WebWhim had recently served a client whose brochure/WooCommerce website became very slow – about 25 seconds to open a page on a desktop device. After investigation, we identified that the client’s website was hacked at least four years ago and used as a farm for keeping a massive amount of backlinks by the blackhat SEO intruder. The size of the client’s database grew out of control to 15GB (with the typical limit of 1Gb for WordPress databases), adding every 3 minutes for the last four years a backlink and a related descriptive text.
The good news is that we had managed to remove malware using WordFence. The bad news is that a hosting provider did not automatically notify a client that his database exceeded the size limit. There is no way to back up a database of this size using any regular tools or backup plugin. Without a backup, there is a significant risk to lose the whole website during the cleaning procedure with WP-Optimize or a similar tool. The time was ticking. Therefore the only solution that remained was to recreate this website anew manually, host it with a different provider, and add another security level – we had chosen WordFence.
This action alone improved website download time tenfold from 25 to 2.0 seconds. The client is now running his website in a much more secure environment. Nevertheless, the website is never safe if there is no routine security maintenance in place. The number of attacks on the client website is still very high and quite persistent – about one attempt per 30 minutes from the different IP addresses each day after the move. Fortunately, so far, the hoster and the Wordfence plugin are doing their job of blocking the hackers.
The next step will be to replace the WooCommerce plugin with Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart, move DNS hosting to Cloudflare, and add a scheduled weekly cleanup of the database.
When using Cloudflare CDN, most geolocations are served from the nearby server network except for Bahrain(served from Germany), India (served from Singapore) and South Korea (served from Japan).
Using the WordPress platform, you can benefit from:
The Squarespace customer base is stagnating for the last couple of years. Unless Squarespace manages to deliver new features, it might start to decline. The niche offering – a stylish website with limited customisation options – is also under attack by Weebly, who provides free hosting but nevertheless struggles to offer exciting new features to eCommerce users since its acquisition by Square in 2018. The sites built with Weebly show substantially faster speed than Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace, but its market share is about three times smaller. And there is a good reason why most users stay away from Weebly. The Weebly platform is famous for its decision to make any changes to the website as final and irreversible. The user does not have to save their editing as it is done automatically. But the platform has no option to undo the changes or restore from the backup if something goes wrong. WordPress users have access to the unlimited undo function using the long history of changes in the Elementor Pro editor. We are enjoying the staging environment for making changes to the design before applying them to the working website. We have for granted regular automatic backups performed by the hosting provider and the capability to restore from the selected backup in the CPanel. It is incomprehensible to consider moving from WordPress to Weebly as you will have to have the bomb disposal squad member’s nerves to work with Weebly.
The Shopify platform’s impressive recent growth evident in the timeline Figure is mostly related to their extensive support for a dropshipping business model. This alone will help grow their user base even without improving slow page loading speed on mobile devices.
If you decided to update your old website, make your choice:
