CAll Us: +1 888-999-8231 Submit Ticket

Hostdedi Introduces Plugin Performance Monitor

Hostdedi is the First Managed WooCommerce and Managed WordPress Host to Deliver Plugin Performance Monitor with Hosting Plans

LANSING, Mich. August 31, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Hostdedi, the fully managed, high-performance digital commerce cloud platform built to optimize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento sites and stores, today announced the release of its Plugin Performance Monitor as a feature on all Managed WooCommerce and Managed WordPress plans

A Hostdedi exclusive, Plugin Performance Monitor will capture and compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after plugin or theme changes have been made. The monitor runs nightly performance tests on websites and then reports those results to the admins of the website with insights on what changed and the impacts to performance. It will show users which files are contributing to the load (request volume) and performance (speed/delay). Lastly, for ecommerce stores, it connects performance with revenue growth (or loss).

“Change is where bad things happen,” said Chris Lema, VP of Products and Innovation. “Website owners will often add a plugin to their site because they believe it will help in some way. But there’s never been an easy way to understand cause and effect. Which plugins slow a site down? By how much? If you’re a site owner without deep technology experience, you may never know if a plugin is making things better or worse, whether or not it has created conflicts or broken something on the site. At Hostdedi, we watch performance daily. We’re not just telling admins that your site is slow, we’re telling them where to look. It’s a constant feedback loop of the changes they are making. No one else is doing this.”

Included in the cost of the Managed WooCommerce and Managed WordPress Hosting plans, the added feature means that site and store owners can take immediate action to understand performance when shifts occur. The Hostdedi Plugin Performance Monitor runs daily and keeps the performance changes over time, so that customers can see how the changes they’ve made have impacted performance. Customers will be able to open the Hostdedi Performance panel in their WordPress dashboard and see performance score changes, and the drivers of those changes.

“At Hostdedi, we’re passionate about powering the online potential of our SMBs and serving the communities of designers, developers, and agencies who create for businesses around the world. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the managed WordPress and WooCommerce space — so we keep pushing forward. Now with our Plugin Performance Monitor, we want to make sure that fast sites stay fast as our customers add plugins,” said Lema.

Hostdedi is at the forefront of continuous innovation for WordPress and WooCommerce and for the store owners and agencies who use the platforms. For more information about Hostdedi Managed products, visit Hostdedi Managed WordPress and Hostdedi Managed WooCommerce.

About Hostdedi

Hostdedi has been serving SMBs and the designers, developers, and agencies who create for them for more than 20 years by providing a fully managed, high-performance cloud solution built to optimize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento sites and stores. As a company within The Liquid Web Family of Brands, we own and manage 10 global data centers, and collectively serve over 45,000 customers spanning 150 countries and provide unparalleled service from a dedicated group of experts 24/7/365. As an industry leader in customer service, the rapidly expanding brand family has been recognized among INC. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies for twelve years.

Learn more about the Liquid Web Family of Brands and StellarWP.

Media Contact

Rachel Martin
Hostdedi VP of Global Marketing
[email protected]

Source link

How To Start a Subscription Box in 7 Actionable Steps

Learning how to start a subscription box business is a way to regularly acquire new customers and cash flow while selling quality products.

A Statista survey found that consumers spent over $289 monthly on subscription boxes.

What is a subscription box anyway?

A subscription box is a boxed collection of different types of products — such as books, clothes, food, and beauty products — which customers receive on a regular basis.

Several ecommerce brands as well as beauty bloggers have successful subscription box businesses.

Once potential customers sign up or renew their monthly subscriptions, they can enjoy the thrilling unboxing experience that comes with this business model.

If you want to take part in this business model, keep reading to learn how to get started.

How To Get Your Product in a Subscription Box

  • Do product research.

  • Find a subscription box supplier.

  • Price your subscription box products.

  • Build a website.

  • Implement a marketing strategy.

  • Streamline customer orders and get feedback.

