Geotobox.com is an e-commerce website that sells gift boxes, created and operated by Shanghai Geoto. The company initially opened online stores in some large e-commerce platforms, and later found there were better opportunities for self-built independent e-commerce website.

When Geoto built its e-commerce website, they used WordPress + WooCommerce system and a hosted server. With business growth, plus a large quantity of visits brought by the the company’s advertising activities on Google, the hosted server faced rapidly increasing pressure. Hardware configuration of the server increased from the initial 2CPU + 4GMemory up to 6CPU + 12GMemory. To meet application requirements, the number of plugins used also increased dramatically to more than thirty. Geoto purchased a premium version of theme, as well as numerous premium plugins. When encountered with problems, they had to seek solutions in the community, or turn to authors of those themes and plugins for help. Very soon, this operating model failed. Website performance bottleneck and poor user experience were the major issues.

1. In order to meet the requirements by Google Ads, hundreds of single products were added to the website, which could not be properly managed or operated by Variable Product. The Variable Product loaded very slowly, and it took more than ten seconds to see the result of a change in Options.
2. The premium version of theme and page builder plugins were used for page effects, however the pages generated were extremely bloated.
3. To gain more business opportunities, the site evolved from a single English version to six language versions by using multilingual plugins. Translation problems arose rapidly and frequently.
4. Various plugins added too many bloated code to the website pages. Compatibility issues caused a large number of malfunctions and even shut down of the website from time to time. These needed to be handled frequently, which is very labor-intensive.
5. Optimization plugins were used to improve website performance, however problems occurred from time to time and therefore cache had to be cleaned frequently. When caches were being rebuilt, the website performance dropped significantly.
6. Although about 70% of the customers were mobile phone users, their experience with the website was poor. The phone overlay menu was slow to load.
7. Security plugins were used due to lack of security knowledge, resulting in an even worse website performance.
8. Website performance could no longer be improved through simply enhancing hardware configuration of the server.

To tackle the above issues, we helped Geotobox.com successfully add Options to Single Product without any performance deterioration. For details, please refer to our plugin WooCommerce Excel Helper. In the cooperation that followed, we continued to improve the website performance.

1. The hosted website was transferred to a cloud server which gave us full customization and optimization capabilities.
2. Function of the installed plugins was moved to the OS and webserver so as to reduce use of plugins. These plugins were primarily security and optimization ones.
3. Bloated plugins were replaced with appropriate ones and WordPress’ own features. These were mainly multilingual and page builder plugins.
4. A wpmobile theme for optimization developed by us was put in place. User experience improved significantly.
5. A few practical functions were concentrated into the plugin we developed, reducing the use of various plugins.
6. Thousands of images in the website were converted from JPG format to WebP format, and thus page loading was sped up a great deal. This image conversion did not rely on plugins or webserver redirect, but leveraged WordPress’ own features. In this way, the website kept its original functionality.
7. Optimization was done to the maximum. Loading conditions were customized for each plugin so that they loaded as needed. Javascript was also made to load as needed. When users visited different pages, the website only loaded the plugins that were needed, resulting in an increased speed.

The optimization achieved great success. Even with a significant increase in traffic, hardware configuration of the website was reduced. An ordinary cloud server with 4CPU + 8Gmemory could easily cope with more than 50,000 visits per day. Stability and accessibility of the website was improved significantly , and so was user experience.

Chris, a customer of geotobox.com, commented:
I just want to add that you website is absolutely amazing regarding ease of use and clarity.
I love it! Great job!

Sales of geotobox.com has increased about 50%.