How to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Website

How to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Website

December 6, 2023 | 10 min read By: admin

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, having a slow-loading e-commerce website is a major turn-off for users who are not interested in waiting- And this is normal! Because there are almost an infinity of websites available on the internet. If any website loads slowly, users get a thousand extra options to explore the same thing they are looking for. Offering a great user experience, improving website SEO, getting more website traffic, and moreover, driving more sales- all depends on how fast your website is loading.

In today’s advanced technological world, users expect a lot! From exploring a website with seamless navigation to enjoying live chats, and real-time inventory- they want to see it all the moment they enter the e-commerce website. However, if your e-commerce website can’t execute all these amenities- one thing your e-commerce website must keep is fast loading speed. That’s why, you start with choosing the right e-commerce platform for the improvement of your e-commerce website- it is WordPress. To build an e-commerce website using WordPress you need the most popular plugin, WooCommerce.

Compared to other e-commerce website platforms, Woo-commerce has in-built features like an SEO-friendly interface, responsive design, and easy-to-use purchase process to make a smooth and seamless navigation process for your customers. According to e-commerce professionals, there are over 4,495,457 live stores on the Woo-commerce site, at present.

But after building a website with WooCommerce plugins, if you are still not running at a loss, then your WooCommerce website needs the checkup as soon as possible. In this guide, you will find all the techniques or strategies for how you can speed up your woo-commerce website. So, let’s get started:

Why You Should Optimize Your WooCommerce Website Performance?

Speed matters not only in e-commerce websites but also each and every website that is active on the internet. Google Algorithms also choose the website loading speed as a ranking factor on Google’s result pages. To be honest, if your website is on the 7 or 8 pages of Google results, then customers will never find you and you need to stop expecting one day you will be the best e-commerce website.

According to a recent report that analyzed over 4 million website visits, in 2023, an e-commerce website needs to have 2.5 seconds loading time on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.

If your WooCommerce website earns up to $1000 one day, did you know one delayed loading time can cost you $250,000 per year? Are you ready to pay this amount of money?

According to Google, If your website loads more than 3 seconds, 1 out 2 visitors will leave afterward.

Optimizing your website for page speed is a trend that has been around for a while. In 2011, Google already indicated the page speed on its algorithm ranking factors, but it was only for desktop search algorithms. In 2018, Google launched web core vitals which was included as a ranking signal. Web core vitals are for measuring and analyzing the website responsiveness, speed, and visual stability of the website on Google.

If your web core vital score is lower that means something is not right with your website performance and Google won’t rank it unless you start working on this. If your KPIs are green means you have the chance to rank your website on the first page of the Search engine results Pages (SERPs).

Top 10 Ways to Speed up Your WooCommerce Website

As a WooCommerce website is crucial to improving website speed no matter what. Having an e-commerce website one goal is always to be on the list is to offer a great user experience which will come if your website speed is up and users can enjoy the seamless navigation process of your e-commerce site. Here are the top 10 ways to speed up your WooCommerce website which are mentioned below:

1. Select the right E-commerce Hosting Provider:

The WooCommerce plugin offers content with images, online payment, text, videos, and photo galleries. All these features you can use on your e-commerce website but for the security environment, you need to execute fast. But if you see a website loads slowly, even put your banking details on that website? Most people won’t!

For that when you are about to choose a hosting provider, you need to consider how fast your web hosting service is. Are they secure? Or What kind of customer service do they have?

To select the right web hosting provider, the following tips will help you:

  • Server-side web caching
  • Consider the hosting uptime score
  • Look for the content delivery network if you wish to go internationally.
  • How much Storage and bandwidth do they have for your products?
  • Must have multiple data centers, so you can choose any location to target your potential customers.
  • To make your online e-commerce store safe, look for the SSL certificate
  • Automatic backup features
  • Consider what type of hosting provider you need. If you have over a thousand products along with high monthly traffic, then a dedicated server will be the best option for you.
  • Look for the auto-installation process of WooCommerce

2. Consider HTTP/3 over HTTP/2:

Reducing the number of HTTP requests has been told once, and a few later, substantial improvements in how browsers communicate with websites take place. HTTP 1.1 was launched in 1997, and afterward, HTTP 2 was finalized. HTTP refers to the foundation of the World Wide Web which helps to load web pages using Hyperlinks. In HTTP/2, you can find features like proactive and multiplexing server push, and HTTP/3 the latest version of HTTP, is built on QUIC to improve security and whole website performance. However, it helps to enhance encryption and reduce head-of-line blocking.