  • Expand your customer base.

As a small business owner looking to start a subscription box, there are specific steps you must take to increase your customer lifetime value, expand your profit margin, and grow your business.

Here are the top seven actions to take to start your own subscription box company:

1. Do Product Research

Learning how to start a subscription box business requires that you first conduct product research.

You should ensure that your product research is in-depth and involves the necessary procedures to develop a great subscription box idea.

Product research to start a subscription box.

Your research should include:

  • Niche finding: For a result-driven subscription model, don’t just promote anything. Be specific with your business idea. Figure out what niche is profitable and aligns with your goals.

  • Product research: After choosing a niche, research the niche-specific product you want to promote. Find out its in-demand ratio, keyword factors, and where to buy it.

  • Competitive analysis: Research your competitors — their numbers, strengths, weaknesses, and content marketing strategy — to gain insight into your industry and stand out.
  • Customer research: Perform market research to find out who your target customers are. Research details such as their age range, income level, and favorite social media platforms.

2. Find a Reliable Supplier

Finding a supplier, which refers to product sourcing, is crucial to start a subscription box business model.

There are various supplier categories like:

  • Makers: This is a great box idea you can use to deliver one-of-a-kind surprises to your subscribers. For example, you could request unique hand-made or painted items for the curation and promotion of art.

  • Wholesalers: If you sell major brand products repetitively, this is a good choice. Wholesalers sell products in bulk at reasonably discounted rates.

  • Retailers: They are the commonest suppliers for subscription box products. They deliver products to physical and ecommerce platforms at discounted prices.

Having a supplier is essential for customer acquisition and sustained subscription. However, we suggest choosing many reliable suppliers so nothing disrupts your supply chain.

3. Price Your Subscription Box Products

Avoid mispricing your products. To start a subscription box business, you must do product research to price your subscription box products correctly — not too low or too high.

Consider these upfront costs and factors when pricing your subscription box:

  • The cost of your subscription box products

  • Shipping costs

  • Fulfillment costs

  • Cost of packaging materials

  • Advertisement costs

  • Platform’s transaction fees

Setting price to start a subscription box.

You can also send out questionnaires to your target audience to get their opinions about pricing, then select the one that works best for your business.

4. Build a Website

You need a well-designed website to start a subscription box. It is where you direct potential customers to, from your social media pages and ads.

While hiring a web design professional can take time, it is now easy to build a custom website in no time.

WPQuickStart Membership Sites by Hostdedi empowers you with various design templates, plugins, and integrations to set up an intuitive subscription box website in minutes.

5. Implement a Marketing Strategy

Building a marketing strategy is essential when you choose to start a subscription box. You don’t want to set up everything a customer needs only to worry about getting clients in the first place.

Set up different promotion tactics while learning how to start a subscription box. These may include:

Market your prototype box even before you start a subscription box. That way, you’ll keep prospective subscribers informed about the kind of products they will receive.

Ensure you plan your pre-launch — creating awareness for your subscription box — effectively to help you collect subscribers and generate buzz for your upcoming launch.

Use your product research and marketing strategy ideas to build a solid business plan.

6. Streamline Customer Orders and Feedback

When your online store has a subscription box model, you have to deliver items to your customers on the set schedule.

Ensure that you do the following to impress and retain your subscribers:

That will not only reduce the churn rate of your subscription box business but will increase the retention rate and help you build a loyal customer base.

7. Expand Your Subscriber Base

Customer acquisition is another important factor when learning how to start a subscription box.

To acquire new subscribers, use tactics like:

Final Thoughts: How to Start a Subscription Box In 7 Actionable Steps

There are loads of opportunities — like recurring revenue and a loyal customer base — when you decide to start a subscription box business.

To effectively launch your subscription box, follow our seven-step guide above to start a subscription box business model.

Once you do, check out WPQuickStart Membership Sites by Hostdedi to build a functional subscription box website in only minutes.

