Table Of Content
- Why Speed Matters for an Online Store?
- How to Measure the Performance of Your WooCommerce Website?
- Tips to Speed Up WooCommerce Store
- Speed up your WooCommerce Store Today!
Why Speed Matters for an Online Store?
For any product-based company, an eCommerce platform is one of the best ways to improve the business. It helps you reach out to millions of your target audience, market your products, and give your users a chance to buy them more effortlessly. That’s why experts opt for WooCommerce to create their own eCommerce website.
Launched in 2008, WooCommerce is one of the best platforms for creating an eCommerce store, with millions of eCommerce stores built using it. Let’s check out a few prominent statistics of WooCommerce:
- In 2022, the market share of WooCommerce stood at 36.68%, which made it the most prominent eCommerce development platform.
- So far, WooCommerce has been downloaded through the official WordPress library over 161 million times and counting.
- In 2020, WooCommerce amounted to $20 Billion in sales.
- Over 20% of all WordPress websites use the WooCommerce plugin.
But even after you create the best eCommerce store, your customer won’t have a pleasant experience if the eCommerce store’s speed and performance are up to the mark.
Website speed is a crucial factor in the success of an online store. Customers expect a fast and seamless shopping experience, and a slow website can negatively impact their experience and drive them away. Research has shown that even a small delay in page load time can lead to significant consequences for businesses.
Speed and performance are two of the most significant factors in eCommerce SEO, and ranking a website in the top positions of the SERPs. So if your WooCommerce is slow in loading and it takes time to check the customer out, there is a good chance the traffic, conversion rate, and the resultant sales would be on a down low. To prevent that, you would have to take a few steps to boost the speed and performance of your website. The open-source eCommerce solution has made it easier for anyone to start an online store.
That’s why, in this blog, we have listed a few tips and techniques to boost performance and speed up the WooCommerce store. This blog will also show you how you can measure the speed and performance of your website to check if you need to improve it.
How to Measure the Performance of Your WooCommerce Website?
Let’s check out a few tools and software to measure the performance of your WooCommerce store before moving on to the tips and tricks to improve it.
Google PageSpeed Insights
One of the most prevalent tools for measuring a website’s performance is Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool helps check if your website adheres to and passes the Core Web Vitals, a set of parameters devised by Google to monitor the performance of your website.
This tool will provide you with a score of 0-100 on different performance parameters for your website’s mobile and desktop. That would help you check the potholes on your website so that you can rectify them correctly.
GTmetrix
Another popular performance monitoring tool is GTmetrix. This tool provides you with a comprehensive report of the performance of your website. It will help you check what kind of performance issues your website is encountering, so you can rectify them accordingly.
There are several other tools you can opt for to monitor and measure the performance of your website including Pingdom, Load Impact, and Show Slow, which you can choose based on your specific requirements and preferences. That’s why they are highly recognized for improving not just the speed and performance but also the search rankings of your website.
Tips to Speed Up WooCommerce Store
As mentioned earlier, speed and performance are crucial in ensuring your website ranks well on the search engine result pages. So when a person searches for a product or service similar to yours, your website comes out on top.
Let’s check out this checklist of tips and tricks to boost the speed of your WooCommerce store:
#1. Upgrade the Website Hosting
The first step in improving the speed of your WooCommerce website is choosing the right host provider. Without a good hosting service, all other tips would go in vain, no matter how hard you try.
We strongly recommend WPEngine as your hosting provider for better speed and performance. SiteGround, DreamHost, and BlueHost are officially endorsed by WordPress as reliable and trustworthy hosting services for websites and online stores built with WordPress. Each of these hosts offers unique features and benefits, such as server-level caching, built-in security, free domains, dedicated IP addresses, and 24/7 support, making them well-suited for various types of websites and businesses. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the best hosting solution for your specific needs may vary, so it’s recommended to do your own research and compare the different options before making a final decision.
So upgrade your website to a better hosting provider after a careful shift through the market for viable options.
#2. Update WooCommerce & WordPress
Another significant step in boosting your eCommerce store is updating the platform it’s based on. WooCommerce is an open-source plugin of WordPress, and contributors are constantly evolving it to add more features and make it more secure.
So you would also need to keep WordPress updated to ensure you are taking advantage of the new functionalities, performance, and security features added by the contributors.
If you have installed any other plugins and themes to your eCommerce store, make sure you update them as well. Also, before you start the updation process, ensure you take a complete backup of the website, so there is no loss of critical data and information.
#3. Increase the WordPress memory limit
As you already know, being a plugin, WooCommerce is a part of the WordPress environment. So if WordPress’s memory limit is low, it will have a significant impact on the performance of your WooCommerce website.
By default, WordPress’s memory is set to 32MB. Your WooCommerce website is bound to cross this limit at some point. That would result in an error message and slow down your website.
