Mamas-sachen.de
Susanne's assignment was to optimize her WooCommerce store mamas-sachen.de and to get rid of various bugs. First of all, it was important for her to optimize the performance of the WordPress store. With a loading time of about 2.8 seconds, this was understandable. Through my partners from the advertising agency Pixelwald, I came to the order and now look after mamas-sachen.de with my professional expertise around WordPress with WooCommerce.
Implementation
The webshop stack is composed of WordPress in conjunction with the store plugin WooCommerce and has a variety of other plugins for "optimization" or function expansion. Since the last hoster was already whistling from the last hole on the largest shared hosting package offered at peak times, the CDN and load balancer infrastructure of Cloudflare was used. Although this helped to mitigate the outages at peak times, the load time was still around 2.8 seconds.
As a solution I suggested a move to a WordPress specialized hoster. After a short consultation, the premium hoster WP Engine has made the race and shines not only by AI-supported automatic updates of the plugins, but also provides through its new "Advanced Network" the infrastructure of Cloudflare including CDN. The move of ~5GB + database was automated away after one click thanks to our own "WP Engine Automated Migration" plugin. As a "little" extra, we have directly installed the ElasticPress extension and thereby accelerated and optimized the store search.
Is a change of hoster really enough to increase performance? The advertising promises certainly sound like it. But a well-known saying goes "trust is good, control is better". Therefore, we now take a look at the performance comparison:
In the night of July 22-23, I pulled off the move. As you can see from the drop in load time (maintenance mode turned on is faster, of course). After that, the load times still fluctuated due to minor optimizations and the resulting invalidation of the cache. But as you can easily see, a load time of 1.22 seconds on average was achieved afterwards.
Performance Boost
As you can see, we were able to save a whopping 1.6 seconds in loading time. In addition, we were able to switch back to the free plan with Cloudflare to save costs. I don't need to mention that especially for online stores the loading time plays an enormous role and provides for the increase of revenue ;)
Even though WP Engine with German servers is not comparable in price with conventional cheap hosters, this WordPress hoster keeps all its promises.
If you want to see for yourself, I've dusted off a discount coupon code for annual payment for you here: WP Engine Discount [Advertisement]