Related Content

Source link

Hostdedi and Fast Partner to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment for WooCommerce Sellers

At Hostdedi, we help optimize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento sites and stores. We’re thrilled to take that one step further today by partnering with Fast to bring their one-click checkout to thousands of onlines stores hosted on our WordPress and WooCommerce plans.

As the leading high-performance cloud solution built to optimize stores, Hostdedi fully managed WooCommerce hosting is an ideal pairing for Fast’s one-click checkout technology, which is helping today’s online merchants solve the number one problem in ecommerce: shopping cart abandonment.

Fast was created to solve the broken ecommerce checkout process that wastes untold time for consumers and costs merchants billions of dollars in lost sales. It’s the easiest way to buy online and the fastest way for online merchants to increase sales by getting customers through checkout in seconds.

Fast eliminates redundant and time-consuming forms, such as:

  • Usernames

  • Passwords

  • CAPTCHAS

  • Address

  • Payment information

  • And more.

Fewer forms to fill out provides online shoppers with a better user experience — and that seamless one-click transaction results in reduced cart abandonment and improved sales and conversions.

“Cart abandonment is the leading problem in the ecommerce industry — even more so than site speed. Online shoppers get distracted or frustrated with long forms, and they abandon their carts. Fast solves the problem that leads to cart abandonment,” says Chris Lema, Vice President of Product at LiquidWeb, the parent company of Hostdedi.

“Unlike Amazon, which pioneered the one-click checkout, Fast is solving cart abandonment on a larger scale. It can be implemented on any site and platform an online store uses.”

Learn more about how Fast.co and Hostdedi work together

Source link

Ecommerce Metrics: The Top 13 KPIs To Track

Tracking important ecommerce metrics is necessary to evaluate how effective your marketing strategies are and whether your business is growing.

These top ecommerce metrics can help make the difference in total sales, repeat purchases, and customer experience.

There are several ecommerce metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that marketers can analyze.

To help you achieve results faster, we’ve highlighted the top ecommerce metrics and KPIs you should measure and how they benefit your online store.

Top 13 Ecommerce Metrics and KPIs To Track

  1. 1. Average order value (AOV)
  2. 2. Shopping cart abandonment rate (CAR)
  3. 3. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  4. 4. Return on investment (ROI)
  5. 5. Add-to-cart rate
  6. 6. Website traffic
  7. 7. Average session on website
  8. 8. Bounce rate
  9. 9. Pay-per-click (PPC)
  10. 10. Email conversion rate
  11. 11. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
  12. 12. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  13. 13. Customer retention rate

These 13 important metrics fall under three major categories: sales, marketing, and customer service.

Let’s go over each category to see what these metrics are and how they help your ecommerce store.

Category #1: Sales

Keeping an eye on the top ecommerce metrics and KPIs for measuring sales is paramount. After all, they help you decide many aspects surrounding your business.

What Are the KPIs of Ecommerce Sales?

  • Average Order Value (AOV)

  • Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR)

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

  • Return on Investment (ROI)

  • Add-to-cart rate

Average Order Value (AOV)

AOV is the average dollar amount a customer spends when they place an order on your website.

Tracking your AOV gives you an insight into shoppers’ behavior and helps you create better pricing and content marketing strategies.

Here’s a simple formula to calculate your AOV:

AOV = Total revenue / Number of orders

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR)

This ecommerce metric shows you the percentage number of visitors that added products to carts but didn’t complete their purchase.

The KPI is vital since a high shopping cart abandonment rate could mean your ecommerce site has a complex checkout process or poor user experience.

Ensure that you keep the shopping cart abandonment rate low to increase the sales conversion rate.

Here’s how you calculate it:

CAR = (Total number of completed transactions / Total number of existing shopping carts) x (100 / 1)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost is a top ecommerce metric.

This top ecommerce metric tells you the total amount of money you spent in getting one customer to purchase your products or services.

