Performance Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce Server CPU Spikes: WPML, Bots, Or Something Else?

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member raised concerns about persistent CPU spikes on a VPS running a WooCommerce site.

Despite solid specs (16 cores, 32GB RAM), aggressive caching (WP Rocket, Redis, Varnish), and Cloudflare firewall rules in place, the site was still experiencing major slowdowns and outages. The suspicion fell on a mix of slow database queries from WPML and ongoing bot attacks.

This sparked a familiar discussion among Club members: how do you actually determine the root cause of performance issues, especially when WooCommerce is paired with heavy plugins like WPML? And more importantly, what’s the right sequence of actions when a production site is under pressure?

WooCommerce 9.9.3: Performance Gains or Wishful Thinking?

When WooCommerce 9.9 was announced back in May, the headline promised massive admin performance gains, especially for stores with large order volumes.

Smarter caching, async data loading, and leaner queries were meant to make the dashboard snappier and more efficient — with Woo’s own tests showing up to 95% faster admin load times on stores with over a million orders.

Naturally, Business Bloomer Club members were eager to see how these improvements translated to real-world WooCommerce sites — particularly ones with tens of thousands of orders and a variety of third-party plugins.

It didn’t take long for reports to come in, and, as expected, the results were mixed. While some saw notable speedups across admin pages, others discovered that some plugins were actually increasing their query count by the thousands.

So — is Woo 9.9.3 actually faster? It depends.

Is Core Web Vitals Optimization Worth It for WooCommerce?

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, we discussed the impact of Core Web Vitals optimization on website performance and SEO.

Some store owners have invested in optimizing Core Web Vitals but saw little to no improvement in their site’s performance or search ranking.

This raised questions about the real-world benefits of focusing on Core Web Vitals, especially for WooCommerce stores of different sizes and with varying technical setups.

The discussion also touched on how perceived page speed, especially the “above the fold” content load time, might have more influence than overall metrics.

In this post, we’ll explore whether optimizing Core Web Vitals is always a critical task and what factors store owners should consider to get the most value from their efforts.

WooCommerce: Blocking Unwanted Bots Efficiently

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member sought lightweight solutions to block unwanted site crawlers without using bulky security plugins like Wordfence. This sparked a discussion about effective ways to combat bot traffic on WooCommerce stores, which can significantly impact website performance and security if left unchecked.

Several approaches emerged, ranging from server-side configurations to specialized plugins. Server-side rules in .htaccess or web.config offer direct control, while lightweight plugins can simplify the process for users less comfortable with manual coding. Managing bot traffic helps ensure smoother site operations, better resource management, and enhanced user experiences.

Let’s explore these options, including practical examples of server-side rules and plugin recommendations, to protect your WooCommerce store from excessive bot activity without unnecessary overhead.

Planning a WooCommerce Setup for a High-Traffic Site with API Integration

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a developer was worried that a high-traffic WordPress website had raised concerns about implementing WooCommerce to handle complex requirements.

The site expects 100,000 visitors during peak times and will sell tickets, merchandise, and manage user registration through a custom single sign-on (SSO) system.

Additionally, product data will be pulled from an external API rather than WooCommerce’s internal database. Key considerations include balancing the flexibility of WooCommerce with high server demand, handling frequent data updates through an API, and ensuring smooth transactions during peak ticket sales.

Optimizing functions.php to Improve WooCommerce Site Performance

In a recent Business Bloomer Club thread, a member sought advice on reducing the Time to First Byte (TTFB) on their WooCommerce store. They noted that their functions.php file was overloaded with custom functions and wondered if this might be impacting the site’s loading speed.

For WooCommerce and WordPress developers, a large functions.php file can lead to slower load times if not managed carefully. Here’s a closer look at best practices to ensure functions in this file are optimized and only run when needed, ultimately improving site performance.

WooCommerce Site Performance Issues: Tracking Resource Consumption on VPS with Plesk

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a WooCommerce site owner sought advice on diagnosing high PHP-FPM resource consumption on their VPS server hosted with Plesk. Despite a relatively moderate traffic load, the site—large in terms of product count and running in multiple languages via WPML—was experiencing high CPU and memory usage, leading the user to suspect the site’s theme and custom functions as potential culprits. They aimed to pinpoint precisely which scripts or functions were consuming excessive resources.

The discussion covered effective tools and strategies for diagnosing server load issues. Advanced Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions like New Relic were recommended as ideal for identifying specific lines of code that may be slowing down the site. Such tools can break down execution times, helping users understand which plugins, scripts, or custom functions are consuming resources.

Optimizing WooCommerce for Page Speed and Caching with WP Rocket and More

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a WooCommerce user managing a B2B store struggled to optimize page speed due to caching conflicts with WP Rocket.

The store displays prices only to logged-in users, which led to display errors as cached pages for logged-out users affected the experience.

Here are some practical solutions to improve performance, reduce caching issues, and ensure a fast, user-specific experience for B2B customers.

Unlocking WooCommerce’s Full Potential: Addressing Its Weaknesses

Greetings from a seasoned WooCommerce user, developer, and advocate with over 12 years of experience!

I “play” with WooCommerce daily and believe there’s room for improvement. Simply catching up with competitors isn’t the right goal—STANDING OUT (yes, in all caps) is what we should be aiming for.

