considerable power, the data can also get confusing if you’re not a seasoned pro. Not every store needs all the information that Google Analytics can provide.

Luckily there are a few other options to enhance your site sales including:

Each of these options has their benefits and their drawbacks. No single WooCommerce analytics package meets the needs of every site. While Google Analytics is frequently the default program to collect site analytics, make sure you explore your options to pick the one that best matches your needs.

Online stores need an analytics package to be successful. However, setting up the analytics, collecting the data, and understanding and interpreting that data can seem overwhelming. Having Google Analytics installed before an online store goes live makes it possible to dig deeper into the information later.

By combining just WooCommerce Customer History and Recommendation Engine, you can get insight into how your customers are purchasing and increase that value. These two plugins alone quickly pay for themselves as you improve your store profitability.

Need a WooCommerce Host?

Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting solution has plans for every kind of business.

Specially designed to convert more sales, it’s packed with cutting-edge technologies to reduce query load times and cart abandonment rates.

Best of all, these plans arm you with more than 20 different performance tests so you’ll know that you can accommodate tons of web traffic.

Give it a try. Start your free two-week trial of fully managed WooCommerce today.

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

The majority of marketers will agree that ecommerce content marketing is one of the best investments you can make for your online store. 

Ecommerce content marketing increases traffic and conversions, lowers acquisition costs, promotes thought leadership, boosts search engine results, and improves your marketing efforts.

But effective content creation is not as easy as it seems. Content for ecommerce websites requires a carefully considered ecommerce content strategy that maps out your business’s goals, metrics, and action items.

Ecommerce Content Marketing

Ecommerce content marketing is a type of inbound digital marketing that connects ecommerce businesses to customers depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Specifically, ecommerce content marketing is the process of creating content for ecommerce websites. Marketers create content in various formats for different channels to achieve an ecommerce site’s goals. 

The ultimate end goal is to get the potential customers to buy from the ecommerce store, while the short-term goal is to move customers along the sales funnel.

We’ll show you a step-by-step guide for creating an ecommerce content strategy below.

Ecommerce Content Strategy

1. Determine the buyer’s persona.
2. Perform keyword research.
3. Choose a content channel.
4. Create content.

1. Determine the Buyer’s Persona

The first and most crucial step to achieve your ecommerce content marketing goals is to identify your target customer’s qualities. 

When you create a representation of your ideal customer, you can plan what pieces of content to create, map out which part of the sales funnel to place the content, and develop a brand voice.

To craft your ideal customer, consider their:

• Demographics. This includes basic information such as age, gender, education, and income bracket.
• Pain points. Identify the problems your customers have and how you can help solve them.
• Usual channels. Which content channels do they frequent? Social media, email, or blogs? Knowing their preferred content channels shows you the best way to reach them.
• Personality. What are your customers like? Are they fun, serious, or impulsive? This information helps determine their shopping behavior.

You can gather data from your existing customer base or capture new information using methods such as interviews and questionnaires through email lists and landing pages.

2. Perform Keyword Research

Once you’ve created your ideal customer’s profile and determined the types of content to publish at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can now perform keyword research.

Keyword research is essential when planning content for ecommerce websites because it shows you the search terms that your target audience uses when they look for information, solutions, or products. It also gives you an idea of the keywords you can use to rise through the search engine optimization (SEO) ranks.

Some of the ways to succeed at keyword research are to:

• Look at competitor analysis to see how competitors’ domain names and backlinks rank compared to yours. 
• Check out competitors’ top posts to identify keyword gaps. This empowers you to find opportunities to create new content.
• Use long-tailed keywords that convey search intent.

3. Choose a Content Channel

After you create your buyer’s persona and do keyword research, the next step in your ecommerce content strategy is to choose your content channels.

After the buyer’s persona exercise, you’ll likely be familiar with the platforms your ideal customer uses. Create content for the channels where you’re most likely to see results.

Since there are several different content marketing channels, business owners and marketers have to agree on the goals for each and the metrics to measure.

An excellent place to start is email marketing because most people use this channel. Studies have found that email marketing provides one of the highest returns on investment (ROI).  As an ecommerce brand, email marketing is also helpful to reduce abandoned carts.

4. Create Content

After everything else is settled, you can start creating good content for ecommerce websites.

A simple principle to guide you when you brainstorm content ideas is to think about what the customer might need or what they need to know.

Don’t limit yourself to blogging — you can explore other content types, such as:

• White papers.
• Checklists.
• Webinars.
• Videos.
• Infographics.
• Podcasts.
• Tutorials.

Different content types can be mixed to achieve goals such as creating brand awareness or increasing subscriber count.

Tips for Creating Content for Ecommerce Websites

It can be daunting to come up with content ideas, especially when you want to create valuable content. Here are some content creation tips to look into:

• Create evergreen content. Evergreen content is timeless content that people are always interested in. It brings in steady traffic and establishes you as a thought leader in your niche when done correctly.

• Make content appropriate for the channels you’ve chosen. For example, if you’re on LinkedIn, you should appear professional, while if you’re on TikTok, you have more license to be casual.

• Consider user-generated content (UGC). User-generated content is any form of content created and posted by users, such as product reviews and social media posts. If you have a marketing budget, you can even hire influencers to post content about your brand.

UGC creates trust, promotes your ecommerce brand, and is a quick fix when marketers fall into a creative slump.

• Repurpose content. Use information from existing content and change the medium. You can make high-quality content such as videos, infographics, or e-books from existing blog posts, which you can use as lead magnets.

There are many ways to generate content. You can use in-house content creators, hire freelance writers, or ask for guest posts.

Final Thoughts: How To Create an Effective Ecommerce Content Strategy

One cannot understate the importance of content for ecommerce websites. 

An ecommerce content marketing strategy provides direction to ensure you meet your content marketing goals, be they increased visibility, brand awareness, engagement, or conversions.

Complement your content strategy with a powerful ecommerce platform. Sign up for a Hostdedi fully hosted WooCommerce plan today.

Try it out for yourself with a two-week free trial.

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A website can be a costly endeavor. It takes time to:

• Plan and set up your environment.
• Find the right plugins or extensions.
• Build out the right functionality.
• Secure and update as needed.
• And constantly monitor it for vulnerabilities.

That is why managed hosting is so important. 

But first, what is managed hosting? There are two types of managed hosting. There is server-side hosting, which covers only the server, and application management — this is what Hostdedi does.

Managed application hosting goes beyond the server to cover items like malware scanning, plugin updates, and migrations. Like Hostdedi, they’ll also likely have application-specific knowledge and expertise.

When looking for a managed application hosting provider, you need to consider these five factors.

What to Look for in a Managed Hosting Provider

1. Reliability

You can’t just go with any managed application platform. Some managed application companies leave most of the heavy lifting to you. They notify you if they find an issue, or write up a doc on how to secure your platform, but they won’t always be there to help in a real emergency. Their systems are set up more for awareness and management of notification rather than to mitigate issues.

👉 Top 10 Questions to Ask a Cloud Hosting Provider >>

Hostdedi has many tools in place to make sure your site doesn’t hit a failure point due to a vulnerability, or a bad actor destroying your systems. Our team has built two-factor authentication encrypted access points that sit behind a web application firewall to keep unwanted traffic (like bots) away from your backend.

With Hostdedi Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce, you can take advantage of the Visual Compare function. It makes sure all updates are completed and do not present any issues to your front end as well. If something does go wrong, our support team is constantly working to stay up to date with the latest exploit solutions. 

2. Performance

One of the most important factors to the success of your site is speed and website performance. Unfortunately, some major brand name hosting companies don’t actually own the server structure they sell. 

As “resellers” of major clouds like Google or AWS, they don’t get to optimize and completely configure the server structure to be as fast as it can be. They need to work within the confines of a third party that ultimately controls everything. 

Hostdedi owns and operates its own data centers. Having this ability allows us to structure our managed hosting cloud service specifically to your application. This allows us to modify your server backend for your site structure so you can deliver near-instant assets to your users easily.

Along with server structure, we built out specialized containers that let you add services, like ElasticSearch, to your accounts adjacent to your existing services without slowing down your front end. They can be deployed in seconds, are fully managed by our beyond management team, and are accessible over a secure cloud-only container network.

