WooCommerce store: plan, installation and settings

What you'll achieve

• you choose the right plan and know when cloud hosting makes sense;
• you install WordPress with WooCommerce directly from Enhance;
• you adjust PHP, cron and order emails;
• you back up your store before every major update.

Which plan you need

A store's regular pages (home page, categories, products) can be served quickly. The cart, the checkout page and the customer account, however, are calculated by PHP every time, for every visitor. That is why, for a store, what matters is how many requests PHP can process at the same time, meaning each website's concurrent PHP processes.

• A store that is just starting out: the Store plan — 30 GB, unlimited email addresses and databases, up to 3 websites. The plans, with prices for each period, are on the WordPress hosting page.
• A high-traffic store, where pages start loading slowly when many visitors arrive at once: cloud hosting, with 10, 15 or 20 concurrent PHP processes per website.
• Cloud doesn't make a heavy page faster. If your store is slow even with a single visitor, the cause is usually the theme, the plugins or the code; a bigger plan won't fix that. Ask us before you move to cloud.

Move to a bigger plan at any time: we change your account's plan, and your websites, databases and email addresses stay where they are.

Before you start

• The domain must point to our server and have its SSL certificate issued (see How to point your domain to NBT Host and The free SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt)). Without https://, the browser shows customers “Not secure” right on the page where they enter their details, and card payment plugins require a secure connection.
• Log in to Enhance: https://server.nbt-host.com. The names below are in English, exactly as they appear on screen. If the panel opens in another language, switch it to English from the top right: your photo or initials » “My account” » “Language”.
• Is your store already with another host? We move it for free, under the conditions here, or you can move it yourself with the steps in Moving a WordPress site from another host.

Steps: install WordPress with WooCommerce

1. In Enhance, click “Websites” in the left menu, then your website.
2. Open the “Apps” tab and click “Install app”.
3. Under “Application”, choose “WooCommerce + WordPress”: WordPress is installed with the WooCommerce plugin already added. Fill in the rest of the form (version, domain, administrator account) as in Installing WordPress from Enhance.
4. Click “Install”, then, on the website card, “Login to admin”. In WordPress, the WooCommerce setup wizard asks for your store details: address, currency, type of products.

If you like, we do the installation for you, for free, on any plan: just tell us which domain when you order.

Steps: PHP settings for your store

1. On the website page, open the “Developer tools” tab (if you don't see it, it is in the “Advanced” menu).
2. PHP version: under “PHP” you choose 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4; the default is 8.3. Before moving to a new version, check that your theme and your payment and shipping plugins support it, then test a cart and an order.
3. Limits: in “php.ini editor”, click “Add directive” and add only what you need:
   • memory_limit — a store with many plugins may need, for example, 512M;
   • max_input_vars — if products with many variations or a large menu don't save completely, raise it to 5000;
   • max_execution_time — for large product imports;
   • upload_max_filesize and post_max_size — for large CSV files or images.

The detailed steps are in PHP version and PHP settings.

Steps: a real cron instead of the visitor-triggered one

WooCommerce does a lot of its work in the background, as scheduled tasks: it cancels unpaid orders after the stock hold time, starts and ends scheduled sales, sends some emails. By default, WordPress only runs these tasks when someone visits the website. On a store with few visitors they run late, and on one with many visitors they are checked needlessly on every visit.

1. On the website page, the “Developer tools” tab » “Cron jobs”. If there is already a row with wp-cron.php, the website has a real cron and you don't add another one.
2. Open wp-config.php from the “Files” tab and, above the line starting with /* That's all, stop editing!, add:

   define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

3. Add a cron job of the “Request URL” type, with the address https://domeniul-tau.ro/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron. For a store with many orders, choose “Custom” and write */10 in “Minute”: it runs once every 10 minutes.

Details and good practices are in Cron jobs: scheduled tasks in Enhance. In WordPress, under WooCommerce » Status » Scheduled Actions, you can see the pending tasks: if many “Pending” ones with a past date pile up, cron isn't running.

Order emails

• The sender. Create an address on your store's domain in Enhance, for example comenzi@domeniul-tau.ro (see How to create an email account in Enhance), and set it in WordPress under WooCommerce » Settings » Emails as the sender address. Messages sent from your own domain reach the Inbox more often than those sent on behalf of a Gmail or Yahoo address.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set automatically on domains that use our nameservers. If your DNS is elsewhere or order emails end up in spam, follow Why my emails go to spam: SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
• The limit. Emails sent from the website's code (order confirmations, forms) are capped at 200 per hour, per website, separately from those sent from email addresses. For newsletter campaigns to large lists, use a dedicated email marketing service, not WooCommerce.

Backups and updates

• Before every major update (WooCommerce, the theme, a payment plugin), make a backup: on the website page, the “Backups” tab » “Create backup”. If something goes wrong, you restore it from the same place (see Backup and restore from Enhance).
• In addition to your own backups, we make a daily backup of files, databases and emails; you can restore a version from the last 7 days for free. Keep in mind that restoring the database also brings back the orders as of the day of the backup: orders received after that are lost from the database.
• WordPress admin access from your IPs only and automatic updates are set from Enhance, with the steps in WordPress updates and security in Enhance.
• Don't want to handle it yourself? WordPress Maintenance, the Complete tier, is designed for stores: weekly updates, and after each one we check the cart and the payment page, without placing real orders.

If something doesn't work

• The cart and checkout are slow only when there are many visitors. All of the website's PHP processes are busy. First check the plugins that make many requests, then consider cloud hosting.
• “Allowed memory size … exhausted” appears. Raise memory_limit from “php.ini editor”, as in the steps above.
• Scheduled sales don't start on time, and unpaid orders aren't canceled. Cron isn't running: check the cron job and Scheduled Actions.
• Customers don't receive the confirmation email. Ask them to check Spam; then check the sender and SPF/DKIM, as above. If you send many emails at once, you may hit the website's limit of 200 per hour.
• The CSV product import stops halfway. Raise max_execution_time and upload_max_filesize or split the file into smaller parts.