Now, you can either resolve this issue yourself or contact your hosting provider. If you have decided to take on this issue yourself, check the following steps.
Edit your wp-config.php file
- Open wp-config.php. It is located in the WordPress root directory by default.
- Find this line near the end of the wp-config.php file:
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
- Then, add this line just up over the one shown above:
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M').
- After that, save the changes.
Edit your PHP.ini file
- If you can access your PHP.ini file, change the line in PHP.ini
- If it shows 64M, try 256M: memory_limit = 256M; increase this limit to 256MB.
Edit your .htaccess file
- If you can’t access PHP.ini, try adding this to a .htaccess file:
php_value memory_limit 256M
By increasing the memory limit, you can improve the speed of your WooCommerce store quite effectively.
#4. Caching for WooCommerce website
Caching is a process of storing frequently-visited pages and resources on the server or in the client’s browser. So users can retrieve them quickly and easily without the need for the database every time. That helps reduce the load on the server, which reduces the time it takes for pages to load, making the website faster and more responsive.
A WooCommerce website, which usually includes caching product information, customer data, etc., to reduce the load on the server. Additionally, browser caching can help reduce the amount of data transferred over the network, improving the overall performance of the WooCommerce website.
One of the advantages of using WooCommerce is that it is a part of the WordPress environment. So there are several plugins in the official WordPress plugin library, including WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc., that can help you set up caching on your WooCommerce store.Â
#5. Image optimization
Images are a massive part of any eCommerce website. A majority of customers make their purchasing decisions based on pictures. But too many images are bound to slow down the website. So image optimization is a critical step in improving the performance of your WooCommerce store. That means you can reduce the file size of the images without having a significant impact on the quality.
There are two ways to achieve that. You can either optimize the image through Adobe Photoshop and other editing software or opt for an image optimization plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.
Another technique you can implement is lazy loading, which means loading an image for the user only when necessary rather than loading them all at once. A few of the best image optimization plugins in the WordPress library are Smush, Optimus, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, Compress JPEG & PNG Images, etc.
#6. Remove or replace poor-quality Plugins and Themes
WordPress has over 60K plugins and 30K themes in its official library. Plugins and themes can help improve every aspect of your WooCommerce store, from appearance to features and functionalities. But as you may imagine, there are several poorly-coded ones, which can bring down the performance of the website quite severely.
Analyze every plugin and theme and its quality very carefully before installing it on your website. Moreover, make sure the installed plugins are updated to their latest versions.
#7. Implement & use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)
CDN is a network of distributed servers working together to ensure the most accurate content is delivered to the users based on a number of factors, including the users’ geographic location, web page origin, and the content delivery server.
Content delivery networks are especially important when your target users are far away from the location of your website’s server. It uses edge servers to act as a bridge between the main server and the user to ensure the website works as intended.
There are two ways to go about implementing CDN on your WooCommerce website: Choose a hosting provider that offers CDN services as well or select a CDN service yourself. A few of the best CDN services are Cloudways CDN, Jetpack, Google Cloud CDN, Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure CDN, Sucuri, etc.
#8. Install fast, Reliable Themes
There are millions of eCommerce stores around the world. So it’s quite easy to get lost in the crowd. A great way to stand out from your competitor crowd is by making your website look a little different, which can be achieved through a range of themes on the WooCommerce and WordPress official libraries and third-party stores.
Analyze the themes and choose the fast and lightweight ones to ensure they don’t weigh your website down. Look for the factors like layout choices, color schemes, WooCommerce support, etc., while choosing the most suitable one.
#9. Update the PHP version
Another great way to boost the performance of your WooCommerce website is by updating the version of PHP. As you might expect, the newer versions of PHP are faster and more efficient. Moreover, some of the new features on offer can help enhance your website’s speed and performance.
But before you update PHP, make sure the new version is compatible with the installed plugins and themes. If not, the compatibility issues may slow down your website or even crash it.
These are just a few great ways to improve the speed and performance of your website. So the website will open and render faster, leading to better traffic and customer engagement, which would help improve the sales and revenue of your business enterprise.
Speed up your WooCommerce Store Today!
Developing a WooCommerce store is one of the best ways to promote your product-based business. But even after you design and create a great eCommerce store, your organic traffic might be low due to a negative user experience. A plausible reason behind that might be lousy website speed and performance.
Google and other search engines consider the speed and performance of a website amongst the most significant factors in ranking them in the top positions of the SERPs. So we have carefully analyzed and compiled a comprehensive checklist of tips and tricks you can implement to boost the speed of your WooCommerce store, which would improve the user experience effectively. Moreover, since performance is a significant factor in the search algorithms, better speed and performance would also rank your website at the top of the SERPs.
But if you are not confident about the implementation of these techniques, hire WooCommerce developers or book 30 mins free consultation with our experts.
