Continue with own Wordpress store or move to Shopify Plus?

[british steve]

We run a busy Wordpress website hosted with very well known UK (fully managed - PCI compliant) hosting provider, costs around £2.4K per month hosting plus the vat. Site gets around 2 million visits per month, 70% of vists are from UK, EU USA and Canada, the other 30% from other countries

We sell half a dozen products through our (woo commerce) website and sell in high volume and ship across the whole of the UK, USA and Canada and several other Countries and over the next couple of years we/ll expanding to more Countries

Not to put to fine a point on it our existing hosting is a bit crap (it used to be very, very good) in the last few months our site has been up and down like a yoyo and at times has been running very, very slow which has not been good for business! Hosting companies solution is for us to pay even more system and bandwidth upgrades which last time we did that made no difference what so ever. To be honest I've had enough of chasing hosting company for this, that and the other andI i'm now looking to ditch them as support now sucks as much as the hosting.

I've had a quote from Shopify which comes out at almost the same price as currently paid which is fine, just not sure if Shopify is any good for high traffic high sales site as I have no real experience with them! The thiong I do like about Shopify is all of the the backend reporting - we have much the same reporting at the moment but its done through Plugins, some of which we've had to deleat as not updated etc or changed as some of the plugin core features have been removed

SO! Thoughts on using Shopify please. Good or Bad as I dont want to have to change the site / hosting again

 

[WebshopMechanic]

Hey Steve,

In my opinion, there are pro’s and con’s to both options.

I’m a big fan of Shopify from an ecommerce point of view. It runs on top notch servers so it’s lightening quick, the up-time is pretty much 100% and you know all the security patches for the servers are automatically installed by Shopify themselves.

The downside can be the costs of the bandwidth and the additional 3rd party apps. This can be expensive, especially if it is based on number of transactions.

It sounds like you’ve run into a few problems with Wordpress and I should imagine that’s partly down to the fact that the site had multiple plugins (created by different developers) that probably weren’t load-tested or scalable for your size of operation. They are obviously not all build to run together because of the different authors.

If it was me making the decision I would price it up based on your future growth and functional requirements. If you grow 100% in the next couple of years and you can handle the costs of Shopify plus the additional apps, then I’d probably go for Shopify.

However, the other option is to go for a bespoke build that fits your current and future requirement functionality-wise. In theory, this will / should ensure your platform is running smoothly without ‘the bloat’ of 3rd party apps. There’s obviously up-front cost associated with this but it may be a good option because you can build it with a mobile-first view which Google loves.

It’s a tough decision to make. Shopify certainly isn’t going anywhere but running coats and additional bespoke functionality could be expensive. A bespoke solution could give you exactly what you want with speed but you are reliant on having developers you can trust and work with.

Finally, if you have a problem with your hosting then you might be able to smooth some of your issues by finding a better hosting company. I can recommend Clook Hosting. They are not the cheapest but their support and knowledge is second-to-none. I’ve got no affiliation, I’ve just used them for nearly 15 years.

I’m not sure whether that helped or not? I’ve had good experiences with both to be honest.

Matt

 

[BigPhill]

I've got several years of experience with running eCommerce websites making hundreds of thousands a year....

Your current slow server is most likely due to poor optimisation between the MySQL database and your Wordpress website. This could be down to multiple factors including third party plugins as stated by Matt.

For two million visitors per month... for half a dozen products... you shouldn't be paying anywhere near £2,400..... UK dedicated servers configured correctly should easily be able to handle that amount of traffic for a couple of hundred pounds per month.

I suspect with a large amount of traffic, the current database is handling similar queries thousands of times unnecessarily, which should be looked at to help the speed of the website.

While this may be a configuration issue, it could also be an issue with low RAM and the processing ability on the server.... As i don't know what your current RAM is, you can get UK servers for about £300 a month with 128GB of RAM

Equally backend reporting tools can sometimes cause a lot of stress on the server... this is particularly true if you're logging a large of amount of data from most users.

Obviously this data is stored in the same database as your products, hence further slowing down of the entire website.

Furthermore as your traffic is coming from countries across the world, this will also be having an impact, typically it takes around 1 - 2 seconds longer for a UK based server to load for a North American customer, while this doesn't sound like a great amount, if you scale this figure up, you can easily see how problems can arise.

Hopefully some of this information helps

 

[finleydesign]

Have to agree with some of the points above, £2.4k a month sounds stupidly high, however you do gain a large number of visits, but personally we have ran large Woocommerce stores before without issues, you would need a Dedicated server however also if woocommerce isn't setup correctly it can drain on resources, which can often be the issue

Can't comment to much on shopify, as such, we transfer more customers from Shopify to Woocommerce

 

[Website Design Ltd]

Steve, the 2.4k seems excessive to me. There is no reason from what you are telling us that you should be paying that, but without seeing the site it is difficult to tell.

Switching over to Shopify is (probably) going to be a much bigger change than getting the website and hosting working as they should.

