Geolocation query string: good or bad?

[FromBelgium]

For pricing purpose I need to geolocate the user of my woocommerce site. Since I also have a caching plugin I need to append a query string to each page, different for each country. For example https://example.com becomes https://example.com?v=d3dcf429c679. Can this affect my rankings? If someone links to my site they will probably also use that query string.

[edited by: not2easy at 1:46 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2021]
[edit reason] readability [/edit]

[lammert]

By adding a query string per country, you will practically kill your caching functionality, at least if it is done through a WordPress plugin. You might look in using a geo cookie instead. You can use geo cookies with a smart front-end reverse proxy server which only adds the cookie, and I also know of at least one WordPress caching plugin which supports caching based on the value of certain cookies.

The best solution would however be to stop caching entirely. I have a WooCommerce based site serving multiple countries, languages, shipping zones and tax regimes and all those combinations made caching nearly impossible. Instead, I moved to a dedicated server for the setup, meticulously optimized all aspects from the database configuration, the database to PHP communication, the PHP setup and the plugin settings and went from 1.8 seconds TTFB to 250 milliseconds.

There are two added values to stopping caching on a WooCommerce site. One is that your stock quantities will always be valid. The second is that you will have less cart abandonments. This is because WooCommerce site caching only works on the static pages, but not on the cart and checkout pages, and for users who are logged in. With an eCommerce site, you don't want to make the people happy who just fly by, you want to make the people happy who are willing to place the order and send you money. The best way to do that is to make their pathway to the payment button as smooth as possible, by having fast loading pages up-to the point where they press "Pay".

[FromBelgium]

Hi Lammert, thanks a lot for your reply. I removed the cashing plugin.

[lammert]

If you run into performance problems without the caching plugin and you have access to the command line of the server where the site is running on, use the command htop to display the processes when pages of the site of loading. If Apache/PHP CPU utilization during the page load is high (>85%), your site performance is CPU bound. Otherwise the database side is the limiting factor. Optimization steps depend on what is limiting you.