Alpa and Seravo: How to Make Your E-commerce Site a Powerhouse

The convenience of digital commerce has won many hearts, and today, goods are acquired from online stores. Do you want a peek behind the scenes of an online store? Alpa is a Finnish brand that has successfully risen to the top in the world of e-commerce with the help of Seravo, and it continues to expand its operations into brick-and-mortar stores and international markets.

Why is a high-performing and fast-loading site critical for the operation of online stores? What tools can be used to diagnose a slow site, and how can it be sped up? Alpa found a partner in Seravo that has made their online store more efficient than before — in this story, we’ll tell you how!

“A malfunctioning online store is like a brick-and-mortar shop with stuck door hinges.”

— Jaakko Taipale, Head of IT, Alpa

Durable Knits from Alpaca Wool

Founded in 2012 in Jyväskylä, Finland, Alpa is an active Seravo customer. Their alpaknitwear.com Woocommerce store, which sells products made from alpaca wool, has been hosted on Seravo’s premium hosting platform since 2019.

Even though the company has expanded with its own brick-and-mortar stores very recently, Alpa still relies heavily on digital sales. Running the online store and expanding operations wouldn’t be possible without a skilled team. Alpa’s Head of IT, Jaakko Taipale, ensures that orders keep rolling in. A typical workday can involve everything from web development to warehouse integrations and automation.

Jaakko and his team keep the heart of the online store beating 24/7, and we at Seravo are happy to be a part of their success story. Alpa’s knitwear products are timelessly stylish, comfortable, and high-quality. These are all important qualities that make a garment as durable as possible! In addition to selling knitwear, Alpa also offers a repair service, which extends the lifespan of the products even further.

A Good Partner for WooCommerce

Alpa relies on WooCommerce. With numerous available plugins, WordPress and WooCommerce offer a lot of features and possibilities as a business expands and evolves – but the end result can turn out to be quite complex. Jaakko describes the whole setup as a house of cards that requires constant attention and finding the right plugins. “Just one faulty plugin can make the whole house of cards collapse. Our goal is to spend as little time as possible on fixes and maintenance, so we have more time for development.”

This is why it’s crucial to have expert-level support for running the online store, and why it is important to work with proactive partners. As Alpa’s previous hosting services could no longer handle the growing web traffic, it was time to find a new, reliable partner that would provide not only server space but also maintenance to support the site and the business. “A malfunctioning online store is like a brick-and-mortar shop with stuck door hinges,” Jaakko says with a chuckle.

Peak Performance from Seravo

Of all the WordPress hosting providers, Alpa chose Seravo for several good reasons:

• Improved search engine visibility. When you use a local hosting service, your site’s loading times improve, and search engines get stronger hints about your relevance in a specific country.
• More optimization, not just hardware. Simply adding more server power isn’t enough; you need optimization, caching, and meticulous fine-tuning.
• Peak performance and straightforward support. Alpa succeeds because its online store is lightning-fast and Seravo’s support is proactive.

According to Jaakko, it’s great to see how easy it is to reach Seravo’s support team and how they always find a sensible and effective solution to any problem together. Active communication builds trust, so when a tough situation arises, they know how to handle it.

“When something works, it just works. There are also generic, shared hosting service providers, and you can do everything yourself if you want to… But no matter the stack, it needs to be optimized. If you don’t pay attention to that, your site won’t perform,” Jaakko notes.

How to Optimize with Seravo

What can be revealed when you start investigating a slow site? Alpa’s online store, alpaknitwear.com, was occasionally running slowly. A performance analysis was conducted, and the results suggested that a large number of order details were slowing down the site at the database level. By enabling WooCommerce’s HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) feature, the database was streamlined, and the site’s speed improved.

In WordPress, both the wp_postmeta and wp_posts database tables significantly affect site performance, specifically how and how quickly information can be retrieved from them. If they have grown unnecessarily large, processing them and loading the site becomes slow. Our previous blog post explains in more detail what HPOS is and how to enable it.

The site’s performance was also analyzed with Tideways, which revealed that slow queries were also being made to another table in the database. While there weren’t many of these queries, they were exceptionally slow as the table lacked a database index. Once the index was created, a single query’s speed improved from 0.388 seconds to 0.002 seconds.

A High-Performing Online Store Benefits Everyone

Solving website bottlenecks works best when site developers and server experts collaborate. It’s in everyone’s best interest for a site to work as well as possible: the site owner, the server admins, the developer, and especially the end-user all benefit from smooth data flow.

Product drops are a key part of Alpa’s online business. Previously, alpaknitwear.com would hit bottlenecks with just 300 simultaneous users. After optimization, even over 500 simultaneous sessions showed no signs of slowing down.

Alpa and E-commerce Trends

For Alpa, the online store is central to its operations, generating about 55% of its turnover. This is why it’s important to constantly look for new ways to improve the customer experience.

• New pop-up stores and product launches: The online store is thriving, but it’s also good to go out and meet customers beyond the digital world.
• Digital innovations: Future e-commerce will increasingly use automation, feature more live shopping (selling products in livestreams), and utilize 3D models for product fitting.
• Simple is beautiful: The ordering process should be as straightforward and user-friendly as possible.
• Security first: Protecting customer data and responding to cyber threats are becoming more and more critical. Reliable partners like Seravo are key in this area.

Convenience, Expertise, and Problem-Solving

Having great business partners and a focus on what’s essential really takes an online store to the next level. Jaakko notes that maintaining an online store is a process that requires continuous evaluation of situations and resources: how much should you take care of on your own? For Alpa, Seravo has proven to be a solution-oriented partner that shares its expertise to ensure the overall quality is as high as possible.

Great products alone are not enough for an online store to succeed. It also takes strong technical expertise, continuous evaluation, and partners who genuinely understand your needs and want to solve problems with you. “It’s good to have a partner who approaches things seriously and effectively,” Jaakko concludes.