Andy

 

[Page]

I am no server expert so I will put that to one side

But you should first try and sort out the speed issues if it looks as if they can be sorted

You are then able to make a separate decision on whether to move to shopify etc and in a better way and when suits

No move is pain or time free

But a server move is much more pain-free than a shopping platform

We changed hosting companies last year - Magento "only" specialists - and the cost plummeted and the speed and support went right up

It took up hardly any of our time to make the move

There must be some serious woo commerce TECHNICAL people out there and maybe through woocommerce themselves that can help you with this and look to see if there are technical aspects slowing your site down

But even then I would still relook at your hosting

If you can get the two combined then you are away

There are ways of having stuff for abroad pushed out at local speeds - er somehow - but by then I am mega out of my depth

 

[british steve]

Cheers for feedback people. Current setup is 4 servers split between 2 data centres, London / Manchester. Servers are fully managed.

Servers have 64Gb ram and raid 10 SSD with each pair sat on a dedicated connection (we offten get high bursts of traffic - we've had almost 300,000 visits in under an hour before) As I understand it 2 servers do the website donkeywork and the other 2 are for the mailing lists and running other backend ops. Included in the monthly price is also dedicated Cisco firewalls, on top of that we have Cloudflare.

Today I handed in my notice to my existing hosting provider, we'll see if that shakes them up a bit!

I quite like the idea of Shopify just for the simplicity and all in one reporting etc but I'm not impressed with the backend site builder - looks like very early Wordpress from years back. I would need to take someone on to build a new site - pretty much all of the Shopify templates are pretty crap looking!

Shopify have offered me a free period deal that would cover most if not all of the cost of new site build from scratch if I decided to switch from Wordpress to Shopify

Main requirment is 100% uptime - and site speed - and no hassle would be a bonus

 

[fisicx]

Site speed is more often affected by themes and pluginds rather than the hosting.

For example, Yoast can really slow down a busy site (such as yours). Other plugins can often be replaced by theme functions or even got rid of. In other words, optimising the site can easily speed things up.

Use sites like these to look for bottlenecks: https://gtmetrix.com/ or https://tools.pingdom.com/

 

[british steve]

Even removing plugins to test made no difference!

My site has gone down twice today for a total of 22 minutes and in the last week has been down for almost 3 hours. Me thinks its down to the hosting company!

Have been shopping around for hosting quotes today

Either way I am ditching current host!

 

[fisicx]

Good move. Better than switching to shopify.

 

[Alan]

I'm no real expert on scaling multiple server for WP, as my main experience is running many WP sites on single server instances, but something doesn't sound right with 4 servers and poor performance and down time.

In 2017 ( edit.. 2018 ) I would also be asking why a managed service on cloud infrastructure ( e.g. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Azure ) with load balancers fronting multiple front end processors wouldn't be a target architecture.

If I were you ( assuming you are moderately profitable ), based on what you have said, I would be starting with the assumption that sticking with WP is a good strategy and your existing technical architecture is incorrect - and employ someone that can define the right technical architecture for your business.

The main advantage, I see, of cloud based infrastructure is that it is pretty easy to 1) do a proof of concept 2) change gear when required.

I am no PCI expert but a quick search tells me Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services cloud compute services are PCI compliant infrastructure.

 

[antropy]

We sell half a dozen products through our (woo commerce) website and sell in high volume and ship across the whole of the UK, USA and Canada and several other Countries and over the next couple of years we/ll expanding to more Countries

6 products is nothing, it makes me wonder if you even need an ecommerce platform at all - they could be static HTML pages with a PayPal cart - sure it's not the slickest but it would be super fast and would pretty much never go down.

Or there's something like the super-minimal LiteCart:
https://www.litecart.net/

Or there's OpenCart which should also be super fast for that number of products:
https://www.opencart.com/

As others have said, over £2k for hosting a site like that even with very high traffic is very excessive! You're probably paying 10x what you need to.

 

[british steve]

Looking at fully managed co-location with Equinix data centres! Buy our own hardware and have them manage it for us!

To be honest I think I would like to stick with Wordpress - it means that I can make small changes and stick in special offers if I feel like it without screwing up the site or needing a developer to do it for me!

The backend of Shopify is a bit crap! I like the reporting etc etc but to build a site using it - I dont think so. I wont be using Shopify - at least that much I do know! AND I WILL BE DITCHING CURRENT HOST

 

[Nochexman]

I'm not a techy, so take my thought with a pinch of salt. But before considering the solution i.e. Shopify, I would work out what the problem is. You seem to think the problem lies with your host, but you don't seem to know that for sure. Given the substantial size of your business, first step should be to get some proper expertise in and work out what is wrong and work out a migration path to a better service - but don't choose the service provider before you know the way through the woods. I'll shut up now.

 

[british steve]

I'm guessing with 3 hours server downtime over 7 days its the server rather than the website! I did have someone from outside take a look at the site today - picked up on a couple of minor things but nothing that should slow down or kill the site all together!

