SiteGround has recently announced the launch of a new WooCommerce plan called the “WooCommerce Bundle” which comes preinstalled with premium plugins, automatic SSL Configuration and is based upon their fantastic GoGeek Plan.
SiteGround’s GoGeek plan is their highest level Shared Hosting plan and contains a whole host of features such as Site Staging, SuperCacher (NGINX + Memcache), SSD storage, Free SSL, PHP 7 + OpCache. Our review either covers these features and links to more in-depth articles about them, which you can read here.
What we will cover in this article is the differences between the GoGeek Plan and the WooCommerce Bundle. The WooCommerce specific features are as follows:
Preinstalled Woocommerce
When you first sign up to the WooCommerce Bundle, you will find that WordPress and WooCommerce are preinstalled by default.
Preinstalled Storefront Theme
Also, you will find that the Storefront Theme is preinstalled on your default WordPress installation. Storefront is the free theme built by WooCommerce to work seamlessly with their product. By using this theme, you will have no issue with any conflicts with WooCommerce, and have a great clean theme to work from. You can see a screenshot of Storefront below:
There are of course some great Child Themes available for Storefront, or indeed you can even just purchase a WooCommerce ready theme from Themeforest. Either way, there are plenty of choices to make your website your own.
Akismet Plus + VaultPress Lite Subscription included & Activated
As part of the WooCommerce bundle, you also get a subscription to the VaultPress Backup Bundle. This includes VaultPress Lite and Akismet Plus and is worth $9 per month or $99 per year.
These happen to be the two products we use ourselves.
- **Akismet Plus **is the premium comment spam filter. You can read more about how you can use this to stop comment spam with this tutorial. Most people we imagine do not purchase the premium, but if using it for business purposes (which presumably a WooCommerce store is), you need the paid version to abide by their license.
- **VaultPress Lite **is a backup system that automatically backs up your website to a third party server each day. We always recommend implementing a third party backup system, no matter how great your host is, and VaultPress is the one we use ourselves (we use the real-time VaultPress backup for $15 per month), but if you don’t update your content regularly then VaultPress Lite is more than good enough. One great thing about VaultPress is that it allows easy restores to a new server should you ever need to (not that you will need to with SiteGround as they are reliable), but it is worth mentioning.
Free Private SSL Automatically installed & configured in WordPress
While the GoGeek plan comes with a free SSL, the point they are trying to make with the WooCommerce bundle is that SiteGround will not only install the SSL certificate for you, but they will configure your WordPress installation to use the certificate (i.e. use HTTPS).
Final Thoughts
We are big fans of the SiteGround GoGeek plan (we use the Cloud, but also maintain a GoGeek subscription), but if you are relatively new to WooCommerce, then this is a great hosting plan. The fact that you can get up and running with spam filtering, external backups, and SSL it is a no-brainer in terms of ease of use.
The only thing we would mention is that the default premium subscription to Akismet Plus and VaultPress Lite may not be suitable. For instance, if it is just a hobby website you may not want Akismet Plus, but equally if you make lots of changes, or have lots of transactions, we would recommend the full VaultPress subscription that backs up in real time (this is what we use).
Regarding pricing, the Premium subscriptions do not appear to be discounted, so you may want to get a cheaper plan (i.e. Growbig) or the GoGeek plan separately and purchase the Premium subscriptions at VaultPress separately.