3. Support

You know your business better than anyone else. We make it our mission to know your site the same way. We call ourselves “The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting” for a reason. Problems will arise and when they do we have a team waiting around the clock for your call, text, chat, ticket, or email and we won’t rest until the problem is solved. 

Why Hosting Support Is Important >>

Support is about fixing problems, not just replying to them and that is why you should never have to worry about an issue. We’ve built an experienced team of experts to manage your site for you, provide you with a stable platform, keep watch on site security, and help make sure your site is performing beyond your expectations.

4. Expandability

The reason you set up a site is to grow your brand. With brand growth comes increased traffic. Unfortunately, one of the major failure points for most sites is an influx of traffic their host can’t handle. 

At Hostdedi, we have built our Managed Application Plan to scale as needed up and down. Easily move up in plans without needing to deal with downtime just to migrate. Our container systems allow for additional software that can be added to your cloud solution to expand performance, functionality, and management.

What is Scalable WordPress Hosting? >>

Don’t need to move up for long? That is what Hostdedi Auto Scale is for. Auto-scaling monitors your website and triggers a scaling event whenever traffic begins to exceed capacity of concurrent users (users who are doing the same action at the same time).

A scaling event adjusts the PHP process limit (also known as PHP workers) to accommodate bursts in user concurrency on your site. So when you promote flash sales, see activity from a post that goes viral, or prepare for seasonal spikes like holiday shopping, you can rest assured that your site can handle anything that comes its way.

The most important thing about any managed application hosting company is how they give back to the community. Many of the applications hosted are open source and kept up to date by the many volunteers who live and breathe the app. 

Your host should be no different. The Hostdedi staff is full of contributors to application communities. From plugin authors to core contributors to top developers listed in Stack Overflow or Git, our staff lives to make these applications better for everyone. 

Bottom Line

There are many reasons to start or move to Hostdedi — these are just a few. We have many more features, add-ons, plugin bundles, and security tools to explore.

And if you’re currently locked in a contract with another host, we’ll cover your costs and buy you out of your plan. Switching to Hostdedi is easy with our free white glove migrations.

Your success is the most important thing to us and we look forward to helping you get there. 

The best way to see how Hostdedi can improve your site is to talk to our experts and share the details of what you are trying to accomplish. Contact us today.

WordPress is the most popular tool for website creation in the world. Over 40% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. Over 100 WordPress versions have been released in the last 18 years since it’s been on the market.

If you want to know more about them, just keep reading.

In this blog, we will cover:

• The latest WordPress version and what’s new in it.
• Why is it important to use the latest version of WordPress.
• Why new WordPress releases are pushed out regularly.
• Details about WordPress versions over time.

So let’s begin! 

What is the WordPress Current Version?

The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

What’s New in WordPress’ Current Version?

FUN FACT: Core WordPress developers are big fans of jazz music. All major releases since version point 1.0 are named after musicians that developers admire! This one was named after Esperanza Spalding.

A Closer Look at WordPress’ Current Version

Let’s do a short breakdown of Esperanza, the current WordPress version, below.

• Adjustment of font sizes in list and code blocks in detail.
• Drag-and-drop blocks from the inserter directly into the post.
• Alignment of blocks, you can adjust block size in any way you want now.
• Ability to change the size of social icons block in detail.
• Simplified default palette of colors.
• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS in one click, thus reducing the usage of search and replace.
• Default lazy-load of iFrames.

To summarize, WordPress version 5.7 made website creation significantly easier. 

Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization >>

Importance of Using the Latest WordPress Version

Once you get started with site creation, you will notice that you can create countless types of WordPress websites. No matter what type of site you are running, it’s of huge importance that you always use the latest version.

Why?

The answer is pretty simple. WordPress is free to use and the fact that it’s so popular makes it a target for hackers. They can study the source code and find exploits in it which will let them proceed with their malicious intent. 

How to Improve Website Performance in WordPress >>

Updating your installation constantly to the latest WordPress version will make sure that overall security of your site is up to date, that all bugs are patched, and that you are not missing out on any new features that developers push out. 