One way or the other I will be moving the website in the next couple of weeks. Had a few new server quotes, to be honest most of which are not a million miles away on price from what I already pay.

 

[Page]

Did you tell them what you currently pay - er dont

 

[british steve]

Did you tell them what you currently pay - er dont

No!

I made that mistake many years back when getting a quote from Adrian Flux Insurance - never ever tell any company either what you currently pay or what another company has quoted and then let them give you their best price.

One quote has come in at almost £5K per month inc VAT

 

[webhostuk]

No!



One quote has come in at almost £5K per month inc VAT

What exactly are they offering at that price.Can get a complete load balance solution with mulitple
servers at less price.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Use someone like Fisicx to analyse what is going wrong either with the site or servers, you have a site which is working but also having problems, so you need to stop acting and get a expert to find out the source of the problem before you make changes

You have suffered a lot so now get a expert to sort it out as it sound like you are just reacting to a problem without fully investigating it

 

[british steve]

I had an Expert go through the site on Wednesday, Only picked up on a few minor things but nothing that would slow the site down or stop it all togethet!

This morning the hosting company came back to me and said they may have found an error with all the SSD drives - and offered me a free upgrade (i'm guessing to SSD drives that work) Major change in attitude from hosting company now I have served notice and told them i'm leaving - hosting companies new caring attitude is too little too late

I have decided to go down the data centre co-location route - will be ordering new HP or Dell servers and a couple of firewalls etc over the next week after I have sought some advice on what to get, these will be installed in two seperate data centres with dedicated connections, dual power supplies etc etc etc.

Will be launching a new product subscription service website in the next couple of months so will also sit on the new server setup - hopefully this site will be equally as busy as other site!

 

[british steve]

Problem solved!

Now have new Broadberry servers and hardware based firewalls installed in to two seperate data centres in the UK - have copied existing Wordpress website over to new servers and the site whizzes along. Page load times are superfast. New site's not live to the public as I dont have PCI compliance sorted out just yet, but this should be done in next few days.

New servers should be able to cope with any amount of traffic we are likely to ever get! Servers are sat on dedicated connections that can burst up to 10Gbps. Decided against using Shopify, I'm sure its brilliant but the backend control panel sucks and is **** to use.

Going down route of buying own servers and installing in to data centres wont work out any cheaper than I was paying before - but it also means I wont pay any more for adding several other websites over the next few months, a couple of these are also expected to be busy sites so will save money in the long run.

If your ever looking for servers I can recommend Broadberry servers and customer service.

Thanks for all of the above help and advice!

 

[andygambles]

If you are running Cloudflare have you looked at employing the caching techniques offered by Cloudflare?

Depending on how your Ecommerce works you can create rules to cache pages 100% on Cloudflare meaning visits never even hit your server.

For dynamic page content you can look at configuring Railgun so Cloudflare only grabs the bits it needs and serves the rest of the content from cache.

 

[british steve]

Will have Cloudflare connected once our own servers go live in about 2 weeks after some more testing.

We will also be installing our own servers in a USA based data centre in the next couple of months.

 

[mtools]

I've had a quote from Shopify which comes out at almost the same price as currently paid which is fine, just not sure if Shopify is any good for high traffic high sales site as I have no real experience with them! The thiong I do like about Shopify is all of the the backend reporting - we have much the same reporting at the moment but its done through Plugins, some of which we've had to deleat as not updated etc or changed as some of the plugin core features have been removed

I know of a company called GymShark who are perhaps shopify’s biggest customer (I watch YouTube channel of their founder and he went to New York to open the stock exchange on behalf of shopify or something) and I know they do over 20,000 orders per day. They’re turning over well in excess of £100m a year (and I would imagine it’s a pretty hefty profit as well) so I’m sure shopify can cope with your volume. I use woocommerce and never went down the shopify route because I’d spent so much on woocommerce and it’s where I want it to be so couldn’t be bothered to restart with shopify. A friend of mine is using shopify for a successful clothing store and they’re really happy with it

 

[british steve]

I know of a company called GymShark who are perhaps shopify’s biggest customer (I watch YouTube channel of their founder and he went to New York to open the stock exchange on behalf of shopify or something) and I know they do over 20,000 orders per day. They’re turning over well in excess of £100m a year (and I would imagine it’s a pretty hefty profit as well) so I’m sure shopify can cope with your volume. I use woocommerce and never went down the shopify route because I’d spent so much on woocommerce and it’s where I want it to be so couldn’t be bothered to restart with shopify. A friend of mine is using shopify for a successful clothing store and they’re really happy with it

I'm sure Shopify is brilliant - I just found the backend site building side of it to be complete and utter ********. I also prefer to own and control my own site and content! I found several things that I wanted were not available through Shopify so now having required tools developed. I will stick with Wordpress and WooCommerce, we only sell half a dozen products - its just that we sell them in large numbers.

We're working on plans to launch 2 new sites over the next 6 months, again these will now sit on our own servers and wont cost anymore to run as we have already got the infrastructure in place and paid for.