Faster checkouts. Free migrations. 
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is the leading WordPress-based eCommerce platform purpose-built for selling digital products, including software, plugins, eBooks, templates, and music. Unlike traditional eCommerce solutions designed around physical goods and shipping logistics, EDD is engineered for the unique demands of digital commerce: secure file delivery, software licensing, subscription management, and real-time transactional workflows that digital creators depend on every day.
As the platform grew and its infrastructure demands intensified, EDD’s President, Chris Klosowski, recognized the need for a hosting environment that could match the pace and complexity of a serious digital eCommerce operation. Before migrating to Rapyd Cloud, EDD faced a familiar challenge: balancing the need for hands-on infrastructure control with the reliability and performance of a fully managed platform. Most hosting solutions fell into one of two extremes: either fully DIY setups that demanded constant manual tuning, or fully managed environments that offered convenience but stripped away the autonomy EDD’s team required.
In this case study, Chris Klosowski shares how Rapyd Cloud has transformed EDD’s hosting experience, from eliminating performance bottlenecks and handling unpredictable traffic spikes with confidence to enabling a complete brand relaunch without a moment of doubt on launch day. He also explains why purpose-built eCommerce hosting matters for EDD store owners, and what separates stores that can run anywhere from those that need infrastructure designed to protect their revenue.
Rapyd Cloud: Pease briefly tell us about your background and role at Easy Digital Downloads, and what initially drew you to building tools for digital commerce and eCommerce businesses.
Chris: I’m Chris Klosowski, President of Easy Digital Downloads. I’ve been part of the WordPress community for over 20 years and involved in digital eCommerce for more than a decade. I started as a software developer, and through my own experiences trying to sell my digital products, I saw firsthand how few tools were genuinely built for digital creators. That gap turned into a passion for building eCommerce solutions that actually fit the way digital products are sold.
Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress-based eCommerce platform designed specifically for selling digital products like software, plugins, eBooks, templates, and music. Where most eCommerce tools are built around physical goods and shipping, EDD is focused entirely on the digital product experience: secure file delivery, software licensing, subscription management, and the unique workflows that digital creators depend on.
Rapyd Cloud: What do people often underestimate about the technical demands of running a serious Easy Digital Downloads store?
Chris: A few things. First, resilience during traffic spikes. Digital product stores don’t have gradual traffic curves. You get a surge during a launch, a sale event, or a feature mention, and your checkout needs to handle that without flinching. A failed transaction during a spike isn’t just a bad experience, it’s lost revenue you likely won’t recover.
Second, the importance of transactional data integrity. EDD store owners depend on accurate sales data to build reports with actionable takeaways: revenue trends, customer behavior, and product performance. If your infrastructure can’t keep up with the volume of transactions being written, your data suffers, and so do the decisions you make from it.
People also underestimate how digital eCommerce differs from physical eCommerce when it comes to security. There’s no shipping delay. Once a purchase is made, the product is delivered instantly. That means your infrastructure needs to handle secure file delivery, license key generation, and access control in real time, with no room for gaps.
And finally, growth. A store doing a few sales a day has very different infrastructure needs than one processing hundreds or thousands of sales. What works at one stage can become a bottleneck at the next. Serious EDD stores need hosting that scales with them, not hosting they’ll outgrow.
Rapyd Cloud: Before moving to Rapyd Cloud, what infrastructure or hosting constraints did EDD need to overcome?
Chris: For us, the biggest constraint was the balance between autonomy and performance. We need modern infrastructure like current PHP versions, proper caching layers, and optimized database configurations. But we also need the ability to get in and manage those things ourselves when the situation calls for it.
Most hosting platforms fall into one of two camps: fully DIY, where you’re tuning everything yourself, or fully managed, where performance decisions are made for you and you have no control. Neither works well for a team like ours that knows what it needs but also wants the infrastructure handled at a high level by default.
