We recently built an ecommerce site for Broadway Liquor Store Wine N Liquor which required an automated US sales tax solution for all 50 states. There are a number of automated tax solutions available including paid options like TaxJar and Avalara, and a free option from WooCommerce themselves which operates within the Jetpack / WooCommerce services plugins. Each has their limitations but what we discovered after testing was that all of these automated solutions hog a lot of server resources and run very slow!

All automated plugins ping their own servers to grab the tax rates data based on your cart, when you enter the checkout. Since the introduction of HTTP/2, page speed enthusiasts will note that you shouldn’t load content from other domains than your own anymore. Not only is there the extra HTTP request to an external domain, but these requests are really, really, REALLY slow. In fact, WooCommerce Services (the free option from WooCommerce) added 9 seconds to our load time on the checkout. Completely unacceptable.

After numerous configuration tests we came to the conclusion that loading the tax rates directly in to your site is a much faster way to calculate tax. Yes, we are talking about 50,000 rows of sales tax for all 50 US states. But scanning 50,000 database rows loaded from your own server is much quicker than scanning 50,000 rows from a database on the other side of the continent. There’s no reason to be at the mercy of someone else’s server location; do it yourself.

The result of this was we created a full WooCommerce Sales Tax CSV file ready for one-click upload, which we’ve turned in to a product which is available to purchase on the Sales Tax USA website. This WooCommerce Sales Tax CSV is only $19 and we will keep it up to date with the latest tax rates.

Download it now!

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