WooCommerce hosting requirements

When you’re setting up a WooCommerce store, your hosting has to provide a few specific things before the platform will run properly. The WooCommerce server requirements are a published list of five key performance requirements you need to validate to ensure performance.  However, these are often not enough so we’ve added a few additional tips. Checking them before you launch is far easier than finding out something is missing once you’re live and taking orders.

The WooCommerce server requirements

The WooCommerce server requirements cover five things. Hosting that falls short on any of them will either cause a particular problem or stop WooCommerce installing at all.

• WordPress 6.9 or later. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, so the WordPress hosting requirements have to be met before the WooCommerce ones come into it.
• PHP 8.3 or later. PHP is the language your store runs on, and WooCommerce is tested up to version 8.4.
• MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or later. This is the database holding your products, orders and customers.
• HTTPS across the site. The certificate has to cover every page rather than the checkout alone, because browsers and payment providers both treat a partly secured site as broken.
• A memory limit of 256MB or higher. This is how much memory a single page is allowed to use while it loads.

WooCommerce does still run on older versions of PHP and MySQL, but those stopped receiving security updates, so a store sitting on them is running unpatched. This leads to privacy and security vulnerability that retailers can’t afford.

How to check what your host gives you

If you’re unsure what your host gives you when you buy hosting from them, WooCommerce reports all of this back to you, so you can check. In your WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Status, where the System Status report lists your PHP version, your database version and your memory limit, and flags anything below requirement in red.

Run it before you launch, before a big sale, and after your host changes anything on your account. If something comes back short, ask your host to fix it, because raising a memory limit or moving you to a newer PHP version are normal requests that don’t take long to fix.

What the requirements do not cover

The requirements do not cover what happens when lots of people buy from you at once. Three other things decide that, and hosts do not usually advertise any of them.

1. The first is caching. Most websites are fast because the server builds a page once, saves the result and hands the same copy to everyone who asks for it, which works until the page in question is a shopping cart. Every shopper’s cart holds something different, so WooCommerce requires that the cart, checkout and My Account pages are left out of caching.
2. The second is how many customers your server can serve at the same time. A cached page costs it almost nothing, while a checkout takes up a slot for as long as the customer needs to finish. Hosts call those slots PHP workers. A plan with two of them leaves eight people waiting when ten check out together.
3. The third is how often your database is backed up. Product pages can go weeks without changing while your orders table changes with every sale. A nightly backup on a busy store means a restore that loses a day of orders. What a store needs is hourly or continuous backups, and on most plans that is a paid extra rather than the default.

What to ask WooCommerce hosting providers

When you’re comparing WooCommerce hosting providers, storage and bandwidth are what get advertised, and neither says much about how a store copes when it gets busy. Three questions get closer.

1. How many PHP workers does this plan include?
2. How often do you back up the database, and how far back can you restore a single order?
3. Which pages does your caching exclude?

Any host that has built for stores will have specific answers to all three.

What to do first

What to do first is run the System Status report, which takes about thirty seconds and tells you whether you have a real problem or nothing to fix. Send your host anything it flags, then put the three questions above to whoever you are hosting with now.

Infrastructure built for ecomm requirements

Online stores need infrastructure built for constant database changes. Liquid Web’s Managed WooCommerce Hosting is designed with PHP workers that scale automatically, backups that protect every order, and extra server capacity so your store stays reliable as your sales grow.