For any eCommerce store, its loading speed is a crucial aspect to be taken care of. The sooner your site loads, the better the buying experience. A better user experience equates the better eCommerce SEO, more ROI, and happier consumers. This eventually leads to increased sales and profitable revenue.
According to recent studies, a 1-second dip in page speed results in a 16% drop in consumer satisfaction and a 7% loss in conversions.
If users find a slow website, almost 73% of users move to another website. Thus, you must optimize your WooCommerce website for increased speed and functionality. Even Google considers page speed to be an important element in ranking websites.
On the plus side, WooCommerce is one of the greatest eCommerce platforms available in the market, and it is built to be faster and more efficient. However, it’s also crucial to focus on the right WooCommerce Speed Optimization Tips.
Here we have summed up the reasons for low website loading speed and the excellent how-to tips which will help you optimize WooCommerce speed, keep scrolling…
Factors That Make Your WooCommerce Store Slow
There are so many underlying factors that will make your WooCommerce store slow. Knowing about your specific problems and finding the solutions for the same is more important than ever to optimize the WooCommerce speed of your store.
Let’s find some of the common reasons for the same
Large Image Files: Uploading high-resolution images without optimization can significantly slow down your WooCommerce store.
Unoptimized Plugins: Too many or poorly coded plugins can impact performance.
Inadequate Hosting: Choosing a low-quality or shared hosting provider may result in slow loading times.
Unoptimized Database: Over time, databases can become cluttered with unnecessary data, which can be one of the leading reasons for the slow WooCommerce store.
Lack of Caching: Without proper caching mechanisms, your store may load each page dynamically, causing delays in loading the website.
External Scripts and Fonts: Including too many external scripts or fonts from third-party sources can lead to increased page load times.
Unoptimized CSS and JavaScript: Bloated or unoptimized code in your theme’s CSS and JavaScript files can slow down page rendering.
Non-Responsive Design: If your WooCommerce store is not optimized for mobile devices, it can lead to slower load times for users on smartphones and tablets.
What is the Optimal Load Time?
There is no ideal load time that is set forth. But the general opinion from experts is to keep it under two seconds. Page load time is, as you might expect, a crucial performance indicator in WPO. If your WooCommerce store takes over two seconds to load, you have a lot of work ahead of you.
A visitor’s likelihood of leaving a website increases by around 32% as the loading time of the website climbs from 1 to 3 seconds, as per Google’s page and load time statistics.
You’re probably wondering, “How can I speed up the page load time without alienating customers?” at this point.
Let’s look deeper and find out
How to Measure Web Performance?
You cannot make improvements if you cannot measure!
This is relevant to the speed of websites. You must first understand the speed of your website to make improvements. An ideal tool for evaluating the speed of your WooCommerce store is a website speed test. It’s not simple to select the best website speed-testing tool. There are a plethora of options accessible, and selecting the appropriate one is crucial.
To identify the themes, plugins, and features that aren’t working so well, you can also utilize the free WordPress plugin Query Monitor. It assists you in troubleshooting bloated functions, ineffective database queries, PHP problems, HTTP API calls, etc.
No speed testing tool is perfect, but pick one and stick with it for consistency.
– Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google.
If your website loads within the optimal loading time, it is fine. (However, you can still go through tips to optimize WooCommerce speed and improve customer satisfaction.) On the other hand, if your website takes more than usual to load – then our below-listed optimization tips can help you achieve the best website loading time.
12 Best Tips to Optimize WooCommerce Speed
1. Optimize your WooCommerce store settings
One of the most effective strategies to improve the performance of your online business is to optimize your WooCommerce settings.
Here are some WooCommerce settings you need to change to boost its speed:
Initially, modify the URL of your login page. Every WordPress website uses domain.com/wp-admin/ as the default login URL. You can defend yourself from brute force assaults and even rate-limiting HTTP issues like 429 Too Many Requests by changing your login URL to something different.
If your e-commerce website also has a blog, you have the option to restrict how many entries appear in your blog feed. WordPress automatically puts this limit at ten posts, but you can lower it to boost the speed.
Turn off pingbacks from your website because they typically result in useless spam. Your site’s speed will improve with fewer queries generated.
Optimizing the WordPress conversation settings. If you have a large number of user comments on your articles or pages, WordPress allows you to divide them into smaller parts. When it comes to segmenting reviews on your product pages, the same configuration applies.
