EverCache® Upgrade Brings Smart Performance Gains to WooCommerce

WP Engine’s proprietary cache, EverCache, just got an upgrade that extends our smart caching functionality to WooCommerce.

Why does this matter to you? Speed! More cached content means better—faster—browsing for your shoppers.

With shoppers expecting highly personalized and more immersive shopping experiences, performance optimization becomes more difficult to configure and maintain. EverCache for WooCommerce takes everything you love about the WP Engine managed cache solution and expands it to WooCommerce users on our eCommerce plans with:

• WooCommerce integration that determines when cached pages can safely be delivered based on if dynamic content is being served.
• WooCommerces-specific rules that are continually audited and updated.

EverCache takes the guesswork out of caching configuration for WooCommerce and delivers more of your pages at peak performance.

How Does EverCache® for WooCommerce Work?

Every WP Engine customer using WooCommerce already benefits from the default WooCommerce recommended cache exclusions. However, WooCommerce uses cookie detection to bypass cache, and our eCommerce engineers noticed these cookies are applied even to static pages after a shopper adds an item to the cart. Serving static content without cache applied more than doubles a page’s load time!

So we implemented a new way of handling exclusion by detecting if dynamic content is being served. 

EverCache knows when to ignore the cookies used by WooCommerce and optimizes cache delivery for static pages. And it automatically bypasses cache when it will break functionality like on the cart and checkout pages or for authenticated shoppers.

The results? More cached pages are being served, especially for visitors further down the sales funnel. 

90% More Pages Benefit From Cache

We wanted to see just how many pages would benefit from our new intelligent cache feature, so we ran some tests. To set a baseline we tested 30 pages with and without our new EverCache feature enabled. As advertised, cached pages loaded 2x faster in nearly every key performance indicator, from First Contentful Paint to Cumulative Layout Shift.

WooCommerce-recommended exclusions do a decent job serving cached content for new and first-time visitors, so what’s the big deal? One significant issue is, after a shopper has added even one item to their cart, your pages are no longer being served from the cache—even blog posts and category pages.

That means the closer a visitor was to making a purchase, the slower our pages would load. Not good.

With EverCache we are able to serve 90% more cached pages to shoppers using the cart. EverCache lets you keep serving pages at top performance to shoppers the closer they get to purchasing.

The best part is that you can enable our fully managed WooCommerce-optimized cache with a single toggle switch, and it’s included for both our new and existing WP Engine eCommerce customers.

EverCache for WooCommerce comes enabled by default for all new sites and can be turned on with the flip of a switch for any existing sites.

WooCommerce Performance-Optimized Hosting

Performance is why people turn to WP Engine, and our customers see an average 30% lift in speed after migrating to WP Engine.  That’s why we are focusing on optimizing your store beyond WordPress best practices and why WooCommerce actually runs better on WP Engine eCommerce. If you have a store powered by WooCommerce, upgrading to an eCommerce plan will help you boost traffic and conversions with performance-optimized servers and the most powerful search tool for WordPress. 

Find out more about WP Engine’s WooCommerce-optimized eCommerce plans here or speak to a representative now for answers to your questions.