A Solution to a Very Slow WooCommerce Checkout

THE PROBLEM

We discovered the last step of the WooCommerce checkout was very slow, taking about 20 seconds to complete.  The orders eventually went through successfully.  The hangup seemed to be on the ?wc-ajax=checkout stage of the checkout.

In our case the problem was happening with all sites hosted on InMotion VPS servers.  We tested about 6 different sites, and even created a new one.  It was happening on all of them, even a completely different VPS server.  Other sites we tested on other hosts such as Siteground were not experiencing the issue.

It wasn’t the gateway, because it was doing it with just Pay By Check active.

It took almost 2 days to figure this out and we found very little information on the web about it.  There were plenty of olders posts about it, but very few solutions.

 

THE SOLUTION

The email sending was the next area of focus.  It must be hanging up on this process. Turning off the main order notification emails, showed an improvement and brought down to 8-10 seconds. Better than 20, but still unacceptable. Deferring transactional emails entirely is what solved it for us, which processes the emails after the order is submitted.   Adding this filter to the functions.php file resolved the issue.

Add this to your functions.php file.

add_filter('woocommerce_defer_transactional_emails', '__return_true' );

Best and Fastest Way To Migrate Your Email To a New Host

Switching to a new web hosting company and migrating your sites, databases, email and domain settings can be a daunting task for those that haven’t done a large number of them.   This is one of those areas where experience can make a huge difference in the success of the migration and the time it takes.  Many hosts offer free migration, but we always prefer to do it manually so each piece can be verified and tested and so we know everything was covered.  Also most importantly so we can make the DNS changes at the best time to minimize any downtime while it propagates.
Email has always been a piece that can really complicate things.   For those that use their web host as their mail server you need to get all those messages moved over.

The Best Way To Migrate Mail from One Web Server to Another Host.

Use cPanel to Copy over the /etc & /mail directories.

cPanel is key here.  I am a big fan of cPanel, and do not like the current trend of do away with it for proprietary interfaces or command line only.  Especially for WordPress sites, it is an essential tool for managing sites & hosting in my book.  A massive time saver.  Also a reason I do not recommend the Managed WordPress hosting services, such as Kinsta and WP Engine that don’t use a typical cPanel setup.

  1. Use cPanel File Manager.  Compress the /etc and /mail directories.
  2. Download the file
  3. Upload the file to the new host through cPanel file manager and
  4. Extract them in the root and replace the existing etc & mail directories.
  5. Done.  Connect via IMAP and carry on.

Shout out to the awesome support team at InMotion Hosting for this tip.
If you need help with migrating to a new host contact me.

How to take a Quick Screenshot or Window Capture on Windows 10

Often we just need a quick screenshot of an application window, such as a web browser, and we want to paste that into an email or word doc. For years I used the Snipping Tool built into windows, which is a great tool, but has a relatively cumbersome workflow when you just want a simple window grab and dump it into an email.
What I really want is to capture the screengrab to my clipboard so I can just paste it in.
Thankfully Windows 10 makes that easy, once you know about it.

How To Save Screenshot or Window Grab to Clipboard:

  • Capture an Application Window. 
    First make the window active by clicking in the title bar of the window and then press  ALT + Print Screen (or Fn + ALT + Print Screen)
  • Captures entire Screen = Print Screen

Then you can just use Paste and put the image where you want it.   It will likely be too large, so you’ll need to resize it once you paste it in.  A note on image size:  Some applications like Outlook will compress the image when resized, so you don’t end up emailing a full size large file when you only want a small version.  Other applications often keep the original resolution, so you could end up with large files.   Ideally if you have the time and it’s nice to optimize/reduce the images in photoshop or similar.
On many keyboards the Print Screen button will be a secondary function, so you will need to press the Fn key first.  For example on my Dell keyboard I would press and hold: Fn+Alt+Print Screen in that order if I wanted to capture a window.
 
 

Mail Routing Settings in cPanel

The likely reason your not receiving emails from your website forms

There is a problem we often see with new websites or after a hosting switch where email notifications from forms are not being received by the site owner.  Assuming there are no error messages appearing,  the first test is to try using an email recipient address that uses a different domain than the website.  If that successfully is received, it is likely you are using mail servers other than your host and therefore you need to set your hosting configuration to be a Remote Mail Exchanger rather than local.
By default most hosts assume that you will be using the server for email as well and it will set the DNS within the hosting company so that your web server is also your mail server.  So what happens here is that when a form is submitted from your website, it looks at the local DNS settings and then sends the email to itself, expecting the web hosting account to be your mail server.  The message never actually makes it out into the external DNS world to realized that your mail server is actually somewhere else like Google, a corporate server, or 3rd party hosted mail somewhere else.

REMOTE MAIL EXCHANGER in cPanel

  1. Log into cPanel
  2. Under MAIL > Advanced MX Editor you should see options to set your Email Routing
    Mail Routing Settings in cPanel
  3. Set it to Remote Mail Exchanger and Click Change.
  4. Test it again.  You may need to wait a little while for the change to take affect.  You can try testing right away, but maybe 30 minutes is a reasonable time.

 

Is Your Send From email using your domain?

Check the From address on your form settings and use an email address that also uses the site domain.  Some hosts require this, rather than just using the users email input into the form.

SMTP Authentication

If both of those methods fail, try SMTP Authentication.  In the event that your mail server is blocking mail from the web server, it may consider not a Safe Sender since it thinks only the main mail server should be sending email using the domain.  This is typically in corporate environments running their own mail servers.  SMTP Authentication will use the credentials and mail server settings of a valid account and will actually connect and relay the mail through the main mail server rather than use the web server.
There are plugins available for WordPress to make this pretty easy.

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