You can determine the customer acquisition cost with the following formula:

CAC = Marketing costs spent to acquire customers / Number of customers acquired at this time

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is another top ecommerce metric that will show you how well your investment — ad budget, online store tool, or subscription — performs.

This KPI shows you whether you’re making profits or not. Here’s how you calculate it:

ROI = Net Income / Investment Cost

Add-to-Cart Rate

The add-to-cart rate is the percentage that reflects the number of visitors who add at least a single item to their cart during a session.

It’s essential to measure this top ecommerce metric to know how effective your product description, website usage, and advertising efforts are.

Here’s how you determine your add-to-cart rate.

Add-to-cart rate = Total number of sessions where web visitors add an item to their cart / Total number of sessions

Category #2: Marketing

Here are the top ecommerce metrics for analyzing your marketing performance:

Website Traffic

This ecommerce performance metric refers to the volume of web users who visit your online store.

You can use Google Analytics, Website Checker Tool, and Similar Web to measure your website traffic.

Average Session on Website

Average session on website is another vital ecommerce metric to watch out for. It is the average time a visitor spends on your online store in a single visit.

A high average web session could mean you have great content or that your website usability is excellent.

Here’s how you calculate it:

Av. web session = Total session duration / Total number of the sessions

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an ecommerce metric closely related to the average time people spend on your website. After all, the more time people spend on your website, the lower the bounce rate.

Knowing your bounce rate helps you determine the number of visitors that leave your ecommerce website after looking at specific pages.

Here’s how you calculate it:

Bounce Rate = Total number of one-page visits / Total number of entries to a website

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Retailer measuring PPC, a top ecommerce metric.

PPC lets you see the amount of money you spend every time someone clicks your ads. You can use it for your social media campaigns and search engine marketing (SEM).

Here’s how you can determine if your PPC campaign is working:

PPC = Total advertising cost / Total number of ads clicked

Email List Conversion Rate

Email marketing is an effective way to improve your brand growth.

Ensure that you provide email opt-in to convert first-time website guests into subscribers. Then, send valuable and personalized email campaigns to build trust.

Here’s how to determine it:

Email List Conversion Rate = (Total number of new subscribers - number of unsubscribes) / (Total number of subscribers x 100)

Category #3: Customer Service

Here are the top ecommerce metrics and KPIs to track the quality of your customer service.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

This ecommerce metric tells you the number of customers who were satisfied with your products or services — according to their responses in your surveys.

Here’s how to calculate your total score:

CSAT = The addition of all the scores / Total number of respondents

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV represents the total sum of money a customer spends as an existing customer of your business. Here’s how you calculate it:

CLV = Total average order x Average number of purchases per year x Average retention time in years

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers your business retains over a specific period.

It gives insights into ways to improve your customer service. Here’s how you calculate it:

Customer Retention Rate = (Total number of customers - Number of new customers) / Number of customers before acquisition

Final Thoughts: Ecommerce Metrics: The Top 13 KPIs To Track

Knowing the top ecommerce metrics and KPIs empowers you to perform effective conversion rate optimization and create a better user experience for existing and potential customers.

The bottom line is to start tracking your ecommerce metrics to know what areas to improve on.

Whether it’s the marketing channels to focus on or the product pages to simplify, follow our guide to find out the top ecommerce metrics to track for maximum success.

Create an intuitive website that supports analysis of the top ecommerce metrics and KPIs with Hostdedi StoreBuilder.

Don’t forget you can also avail of our WooCommerce hosting solutions to ensure your online store offers a top-notch customer experience and enhances customer loyalty.

Get started today with a free two-week trial of fully managed WooCommerce hosting.

Related Ecommerce Resources

Source link

How To Start a Subscription Business in 6 Simple Steps

Should I buy the shoes I have always bought, or should I check out those new shoes?

Will it be worth it?

Shall I buy that top-reviewed software? Will it pay off?

There are tons of similar questions that customers ask themselves on a daily basis. In the end, most of them end up purchasing nothing.

