Introducing: ShopShield, The Ultimate Tool For WooCommerce Performance

Since 2020, we’ve been delivering WooCommerce on our platform, supporting businesses ranging from small SMBs to global powerhouse e-commerce companies like Bird Buddy. The most common issue we’ve seen is when a flash sale occurs, effectively creating a massive frenzy of traffic at once. 

In many cases, this traffic can flood an origin. Even if autoscaling is in place, it takes time for that scaling to take place, resulting in a bad visitor experience.

Over the past few months, we’ve had some customers run mega sales, and we’ve enabled Cloudflare’s Waiting Room for them. This great product has limitations at scale for a company like Rocket.net, hosting nearly 100,000 sites. 

Fresh ideas to effectively handle traffic bursts on WooCommerce sites have traditionally been addressed at the origin by throwing more hardware at the problem. However, this comes with a hefty cost and subpar visitor experience. At Rocket.net, we do things differently, so we leveraged modern technology and took the initiative to engineer an intelligent solution for all our customers.

Today, after successfully impacting over five million visitors with this new tool, I’m happy to announce the release of ShopShield, which may be one of our most innovative features to date.

ShopShield is a service we built on top of Cloudflare Enterprise Workers to help optimize traffic bursts to the origin. Regardless of how many servers or fancy autoscaling buzzwords get thrown your way, WordPress/WooCommerce spikes can be hard to handle.

From the time it takes autoscaling to scale up to the dependency on MySQL, sudden traffic bursts (effectively a human DDoS) can cause significant issues. While we still see a 90%+ cache hit ratio on many WooCommerce sites, many requests cannot be cached.

It’s also not uncommon for us to see traffic bursts coming from newsletter blasts, which may contain custom query strings for tracking or server-side tracking that has to run, resulting in a cache miss. 

To solve this, we created a service that lives on the edge to intelligently manage traffic as it gets sent to the WordPress site. Think of it like Black Friday years ago, when people still went to stores. They would all try to cram into the front door simultaneously, causing fights and a lousy buyer experience.

With ShopShield, we help break this crowd into chunks at the front door by slowing it down slightly, resulting in a delightful visitor experience. Since humans all read, type, and interact at different speeds, controlling the initial click is the key to solving this issue. Once a visitor is through ShopShield, there is no artificial delay in future requests during their session.

How it works

ShopShield can be enabled on any WooCommerce site on Rocket.net within seconds or scheduled to activate at a specific time for coordinated future sales.

When ShopShield is enabled on a WooCommerce site, visitors will see a brief and customizable loading screen, which intelligently adds an artificial delay to the initial routing and requires no interaction from the visitor:

Once ShopShield has cleared the visitor, they will not see this again for their session. This time period is critical as it helps spread the burst out, ultimately enabling a smooth browsing experience for everyone.

Note: ShopShield will never execute on a known bot like Google, Bing, etc., so it will never negatively impact SEO.

Not using WooCommerce.. What about regular websites?

No problem! ShopShield is fully compatible with non-WooCommerce sites if you expect heavy dynamic traffic from sending a newsletter or running an ad campaign. 

Having ShopShield enabled ensures that your visitors will have a positive experience during maximum activity from your marketing and advertising efforts.

Example

Here is a real-world example where a customer of ours was running a sale for GPUs on their WooCommerce site:

You can see where the server CPU load was consistent, and then massive traffic was received. When we enabled ShopShield, the server started receiving these requests in an orderly fashion and successfully delivered them to the visitors, resulting in lower CPU resource consumption.

The world has been so focused on core web vitals and TTFB that companies are taking aggressive steps to please bots. What we realized at Rocket.net is that there are some times when > 100ms TTFB is acceptable, especially if it results in more sales. We still see 8-10 second TTFB today at some competitors, and that’s not even with high volume!

This does not mean that our servers are subpar and can’t handle traffic volume, nor does this mean Rocket.net is slow. It simply means that Rocket.net is thinking outside the box to create the best possible experience for the visitor, not the robots.

This is a very similar experience when using a Roku device. Sometimes, when I load Netflix on my Roku, I see a brief loading screen, and I’m right into the Netflix app. Roku wasn’t installing an update or doing anything special besides the device’s work to launch the app. Rather than seeing no action on click, I’m shown a very brief loader to let me know it’s doing work, which is much appreciated and sensible. 

Future Efforts

As we continue developing ShopShield, we will have various new features (some I can’t quite disclose yet)… but what kind of launch would this be if we didn’t mention AI? In all seriousness, one upcoming feature I’m super excited about is the ability for customers to opt into traffic management powered by AI. 

Our AI traffic management will be capable of detecting fluctuations in traffic patterns way ahead of a CPU spike, as seen below:

In this scenario, ShopShield would automatically activate and level out traffic before it could hit the CPU ceiling, providing the ultimate experience for website visitors and our customers.

That is just one of many things we have planned for this incredible new feature, so stay tuned—2025 will continue to be a big one!

How to use ShopShield

ShopShield has already delivered a great experience to over five million visitors on our platform and is immediately available to all Rocket.net customers who want to participate in our open beta through our team and will be available in the Rocket.net API and Portal within the next few weeks.

Not a Rocket.net customer yet? That’s no problem. Simply fill out this form, and we can schedule a demo!