Finally, to improve performance, eliminate any unnecessary plugins or themes from your site.
2. Limit access to the WordPress admin
Restricting access to the WordPress Admin might help speed up your WooCommerce store quickly because too many login attempts can cause problems for your website. Additionally, it makes your device more vulnerable to harmful assaults and dangerous bots.
You may instantly restrict access to the admin panel by permitting only authenticated users to access it. For example, you can configure Google Workspace so that users must first receive authorization before attempting to log in.
As WordPress does not by default impose any login limitations, it is best practice to restrict the number of login attempts. If you allow too many trials, attackers can exploit your site. A useful plugin called Limit Login Attempts prevents usernames or IP addresses from attempting to access your website after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts.
3. Optimize your Images and remove unnecessary ones!
Reduce file size and improve product image quality.
If there is one thing that all internet retailers have in common, it is their heavy reliance on pictures. People must be able to see what they are purchasing. Furthermore, we feel that having photographs on your online store or website is more important than ever. Stores must provide high-quality photos from various perspectives and with varying details for each product variety.
However, images are large elements that take longer to load. The larger the image or the more detailed it is, the greater the file that must be loaded. So, you need to create a proper balance between.
So, what you can do to?
The very first thing you can do is optimize the images. You must maximize the optimization of your photographs while maintaining their quality.
You need to reduce the file size as much as possible and utilize an image editor after saving the photographs in the appropriate formats and sizes.
Quick-Tip: For WordPress users, you can also go for an image optimization plugin to automate this procedure and get the desired outcomes.
Moreover, to optimize your WooCommerce speed, you must eliminate all unnecessary photos.
4. Go for caching
Using caching to speed up your WooCommerce store is highly recommended. It’s the only requirement for an eCommerce website that loads quickly and effortlessly, from product information pages to checkout pages. By eliminating time-consuming procedures like obtaining all stored data or creating new copies for each visitor requesting material, caching enhances performance.
The top features to look for in a cache plugin are generally the ability to defer JavaScript loading, optimize your fonts, optimize CSS and JS files, enable lazy-loading for photos and videos, and use Gzip compression.
If you’re wondering what the greatest caching plugin for WooCommerce is, check out WP Rocket. It integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and provides all the capabilities that are needed.
5. Choose only the right & robust hosting services provider!
Hosting is by far the most significant factor influencing the performance of WooCommerce stores. The underlying architecture is in charge of managing traffic and providing users with essential info. Therefore, your top priority should be to choose the fastest WooCommerce hosting.
The ideal hosting company to select is one that:
offers data centres all across the globe
provides SSD-based storage and CDN
incorporates technology that improves performance
Here are two of the popular hosting types:
Cloud Hosting: For WooCommerce stores, cloud hosting provides the ideal balance of price and performance. The good news is that pay-as-you-go cloud hosting services guarantee that you only pay for the resources your store uses. This makes them highly desirable. Furthermore, cloud hosting services can scale to meet the needs of your expanding business.
Managed WooCommerce Hosting: If you don’t want to spend too much time setting your servers for maximum WooCommerce efficiency, managed hosting for WooCommerce is the ideal option for your store.
6. Go for the lazy loading of images
Enabling lazy loading for photos and videos is another technique to make your WooCommerce website load faster. Finding non-blocking resources and loading them only when necessary is known as lazy loading.
The content viewable above the fold is presented first, but the rendering of the content below the fold is delayed. The photographs that viewers are currently viewing can be shown first thanks to this optimization strategy.
To postpone offscreen graphics, Google itself advises employing lazy loading.
Manual lazy loading: You can use the manual approach for the lazy loading of images.
Lazy loading through plugin: If you don’t feel comfortable adding the tag manually on each image, then you can even use a plugin for the same. There are some best lazy-loading WordPress plugins available on WooCommerce, which you can use to boost the speed and improve performance.
7. Optimize your website coding
For many users, the quantity of files on a WooCommerce store might be overwhelming, and the amount only becomes bigger with time. As a result, WooCommerce stores load slowly because each page requires the visitors’ browsers to load huge files.
Compression of Files: Without a doubt, the most well-known compression is Gzip, which minimizes the amount of static resources. For example, you can reduce the size of JavaScript files to half their original size while maintaining performance.