Why WordPress Releases Regularly

Just like we mentioned above, hackers look for holes in WordPress code. That is why developers have to stay on top of things all the time. In summary, a release of a minor WordPress version means that a bug or a glitch that could be exploited was patched.

Additionally, WordPress has a strong community and developers are listening to it. Releases of new versions often contain a feature that was requested by the WordPress users.

What Version of WordPress Do I Have? How to Check Your WordPress Version

You may be wondering, What version of WordPress do I have? It’s simple and there are a few different ways to go about it, which we outline below. Keep reading to learn how to check your WordPress version.

How to Check Your WordPress Version Through WordPress Dashboard

By far, the easiest and most commonly used method to check your WordPress version is through the WordPress dashboard. All in all, you just need a few clicks for this method.

Simply login to your dashboard with WordPress admin credentials and navigate to your main dashboard and click on updates.

Once you are there, you will see a screen that will look just like the one below.

As you can see, the WordPress version will be written in bold letters accordingly. If your installation is not up to date, you will have an option to update it.

How To Check Your WordPress Version Through Your Website Frontend

The second way to find out which version you are using is to open your site in the browser and then right click and select View page source. After you do that, another tab will appear and you will see the code of your site, similar to the image below.

While you are on that screen, press Ctrl+f on your keyboard to open a search bar. Type the word “generator” in the search bar and you will see this.

Your WordPress version will be highlighted and you will be able to easily spot it. 

How To Check Your WordPress Version Through Your Terminal

This is a bit advanced, but if your site is running on Managed WordPress, Managed WooCommerce, cloud or a dedicated server, you will have access to your terminal. You will need to use the SSH creds to access your server. If this is the environment that you are using and you are able to login to your server use this command. It will show you which WordPress core version is being used on the site.

You will need to be in the WordPress install directory in order to use WP-CLI;

cd public_html

Once you are logged in, run the following WP-CLI command:

wp core version

As a result, output will look like this:

5.7.2

In the hope that you’ll be able to find out your WordPress version more easily now, let’s check the version history of the latest releases.

Looking Back on WordPress Version History

WordPress is popular because its core is quite easy to work with. Additionally, it offers a huge variety of themes and plugins to extend the capability of your site. 

The 15 Most Popular WordPress Plugins in 2021 >>

Below you can find a short breakdown of WordPress version history and the key features in these WordPress versions.

WordPress Versions

WordPress Version	Release Date	Key Features
WordPress 5.7.2 (WordPress latest version)	May 12, 2021	Security update which patched vulnerability in PHP mailer
WordPress 5.7.1	April 14, 2021	Security update which fixed 26 bugs in total Data exposure vulnerability within REST API patched PHP 8 vulnerability within media library patched
WordPress 5.7 (major WordPress release)	March 9, 2021	Font size adjustment Reusable blocks Buttons block Drag-and-drop inserter One click switch between HTTP and HTTPS Lazy loading for iFrames Simpler color palette Social icons block New Robots API
WordPress 5.6.4	May 12, 2021	Same date and same features as release 5.7.2
WordPress 5.6.3	April 14, 2021	Same date and same features as release 5.7.1
WordPress 5.6.2	February 22, 2021	Small maintenance update which fixed user reported issues discovered in version 5.6.1
WordPress 5.6.1	February 3, 2021	Maintenance release
WordPress 5.6 (major WordPress Release)	December 8, 2020	Improved video captioning Improved layout flexibility Better control over auto updates Built in patterns for block creation Additional support for PHP 8 Updates for jQuery which affected 5.5 installations as well

WordPress Version FAQs

What is the Current Version of WordPress?

WordPress latest version stands at 5.7.2. The latest major WordPress release is 5.7.

How Do I Know My WordPress Version?

You can check it in your WordPress dashboard to find your WordPress version. You can also find it in the front end of your WordPress website.

What is the Latest WordPress Version 2021?

Version 5.7.2 is the latest WordPress release. It was released in May 2021. This security update patched a vulnerability in the PHP mailer.

What Versions of WordPress are There?

There are hundreds of versions of WordPress if you count every maintenance or security version. But major releases go from 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and all the way to the latest major WordPress version, 5.7.

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