Customer download speed slow

Hi @exxis,

Sorry to hear about this, did you already get in contact with your host for that download speed issue?

This is server dependant and they should have tools to further check and provide more insights on why the download speed is slower in comparison with an earlier period.

Thanks.

Hi,
We’ve not heard back from you in a while, so I’m marking this thread as resolved. Hopefully, the above info was helpful and you were able to proceed as advised.

If you have further questions, please feel free to open a new topic.

Thanks.

I’ve contacted my hosting provider. However they could not find any issue with the server. So something must have changed but from the hardware site everything seems to be working.
Also nothing on our plesk or woocommerce configuration changed.
However this problem affects all two stores.

Hey @exxis,

Thanks for getting back.

In order to narrow down the possible causes of this behavior you could enable Debugging following our support documentation:

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-product-search/api/debugging/

Also, PHP error logs can be useful when investigating an issue. You can check WooCommerce fatal errors logs and other error logs in a few possible places on the server:

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/finding-php-error-logs/

Hope this helps.

Hello Mirko,

thank you we will check the error logs if there are errors and let you know. However the plesk support and also our hosting provider did an extensive test and found no problems, so we’re currently a little bit stuck on where the problem could be.

Best wishes

exxis

Hi there,

It would be interesting to know how you measure the download speed. If you are experiencing limited speed on your local network, this may not be the case on another network.

Does your host have tools to test the download speed of their server? This can be useful both for evaluating the capabilities of the server and for verifying if the speed of the server itself is causing slow downloads.

We’ll be here if and/or when you are ready to continue.

Thanks.

Hello,

we used different devices (with different ISP) to test the direct download speed the hosting company also ran multiple bandwith test on the server directly.
However we found the cause of the problem but don’t have a solution yet.
Cloudflare is the problem, because it proxys the hostname/domain and it seems this also happens when customers download something from the store.
We’ve disabled the cloudflare proxy and everything was fine. However to work around the issue we would need a subdomain serving the files.

Is there a way to achieve this? Currently the “normal” string for the download is https://example.com/?download_file=xxx and so on. Is it possible to change the code/path so woocommerce would use something like https://dl.example.com/?download_file=xxx so we could add the subdomain to the dns but without the proxy?

However we found the cause of the problem but don’t have a solution yet. Cloudflare is the problem, because it proxys the hostname/domain and it seems this also happens when customers download something from the store.
We’ve disabled the cloudflare proxy and everything was fine.

Ahh, good to hear that you found the issue! ??

However to work around the issue we would need a subdomain serving the files.

Is there a way to achieve this? Currently the “normal” string for the download is https://example.com/?download_file=xxx and so on. Is it possible to change the code/path so woocommerce would use something like https://dl.example.com/?download_file=xxx so we could add the subdomain to the dns but without the proxy?

There’s no easy way to do this with WooCommerce alone. You might be able to do something like this though:

– Get the subdomain pointed to a specific folder on your hosting account.
– Move your downloadable files to that folder.
– Unproxy that subdomain in Cloudflare.
– Point the File URLs for each downloadable product to the new file locations.

That’s probably the first way I’d try to go about this, at least.

Let us know if that helps. ?? Thanks!

That could work if I use the redirect mode to deliver the downloads, however then the link would be public and not protected anymore.
If I use x-accel or force download then woocommerce would server the files like I wrote above and the same problem would occur. Currently also the downloads are outside the webroot to protect them.

Hey @exxis,

Thanks for getting back.

Did you already get in contact with the support folks at Cloudflare? From what I understand, Cloudflare’s non-cached static files download speed can be slow due to the account being limited or the wrong settings on Cloudflare’s console panel. Cloudflare support help center will be the best place to ask.

I’m now closing this thread as it doesn’t seem to be an issue related to WooCommerce itself. Feel free to create a new topic if you need assistance with anything else.

Thanks.