Having WooCommerce stores implies a lot of heavy elements like scripts, images, and stylesheets. For this reason, using HTTP/3 will be the best option for it.

3. Choose Fast WooCommerce Theme:

If your WooCommerce website gets the speed- you have a high chance of achieving an incredible level of conversation rate-which means you can drive more revenue for your website. To speed up your WooCommerce website, you need to have a fast WooCommerce theme. But there are over a thousand themes available for you, so choosing the right one is essential.

A beautiful-looking theme with great features is not always helpful for increasing the speed of your wooCommerce store. For your e-commerce website, you need to find a compatible theme that perfectly blends with the WooCommerce plugin. The top four WooCommerce Themes are mentioned below:

  • Flatsome
  • Botiga
  • Storefront
  • Astra

4. Use Cache Plugins:

Caching is essential for improving the performance of your WooCommerce store. This is one major thing you need to run an e-commerce website smoothly and seamlessly. From loading checkout pages to product details pages- if you want all pages of sites to load quickly and users can navigate seamlessly, then it is time for you to use cache plugins.

Your website Performance can be improved by caching by reducing time-consuming processes, such as retrieving all stored information or generating new copies each time a visitor requests something. For cache plugins, the best features you need are CSS, cache preloading, JS file optimization, and mostly slow-load image optimization.

5. Reduce the Time of JS Execution:

If you think your page loads slowly, don’t forget to look into JS execution time. JS execution time is crucial because if it takes too long to load then it can affect your website performance. To measure the JS execution, you need to consider Google Lighthouse, an automated tool by Google for measuring website performance. If you see your JS execution time takes longer than 3.5 seconds, it shows a red flag.

To reduce the JS execution time. You need to focus on the following points:

  • Cut back or compress your JS code.
  • Narrow down network trips by caching your code.
  • Remove all the unused code.

6. Optimize WooCommerce Website Images:

As an e-commerce company, it is essential to take product photography seriously because this has a major effect on users converting themselves into customers by making purchase decisions. For the e-commerce industry, product images can convince users to buy from the website. Images have that power!

However, according to marketing experts, you need to discover the right balance between size and quality. If your product image size is up to 2MB, it might look good on your website, but it drastically affects your website performance.

If your WooCommerce website consists of galleries, promotional banners, and other media, then it is crucial to optimize the images to improve overall website performance. In simple terms, you need to optimize your product images without reducing the quality.

There are many image-optimizing tools or plugins available Imagify, WebP, TinyPNG, and more. Use these tools to speed up your WooCommerce website.

7. Focus on CSS Optimization:

Optimizing CSS can help you to increase the speed of your WooCommerce store. Here are the following ways to optimize CSS:

  • Get a faster-perceived load time by eliminating render-blocking CSS.
  • Remove unnecessary CSS

8. Code Optimization:

Developers often face a challenge when creating HTML, CSS, and JS files – they want to keep the code readable by using comments, spacing, and well-named variables. However, this can lead to larger file sizes, which can be detrimental to loading times.

To address this issue, developers can optimize their code by minifying JavaScript and CSS files and compressing them. This process removes unnecessary characters, such as spaces and comments, and reduces the file size, resulting in faster loading times. By optimizing code, developers can improve the performance of their WooCommerce site and provide a better user experience for their customers.

9. Use CDN or Content Delivery Network:

Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is one of the most effective ways to speed up your WooCommerce website. A CDN is a network of servers located in different parts of the world that store a copy of your website’s static content, such as images, videos, and CSS files.

When a user visits your website, the CDN server closest to their location delivers the content, reducing the time it takes for the content to load. This results in faster page load times and a better user experience. Additionally, using a CDN can reduce the load on your web hosting server, which can also improve website speed and performance.

10. Optimize Database:

However, keeping your database clean and optimized won’t have a significant impact on your speed. When it comes to speeding up your WooCommerce store, you want to take maximum advantage of all the options: deleting old tables left behind by old plugins or simply reducing database response times will help.

Conclusion

In order to generate profit, it is crucial to speed up your WooCommerce site. It doesn’t matter which types of products or services you offer, if your customers see your page loads slowly, they will move on to another website. That’s why you need to follow the strategies to improve your WooCommerce website performance.

We hope this article on how to speed up your WooCommerce website in 2024 will help you understand yourself better. If you need any help with your WooCommerce website, we can help you with our e-commerce solutions. If you like to read our articles, keep your eye on our blog page.