You can bypass that by providing a stress-free and personalized customer experience.

How?

By starting a subscription business.

You can learn how to start a subscription-based business model and access a larger customer base.

You get your customers as subscribers, which lessens customer acquisition costs, increases customer lifetime value, and provides predictable revenue on a regular basis.

UnivDatos Market Insights forecasts that the global subscription ecommerce market will reach $478.2 billion by 2025. Starting from mere magazines and newspapers, it has expanded to bloggers, entertainment platforms, startups, and websites like Netflix and Amazon.

Read on to learn how to start a subscription-based business.

Subscription Business 101

In a subscription business model, customers receive a product on a regular basis through subscriptions, which get renewed — manually or automatically — at the start of every billing cycle.

Customers looking to cancel their subscription can do so after an agreed period with or without cancellation fees.

By learning how to start a subscription business, you can satisfy the varying and specific needs of a wide range of customers.

Benefits of Subscription Businesses

Starting a subscription business provides several benefits to small business owners.

Three major benefits that should get you to start a subscription business are:

Predictable Revenue

Small and new business owners have a hard time managing their expenses. They never know what they will make in the current month before its end, let alone the revenue for the next month.

Subscription-based business models change that and help in predicting cash flow. Knowing the subscribers you have, you can quickly estimate your revenue.

Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of getting a new customer to buy your product or service. If you spend $300 on ads and win 10 buyers, your CAC will be $30.

Starting a subscription business to reduce CAC.

Starting a subscription business will lower your CAC by getting you a higher profit from a single acquisition, as retaining an existing customer generates recurring profits.

Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

By nature, a subscription-based business sells products to its customers for a long time due to convenience and seemingly low costs.

As a result, starting a subscription business not only lowers your CAC but also increases your CLV.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total amount of money a buyer spends on your products or services throughout their time as your customer.

Types of Subscription-Based Businesses

There are four common types of subscription-based businesses.

If you’re looking to start a subscription business, you can choose one depending on your industry and your business goals:

Boxes

Many ecommerce businesses have opted for the subscription box business model, in which they deliver a monthly subscription box containing their products to their subscribers.

It is a popular business model among companies selling makeup, food, pet care, and clothing.

Ecommerce

In addition to subscription boxes, some ecommerce businesses offer an open subscription. Customers can specify the products they want and the frequency with which they require it.

Software

Software-as-a-subscription (SaaS) is a popular business model for software companies.

Starting a subscription business as a SaaS involves:

Accessibility

Accessibility is a subscription model that is a blend of software and ecommerce subscriptions.

Entertainment services like Netflix and Amazon Prime use this subscription model to provide access to movies and TV shows and extra shipping benefits, respectively.

Steps in Starting a Subscription Business

Here are the major steps to start a subscription-based business.

1. Develop Your Business Idea

Every great business starts off as an idea.

Person thinking about how to start a subscription business.

For subscription-style businesses, start by:

  • Selecting a niche — Choose a target audience and the product you want to sell to that audience.

  • Market research — Research your customers and competitors.

  • Product sourcing — Decide how you will get the product.

  • Subscription type — Select the type of subscription.

  • Marketing strategy — Develop a marketing strategy that fits your needs.

2. Adopt a Pricing Strategy

Based on your market research, check out the pricing strategy that fits your business.

If you are selling a one-of-a-kind product, opt for a price skimming pricing strategy. In contrast, a freemium model suits you if you are a SaaS company.

3. Build a Website

When your marketing strategies succeed and attract several potential customers, you want your website to be ready to showcase your offers. It will help you to start a subscription business effectively.

While building a functional website generally takes a while, Hostdedi’s WP QuickStart for membership sites is an efficient solution to help you create a custom subscription business website in minutes.

4. Plan Out Inventory and Logistics

If you are sending physical products or subscription boxes, you should ensure that you:

  • Source high-quality products from trusted suppliers.