Resources for CSS: There are various methods for making CSS resources more efficient. One of them is just limiting the quantity of style sheets that are used. Using a plugin such as Breeze, merging these files is a simple process.
Files using JavaScript: Large JavaScript files have the same detrimental effect on page load performance as CSS resources. Developers can use the same reduction and compression techniques that they do for CSS files. Unlike style sheets, “ASYNC” scripts can be rendered such that they no longer block the display and thus accelerate the WooCommerce stores.
8. Choosing the right theme
It is critical to use the correct WooCommerce theme. Selecting the ideal theme for you can be difficult because there are countless options available.
Even though a gorgeous theme has fantastic built-in functionality, it can not work well when used in practice. You must confirm that an e-commerce website is completely compatible with WooCommerce.
Avoid page builders: When used with a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder, they can let you design nearly any site. To reduce bloat, we recommend removing page builders. Rather, choose a theme that works with Gutenberg, WordPress’ block editor.
Choose a theme with all the features: We advise you to make a list of all the characteristics your online store must have before choosing a theme. Next, choose a theme that satisfies the majority of your feature needs. It allows you to reduce your reliance on large multi-purpose themes and third-party plugins.
Choose a lightweight time: The theme you choose has a direct impact on the performance of your WooCommerce site, therefore the lighter the theme, the better the performance. To get an overview of how heavy the theme is, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to evaluate its demo speed.
9. Database Optimization
WooCommerce makes use of the same database as your WordPress installation. They both store a significant amount of data that eventually becomes useless.
For example, your database will hold old revisions, fluctuations, spam comments, and more for a very long time. It’s a needless waste of resources because WordPress might even query them when your page loads.
This means that it will take longer for your WordPress backup plugin to prepare a backup. Additionally, it will take longer to upload or download. Fortunately, you can optimize your WordPress database with several great tools.
You can tidy up your WordPress database from this point on. All you have to do is pick the superfluous things and hit the Save Changes and Optimize button.
10. Increase the memory limit
WordPress uses an optimization method that sets a 32MB PHP memory limit by default. This is the RAM that your WordPress websites’ scripts use to operate. This implies that the website will only consume a small portion of the server’s resources.
However, as WooCommerce stores typically include a lot of data, this may reduce their performance. Increasing the WordPress memory limit is something you should think about doing to optimize the store. Raising the limit to 256 MB can optimize the WooCommerce speed and functionality of your store.
Note: Make sure you have a backup before making any changes to the settings. You can upload the backup to stop data loss if something goes wrong.
11. Utilize the content delivery network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a service that uses a global network of data servers located in key areas to cache the static files for your website. This allows visitors to download those files from the closest place to them, which improves the speed at which your site loads from any location.
It automatically designates the closest CDN PoP to deliver the cached resources based on the origin of the request.
Additionally, utilizing a CDN reduces the strain on the servers hosting your website, so it’s a win-win situation. As a result, the website loads faster and provides a better user experience.
Bonus point:
In addition to caching, a lot of CDNs include other performance-boosting features like better in-the-moment image compression, support for HTTP/3, hotlink protection, and more security.
12. Use the latest PHP version
Both WooCommerce and WordPress are written in PHP as the primary programming language. PHP, like WordPress, is a free and open-source programming language. It is regularly maintained by a very active developer community, which releases new versions regularly.
They devote a significant amount of time and money to enhancing PHP performance by making it quicker with each new release.
You can determine which PHP version is being used by your website by going to Tools » Site Health and selecting the Info tab.
All top WordPress hosting companies give simple tools for determining which PHP version to utilize on your website.
End Note
That was quite the journey, didn’t it? There is a lot of information to digest and optimization ideas to implement, but we hope you found them beneficial.
You don’t have to (and shouldn’t have to) implement all of these suggestions at once. Before taking any action, evaluate your online store by switching themes or running one of the speed tests. It’s a little step, but it’s a solid starting point for improving any WooCommerce website.
Also, if you are looking for professional guidance to help you out with optimizing your store speed or developing a new one altogether, then we are your go-to partner for the same.
KrishaWeb has a team of skilled eCommerce professionals, who will understand your business needs and offer customized solutions accordingly. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
Girish Panchal
Technical Architect
A Technical Architect, proficient in WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, and DevOps tasks, crafts robust IT solutions with a blend of expertise and versatility in web development and infrastructure management.