When you’re focused solely on closing the gap, you risk being seen as “the alternative to” rather than a standout in your own right. WooCommerce, with its unique ecosystem and flexibility, has the potential to thrive by embracing its strengths instead of chasing a moving target. By stepping away from the “catching up” mindset, you can create a truly exceptional product—one that isn’t just comparable but incomparable, one that leads rather than follows.

So, let’s take a step back.

I believe ecommerce software should let you sell ANYTHING (products) to ANYONE (customers around the world), while getting PAID and being able to DELIVER the package asap.

If Woo can address all that, it can really become outstanding, a piece of software that is worth talking about, and that doesn’t need to be compared to others. Because it’s unique.

There’s a reason why you can’t compare pears to apples—yet you could argue that diamonds outshine gold.

So, here’s an overview of key areas where WooCommerce might have weaknesses compared to other ecommerce platforms, together with some context.

WooCommerce: Preparing Your Site for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are just around the corner. Is your WooCommerce site prepared? I hope so!

While time is running out, there are a number of things you can do to get ready. In this post, we’ll cover eight of the most important ones.

The potential of a Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal shouldn’t be underestimated. Indeed, many eCommerce sites report that a significant percentage of their annual revenue comes from sales during this brief period of time.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that nearly all businesses run a BFCM sale, which means that anyone who doesn’t have an offer is missing out.

Before we jump into the eight important things you can do, a final note: failing to prepare may cost you a serious amount of missed revenue. Amazon, for example, stands to lose $13.22 million per hour of downtime! While that’s an extreme example, it is a reminder that downtime should be avoided as much as possible during once-a-year sales events.

WooCommerce: 11 Performance, Security, and Scalability Tips

WooCommerce websites need to be operational at all times: they must load quickly, be secure, and handle large traffic spikes.

Achieving this can be a daunting task without the right strategy and expertise, particularly when dealing with a high number of visitors, as a single problem can result in hours of downtime and lost sales.

In this article, our special guest Martin Ronfort, founder of Dr Tech, will share an overview of the strategies and processes that you can apply to your WooCommerce store and grow with ease

At Dr Tech, in fact, they manage thousands of WooCommerce stores – ranging from small businesses that are just starting out to stores with millions of requests and significant marketing campaigns – and deal with all the technical aspects such as hosting, loading speed, security, updates, backups, uptime, and scalability.

Let’s go, Martin!

WooCommerce: Shoptimizer Theme Review

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme for your WooCommerce store, then you should be searching for a theme that’s fast and packed full of useful features.

However, as you’ve probably realized by now, this can be difficult to find.

Typically, most WooCommerce themes will either be fast with minimal features to avoid slowing things down or feature-rich but slow due to all the bloat from the extra functionality.

You can even find themes that combine the worst of both worlds, being slow and lacking features, but the less said about those themes, the better!

However, while it’s rare, you can find themes that are both fast and have valuable features.

One theme that claims to fall into this category is Shoptimizer. It’s a well-established WooCommerce theme from the CommerceGurus team built to load quickly and come with the features needed for a successful eCommerce store.

In this Shoptimizer review, we explore the key features of this theme. We’ll also determine whether or not this is a high-performance theme that will help your eCommerce store load as quickly as possible.

WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today.

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation.

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions.

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability.

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: What Are The Fastest Themes?

Speed is an essential factor that directly impacts the conversion rates, business revenue, sales, and customer experience.

Akamai’s research suggests that even a 100-millisecond delay in the page speed impacts conversion rates by 7%, while a 2-second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. Thus, even a few milliseconds of delay can cost your store thousands of dollars – let alone dissatisfied customers, poor SEO ranking, and bad online reputation.

Hence, page loading speed is the essence of an excellent customer experience and building a successful online presence.

Where possible, you want to eliminate unnecessary page loads, especially when it comes to the checkout process. Otherwise, you risk cart abandonment. That is the main reason you should use a checkout window, accessible straight from product and cart pages.

While the speed of your WooCommerce store depends on multiple facets – such as your web host, image, media files, and the code of your store, the theme you choose also plays a significant role in ensuring faster store speed.

Calculating your store’s page speed and making sure you choose the right WooCommerce theme that checks all the boxes can get frustrating and overwhelming considering the plethora of options you can choose from – especially 1300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest.

So, in this article, we share the top WooCommerce themes you can use, along with a few factors to look for when picking a suitable theme for your store. But first, let’s understand what makes a WooCommerce theme slow or fast and how to calculate the speed.

WooCommerce: How to Safely Update Via Staging

When a new version of the WooCommerce plugin is released, and the WordPress dashboard starts sending you notifications that it’s time to update, this question comes always to mind: “Should I update WooCommerce right now, wait a little longer, or stay on the same version unless something breaks?“

Well, updating WooCommerce is ALWAYS a big risk – potentially you can break your live website and miss out on traffic and sales. This can happen every time a significant update is released – many store owners don’t update their stores because they feel the hassle is not worth the effort.

But updating WooCommerce is definitely a good idea for the long-term. The main cause of WordPress hacking is because of out-of-date plugins and themes. And this is where staging environments come in.

A staging website is a clone of your existing live store. It’s completely separate and it doesn’t affect your live store in any way. Staging is also called “testing environment” or “sandbox”, while your live site is usually called “production environment”.

Staging gives you the benefit of 1-click-cloning in a few minutes, updating and testing WooCommerce without worrying about breaking your actual live website, and finally “pushing” the changes to the live website (a.k.a. overwriting the live environment), so the functioning is 100% guaranteed.

Tag: Performance