  • Get branded labels to customize your boxes.

  • Streamline and track customer requests from order to fulfillment.

  • Add shipping costs that customers are willing to pay.

  • Deliver products on time and without damage.

5. Market Your Subscription

A major part of starting a subscription-based business is persistent marketing.

To get new customers for your own subscription box business, you need an effective marketing strategy to promote your offers from pre-launch to post-launch.

You can use marketing tactics like influencer marketing, social media, and content marketing to get a successful subscription box business.

6. Keep an Eye on Churn

Customer churn accounts for the customers who stop using your product or service in a specific time period.

Retaining your customers after starting a subscription business is crucial for your business growth.

Monitor subscription cancellations and unravel why customers are opting out. A high churn rate may be a result of credit card issues or economic changes.

Take steps to improve your subscription service and reduce churn.

Final Thoughts: 6 Steps to Starting a Subscription Business

With the ever-changing business landscape, starting a subscription business offers a relatively stable and predictable source of income.

Follow our six simple steps on how to start a subscription-based business and have a bite of the growing subscription-based economy.

Build a fast, functional site that supports your subscription business in minutes. Get started with WPQuickStart for membership sites.

Related Content

Source link

Performance & Page Speed Are Everything

There is a lot of discussion about the changes that Google made around ranking factors. Most experts regularly agree that you should pay attention to — and also ignore — Google when it comes to search engine results.

What they mean is that you should understand the changes to the algorithms so that your pages continue to rank. But you should also try to not pay attention too much because you shouldn’t focus on Google. You should focus on writing for humans, as that’s what Google is trying to do as well.

Page Load Time is a Ranking Factor

In the midst of the changes to their core algorithm, Google’s new Core Web Vitals focus on Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Before you focus completely on those three factors, it’s important to understand that Google pays attention to tons of ranking factors.

One factor that has always been important is page load time. You won’t see it in the pie chart from the FirstPageSage article, unless you know what you’re looking for. And what you should be looking for is user engagement.

When a page takes too long to load, user engagement drops off. And user engagement is 5% of the algorithm — making it the 6th most important factor.

The Web Almanac tracks internet stats and produces a yearly report. In the 2020 report, looking at page weight, it stated,

“…we are closing in on 7 MB of page weight on mobile and 7.5 MB on desktop at the 90th percentile. The data is following an age old trend: growth in page weight is on the upward trajectory yet again…”

Load times get slower and slower as web pages get larger and larger. And the two factors driving page weight are images and JavaScript.

Page Weight Matters

Why should we worry about page weight and load times? Is it only because Google cares? Absolutely not. In an article from Semrush on speed, performance and SEO, they report:

In other words, they’re telling us what we already know: people will spend less time on our site when the site doesn’t respond fast enough.

The same article gives us a rubric for how fast our pages need to be:

  • If your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than 25% of the web.

  • If your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than 50% of the web.

  • If your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than 75% of the web.

  • If your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than 94% of the web.

So what is behind the slowing performance of the web at large and our sites more specifically?

File Sizes, Request Counts, & JavaScript

The answer is both simple and frustrating.

Our website pages are getting larger because the internet is getting faster (in most places). And because the internet is getting faster, most people (developers included) are worried less about the optimization of a few bytes here and there.

There’s no single culprit. But collectively, the plugins we’re installing and the themes we’re using are getting bigger than they ever were before.

But it’s not just themes and plugins. In fact, one of the largest sources of JavaScript on web pages is third party scripts. In other words, the scripts we add for ads, personalization, A/B testing, and more all bring more external requests for JavaScript files.

More requests per page, pulling down more and larger files, will result in only one thing — heavier pages that load more slowly.

The worst part about it is that Google is now paying attention to how we deliver pages and sites on mobile devices in their mobile first initiative. And the Web Almanac report mentioned previously highlights a troubling dynamic when it comes to JavaScript and mobile devices.

“37% is the percent of the median mobile page’s JavaScript bytes that are unused.”

