We wanted to post a little update letting you all know that we’re in the process of planning out and carrying out major updates to our website.
Our website runs on WordPress + Woocommerce and this is a great open-source platform. The issue we have right now is that since our Help Center also runs on this same server it can cause high traffic to the site (over 4,000 people a DAY) that slows down the eCommerce side of it. To speed up the site on both ends we are working on moving the Help Center to its own server and it will reside on the Support.TH3DStudio.com domain name once the move is completed.
Moving the Help Center Info
When we move the help center it will break links out to the current articles. We will set up redirects to direct people to the new URLs and if there are broken ones we will fix them.
We will also be selecting a new platform to host our documentation that is easier to navigate for all of you that use it for help with your printers and our products. If you have any suggestions on a good (preferably self-hosted option) let us know as we still are on the look for something and are testing internally.
General Site Slowness and Hosting Costs
We understand that people want the eCommerce sites to be quick and we agree. The issue with the help center being on the same site/server as our eCommerce store is that it slows it down. We can upgrade the server but the costs are quite frankly insane for more PHP workers. We like Kinsta (our web host) but we’d have to quadruple our hosting plan cost (over $600/month) just to get it quicker with the help center remaining on the main site. Please bear with us while we are working on this transition to improve the site speed.
Shop Updates
After we get the help center onto its own platform we will begin redesigning the entire website so that we can make it easier to find what you are looking for. This will be a complete overhaul and will happen on a staging site instead of doing it little by little on the live one.
If you have any suggestions on helping things run smoother please let us know, we’re open to feedback and ideas if this is something you are good at.
Happy Printing,
~Tim Hoogland
Owner – TH3D Studio LLC