WooCommerce performance on shared hosting (realistic expectations)

Short answer: WooCommerce is heavier than a brochure site—shared hosting can work at low order volume but may struggle during sales without caching discipline.

NZ retailers often blame “images” when database queries, cart sessions, and admin-ajax are the real load.

What shared hosting can handle

• Modest catalog sizes and traffic with lean themes.
• Payment gateways that do not add slow synchronous calls per page.

When to plan an upgrade

Frequent admin timeouts, checkout errors under concurrent users, or TTFB spikes when cron runs.

Optimisations that usually pay off

Object caching where supported, sensible product image sizes, disabling unnecessary related-product queries on cart, and quality hosting with modern PHP.

Frequently asked questions