In other words, we’re building pages that are getting pulled down to mobile devices, which are calling out to download JavaScript, which then isn’t being used at all.

We should be troubled by this. But the owners of websites and even some of the freelancers building websites don’t always know the nuances of what’s going on within the plugins or themes that they’re installing.

The Impact of Adding New Plugins

Until recently, when a website owner or site builder installed a new plugin, there was very little they could do to evaluate its performance. They could rely on comments or ratings on marketplaces or the plugin repository, but other than that, there wasn’t an easy way to know if a plugin would slow a site down.

The reason for this is as complicated as figuring out a plugin’s performance. Performance could be a result of great or poor hosting. There could be subtle conflicts between plugins that might cause errors on a page that could go unnoticed.

Testing the performance of a plugin would mean creating an environment (that matches the production environment) with a complete copy of everything on the production site, and then running tests against it.

But even then, you’d need to be able to isolate what was slow. Was it large files within the plugin? Or was it the number of outbound calls to poorly performing sites? Or was it a conflict with another plugin?

And that kind of monitoring is normally outside the skills and resources available to a site owner or builder.

As a result, most owners and builders simply install plugins and hope they won’t slow things down. And later, often much later, when a site feels slow, they hire someone else to come figure it out.

In other words, the cause and effect feedback loop for a new plugin and the site performance has been non-existent.

Plugin & Theme Updates

It’s not just new plugins that cause this challenge. Plugin and theme updates aren’t regulated in any manner. In other words, there is nothing that stops a plugin developer from radically re-writing their plugin and pushing it out as an update.

This has, in the past, created challenges when plugins are bought and then changed by the new owners.

But there’s another dynamic to consider when it comes to performance and PageSpeed scores.

When a plugin author decides to change their architecture, or add a new feature, they’re adding new code to their plugin. And that little update can take a high-performing plugin and turn it into a site performance nightmare — without anyone knowing.

The Plugin Performance Monitor

There isn’t a single site owner or site builder that enjoys the state of the world we’re in. Every one of them knows that performance and PageSpeed scores are everything. But knowing and being able to do anything about it are two different things.

We set out to solve this problem at Hostdedi for all our WordPress and WooCommerce customers. We wanted to create a feedback loop that would show them how the actions they were taking were impacting their site’s performance scores.

To do that we needed to start by collecting those PageSpeed scores nightly. But it wasn’t just about the scores. We needed to decipher all the feedback Google provides, and determine what was causing any changes in performance.

We’d then have to match the performance degradation or improvement to the changes being made on the site — from a user uploading large photos, to a site owner adding a new plugin or changing a theme.

Lastly, we’d have to make all of that simple so that anyone could look, at any time, and see how the changes that were being made — via user interaction or plugin updating — were impacting performance scores.

The best part of this is that you can adjust which pages you want the Plugin Performance Monitor to watch. So for WooCommerce stores, you can ask it to pay attention to pages like your cart, your my-account, and your checkout pages.

This provides excellent feedback when you’re installing plugins that are supposed to help speed up your store and you find out they’re not working as advertised.

Only Available with Hostdedi Hosting Plans

The good news is that new customers are already seeing the Plugin Performance Monitor deployed on their sites. Existing customers will see it roll out on all their sites in the next few days.

Every WordPress and WooCommerce hosting customer will now have a direct and immediate way to know how their site is performing, and where they may want to make changes (or reverse previous changes) on their site.

At Hostdedi, we understand that performance is everything. We brought image compression to Managed WordPress hosting before anyone else did. We brought performance changes to WooCommerce order data and WooCommerce reviews before anyone else did.

And now we’re bringing you the best performance monitoring before anyone else has — because we know that you know that performance is synonymous with user engagement, and it’s what matters most.

Try It Yourself

With Hostdedi, better is built in.

See for yourself with a two-week free trial of fully managed WordPress or WooCommerce hosting.

Related Resources

Source link