Staging environments were another non-negotiable. We don’t push anything to production without testing in staging first. That’s a hard rule. When your marketing site is also your storefront, it’s critical infrastructure. We needed one-click staging creation and rebuilding, something fast enough that it’s never a reason to skip the step.
On top of that, in eCommerce, time to first byte and page load speeds are paramount. Slow page loads cost you conversions. Our previous infrastructure wasn’t giving us the performance ceiling we needed, and we knew there was room to improve significantly.
Rapyd Cloud: Why does hosting matter so much for Easy Digital Downloads, and why does Rapyd Cloud meet that standard?
Chris: EDD stores aren’t typical WordPress sites. They’re processing transactions, delivering files, validating licenses, managing subscriptions, and generating the data that store owners use to make business decisions, all in real time. Every one of those operations depends on the infrastructure underneath it.
When hosting falls short, it doesn’t just slow things down. It affects revenue, data integrity, and customer trust.
Rapyd Cloud meets that standard because it was built with these workloads in mind. Resource isolation, a sane caching infrastructure, performance consistency, staging environments, and the autonomy to manage your own platform without giving up the benefits of managed hosting.
For us, the move to Rapyd Cloud wasn’t just a hosting change. It was removing a ceiling on what we could do and how fast we could move. That’s what the right infrastructure should do.
Rapyd Cloud: What made it clear that EDD needed a different hosting approach than what it was using before?
Chris: Migrating where your website is hosted is never an easy decision. For us, the tipping point was realizing that projects were being held up waiting on infrastructure changes, things we had to request and then wait for someone else to complete. When your roadmap is blocked by hosting tickets, that’s a problem.
We needed an environment where we had the autonomy to make those changes ourselves, on our own timeline, without sacrificing the performance and reliability that a managed platform provides.
Rapyd Cloud: After moving to Rapyd Cloud, what differences did you notice first in performance, stability, or day-to-day operations?
Chris: The time to first byte improvement was instantly noticeable. Our TTFB was cut in half, if not more, right out of the gate. That’s the kind of change you can feel just navigating your own site.
Our team instantly saw the speed increase not only on the front end but in the management of the store as well. Tasks like admin operations and checkout processing, things that typically bypass full page caching, were still fast. That told us the underlying infrastructure was genuinely performant, not just propped up by a caching layer.
Beyond raw performance, the day-to-day operations got noticeably smoother. Monitoring the stability of our platform has become easier. We had clear visibility into how things were running without having to dig for it. And the tools we needed were right there: changing PHP versions, accessing logs. Things that used to require a support request were now just part of our workflow. It removed a lot of friction from how we operate.
Rapyd Cloud: How has hosting on Rapyd Cloud changed your confidence around launches, updates, traffic spikes, or high-revenue periods?
Chris: Because of the way Rapyd’s infrastructure works and isolates our performance from other customers, I’m far less concerned with traffic spikes, sale periods, or launches. We’re not sharing resources with a noisy neighbor. Our performance is our performance, regardless of what’s happening elsewhere on the platform.
We recently launched a completely new website with all new branding, and the process really highlighted that confidence. Between the staging environment and the ability to automate updates through supported SSH access, we were able to plan and execute the entire rollout with a level of confidence we wouldn’t have had before. There was no crossing our fingers on launch day. We’d already tested everything thoroughly and had the tools to deploy it on our terms.
Rapyd Cloud: What improvements have you seen in handling real EDD workloads, like checkouts, concurrent buyers, database activity, and spikes?
Chris: Overall, our performance metrics are far more stable. We used to see ups and downs, unpredictable fluctuations that made it hard to know what kind of experience a customer was getting at any given moment. That’s gone now, and that’s a huge relief.
Our Google Lighthouse scores have also become far more consistent, which is something that matters more than people realize. It means we can ensure that users are getting the same experience no matter when they visit our site, whether it’s a quiet Tuesday or the middle of a sale event. That consistency is what lets you optimize with confidence, because you’re not chasing performance issues that come and go.