In today’s world, eCommerce is the backbone for any business to expand its footprint globally. To keep this online business up and running, your website must be SEO optimized, easy to access and browse through. A slow WooCommerce online store can cost you revenue, loss of customers, and even lower search engine rankings.
Whether you’re looking to build a fast and efficient online store or optimize your existing one, WooCommerce website development plays a critical role in ensuring your platform meets both user and performance expectations. This guide will help you understand how to speed up your WooCommerce platform, fix issues impacting the website speed, and also identify the best speed plugins for WooCommerce.
Why speed matters for WooCommerce
Speed is an important factor for any online store be it WooCommerce or Shopify or Amazon. As per a user study, for every one-second time delay in loading of a webpage, there is a 7% drop in user conversions and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction online.
Also, Google considers the speed of your website as one of the website’s ranking factors. This means a faster site can improve your website’s SEO and make it rank higher.
How to measure the speed of your website?
You can use a website speed test to test the speed of your online WooCommerce store. There are several testing platforms such as WebPagetest, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTMetrix etc. However, before making changes, you should check your website speed across multiple platforms to ensure that your website is slower or not.
How to speed up your WooCommerce
1. Upgrade your hosting
The foundation of a fast WooCommerce store is a quality hosting provider. Try to choose a hosting provider that specializes in WooCommerce such as Bluehost or Hostinger and offers features like SSD storage, optimized servers, and robust security measures etc.
Source – Hostinger.com
2. Set up caching
Caching can help in a significant reduction of load on your server by serving static versions of your pages. Simply, every time a user visits your WooCommerce store, instead of processing the request afresh, the saved cache of the final HTML output can be directly made available to such a user. One of the highly recommended caching plugins for WooCommerce is WP Rocket.
Source – WP-rocket.me
3. Optimize images
Images make up a large portion of any e-commerce website. Using large and heavy photos can slow down your website. You can make use of tools like Smush or ShortPixel or Optimole etc to compress and optimize your images without losing the image quality. This will speed up the website loading at the time of user access.
Another good way to image-optimize your website is by enabling lazy loading which delays the loading of images on the website until they are about to enter the viewport. This will improve the initial load time of your WooCommerce store.
Source – shortpixel.com
4. Use a fast WooCommerce theme
Not all themes function well on the WooCommerce platform. While some themes are heavy and may take time to load, other themes load faster. Select a lightweight and fast-loading theme designed for compatibility with WooCommerce platforms, such as Astra or GeneratePress etc.
5. Minimize plugins
Using too many plugins can slow down your website. Deactivate and delete any unnecessary plugins. Also, replace poorly coded plugins with efficient alternatives to improve your website speed performance.
Source – WooCommerce.com
6. Enable a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN can speed up your site by serving your content from servers located closer to the users accessing your WooCommerce platform. The use of CDN like Cloudflare can significantly reduce the load on the server used by your website.
Source – cloudfare.com
7. Optimize your database
Carry out regular cleaning of your WooCommerce database to remove unnecessary data. Plugins like WP-Optimize can help you automate this cleanup process.
Source – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/
8. Update PHP version
Ensure your server is running the latest version of PHP. The latest versions are technically faster and provide security against malware and security attacks.
Source – woocommerce.com
9. Reduce external scripts
Reduce the use of external scripts, and third-party services and remove unused plugins that can slow down your website. You should only load scripts that are critically needed for your website.
10. Optimize WooCommerce settings
Modify the various features on the website such as product reviews, the number of products appearing on each page or optimization of the cart and checkout process etc to reduce the overall load on your server.
Regular technical checkups and maintenance of the WooCommerce store
Having an SEO-optimized and speed-efficient WooCommerce store is not a one-time activity. To ensure your e-commerce store runs effectively, you will have to do regular technical checkups and ensure one or more of the following –
- Your store is up-to-date with the latest software and technical upgrades.
- Perform regular (monthly or quarterly) performance audits of your website to ensure optimal website performance.
- Run regular security updates to remove bugs and malware.
- Ensure your WordPress themes and plugins are updated.
- Database optimisation for cleanup of unwanted website database.
Regular maintenance and updates are key to ensuring your WooCommerce website functions both effectively and efficiently.
What is the best speed plugin for WooCommerce?
WP Rocket is widely regarded as the best speed plugin for WooCommerce. It offers comprehensive caching solutions, lazy loading, database optimization, and more, all features designed to improve your site’s performance. Other notable mentions include LiteSpeed Cache and W3 Total Cache, which also offer robust features for speeding up WooCommerce stores.
Conclusion
Optimizing your WooCommerce store for speed is essential for providing a great user experience, improving SEO, and increasing conversions. As always, don’t forget that the optimization of your store is a continuous process. By upgrading your hosting, setting up caching, optimizing images, and using the right plugins, you can ensure your WooCommerce store runs smoothly and efficiently.
Want an expert to handle the performance of your WooCommerce store, talk to our WooCommerce experts and supercharge your website today.
