eCommerce has exploded in recent years, providing customers with the convenience of at-home and on-the-go shopping. However, greater consumer expectations come with increasing pressure for website optimization and reliability.
Online brands must overcome performance challenges such as traffic surges, security breaches, and conversion impact to remain competitive, boost revenue, and maintain brand trust. The advantages of improving the scalability of your eCommerce website can enhance performance, minimize downtime, accelerate page loads, increase security measures, and maximize revenue. These best practices, coupled with a cutting-edge scalable platform, can assure sustainable growth for your online business.
Why Scalability Matters for Business Growth
Scaling your eCommerce website is crucial for managing an influx of traffic without sacrificing performance and reliability. Scalability can transform an eCommerce site into a high-performing growth engine that can support more customers, multiple product SKUs, and high-volume transactions that drive measurable business value, reliable uptime and robust security.
To save costs, scalable solutions ensure you only pay for the most necessary resources and digital infrastructure, minimizing risk as your business requirements change. The approach prevents you from losing customers over poor online performance, while analytical tools help you garner and analyze consumer data to make more informed decisions.
WP Engine empowers companies and agencies of all sizes to build, power, manage, and optimize their WordPress eCommerce websites and applications with confidence. Going beyond managed hosting, WP Engine offers premium, enterprise-grade solutions, tools, and services, including specialized, eCommerce and Agency solution suites, and developer-centric tools, that future-proofs your WordPress eCommerce website to unlock its full potential and drive business growth.
How Can You Improve the Scalability of Your eCommerce Website?
Using a trusted, comprehensive platform with cutting-edge capabilities can help you improve the scalability of your eCommerce website. However, to achieve optimal performance outcomes, you must follow a step-by-step process.
1. Understand Your Current Infrastructure
Before scaling, you should assess your current eCommerce setup. A detailed baseline performance analysis will help you determine limiting factors before a spike in traffic impedes user experiences and revenue. Observe traffic trends, load times and response times as your key metrics.
WP Engine offers a 24-hour uptime monitoring add-on tool, allowing you to customize tracking and address problems immediately. Its Performance Insights page in the customer User Portal also provides accurate data regarding the page experience and performance against industry benchmarks. You can utilize these front-end criteria to take immediate action and make improvements.
2. Embrace Cloud-Native Solutions
Cloud-native platforms provide broad scalability, reliability and optimal deliveries for eCommerce websites. Employing container-based computing guarantees steady, swift implementation and straightforward updates. Auto-scaling solutions also automatically adjust to fluctuating traffic while load-balancing routes requests toward global data centers to avoid downtime.
EverCache® for WooCommerce is WP Engine’s proprietary cache that optimizes eCommerce website speeds and resilience for customer satisfaction. Clients who have used its cache technology have seen results, with pages loading two times faster than every key performance indicator in a test study.
3. Implement Content Delivery Networks
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) decrease latency by sending requests across various global edge servers, reducing your server’s traffic loads.
As a managed WordPress hosting platform, WP Engine provides built-in CDN integrations with distributed denial-of-service protection, and web application firewall (WAF) security to ensure your eCommerce design is reliable, fast and secure.
4. Optimize Database Performance
Optimizing data performance entails spreading data across numerous servers to avoid slowdowns, replicating copies of your database in case you need a backup and caching information for faster page loading. You must also review bottlenecks and tweak your database to ensure consistent, reliable operations.
WP Engine tailors database solutions to your individual eCommerce needs. EverCache, CDN integrations, database caching, and slow-query monitoring allow specialists to recognize problems, while real-time insights and automated alerts help correct issues. Core and Enterprise plans allow access to New Relic Application Performance visualization tools that save time by pinpointing performance bottlenecks, improving site stability through enhanced progress tracking. Smart Search AI offloads search functionality to a dedicated server, which not only delivers results faster but also uses AI-powered hybrid semantic search with smart recommendations to improve relevance and ultimately boost conversions.
5. Automate Deployment and Scaling
Automated updates allow you to easily scale your online store as your business grows. Tools like Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines enable you to experiment with and implement changes with fewer errors. Additionally, you can modify the technical setup with reusable templates by deploying Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which prevents downtime amid sudden traffic increases.
DeployBot and GitHub Actions are two of many ways that allow developers to utilize custom CI/CD integrations, detecting changes and automatically triggering the deployment of system changes to WP Engine. The host also offers IaC for automated build and preview environments of new and existing WordPress websites. The Smart Plugin Manager enables automatic theme updates, cache clearing and customizable options.
6. Monitor, Test and Plan for Growth
A successful online shopping experience depends on consistent uptime and superior performance. Therefore, you must continuously monitor and test your eCommerce website to understand performance under high-traffic simulations. Planning for optimizations and upgrades before problems occur is crucial, as is safeguarding your digital infrastructure to handle user spikes.
WP Engine solutions monitor back-end and front-end servers, as well as application-level and external performance. Its software includes features like Dynamic Plugin Loading to meet your growth trends by only loading key plugins on pages that matter most, providing solutions to all growth needs. They also have numerous parameters to measure peak performance as your business expands. WP Engine’s operations team provides superior support in resolving server problems and actively tracks error codes for its enterprise-level customers.
7. Security and Compliance at Scale
Every scaled-up eCommerce website requires robust security to remain compliant and provide safer transactions. WP Engine has successfully blocked over 26 billion attacks and implemented over 300 website security updates monthly.
Security experts work to ensure comprehensive protection. They use advanced encryption to safeguard customer data, partnering with Cloudflare to stem malicious traffic before it reaches your site. The platform also meets SOC-2 and ISO-27001:2022 industry standards for data management and mitigation. The platform also offers free SSL certificates and management.
Other security features included automated software updates, intelligent backup for rapid system recovery and one-click site restoration to reduce downtime during a data breach. Managed WAF also protects your site from specific attacks on WordPress and learns threat patterns to identify and block new threats.
Future-Proof Your eCommerce Platform
Adopting cloud solutions, automation and comprehensive security will set the stage for sound scalability of your eCommerce website. WP Engine offers a solid platform for business expansion and long-term resilience, allowing you to anticipate risks and adapt to market changes proactively.
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