Is your WooCommerce store slow? Are you losing visitors because of lagging site performance? Unsure how to improve your WooCommerce performance?Â
In this article, we are going to tell you about the best ways to improve your WooCommerce site performance.
What we will learn in this article:Â
- How to test your WooCommerce store performance?
- Optimising the technology stack
- Methods to increase WooCommerce store performance
Why Your WooCommerce Store’s Performance Is Crucial?
I would explain it with this simple example. You have an eCommerce store that people visit. When people visit it, they are moving from the landing page to the product page. They like a product and want to buy it. Now what? They will click on the checkout button and buy the product, right?Â
But what if the webpage just gets stuck? They will wait for a few seconds and then close the button and move to the second page on the search engine page.
Now if they planned to buy a $1,000 product, you just lost a pretty big customer. And, you don’t want that to happen, right?
That is why it is so important for WooCommerce stores to be faster.
Note: Average time a visitor will wait for a site to load in less than four seconds.
Testing Your WooCommerce Performance
First of all, you need to test your WooCommerce store performance with the right speed testing tools. A few tools you can use for store performance testing are:
- Pingdom Speed Test
- GTMetrix
- Google Pagespeed Insights
Let’s test one of these tools to see how they will evaluate the performance of a WordPress or a WooCommerce website.
The speed testing tool will evaluate the overall site speed and other factors used in the Core Web Vitals ranting metrics.
It also tells about the opportunities and diagnostics of the website that can be measured by the users. To ensure that WooCommerce stores perform faster, you need to fix all the recommendations that are provided by the speed testing tool, which in our case is Google page insights.
Best ways to optimize your WooCommerce store performance
That said, here are some of the best ways to optimize the WooCommerce store performance.
1. Change Your Store Hosting
First and foremost, make sure that you are using a hosting solution that is performance-focused. The hosting solution should host your site on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Cloud server. It should also have a hosting stack with proper server-level caches like Nginx or Memcached.Â
These are two cache services that ensure faster server speed.
2. Reduce Image Size
Next, make sure that all the images on your WordPress or WooCommerce website have optimized image sizes.
You can use a couple of tools to improve the image sizes of the website like WPSmush, Optimole, and Imagify. Some of these plugins are free while others offer freemium services.Â
3. Minify JS, HTML, and CSS
Minifying scripts and codes can help you save a lot of page size. You can minify these codes by installing a cache plugin on your website. The plugin will automatically minify these codes and ensure that your page size is significantly reduced.Â
To find out how much size minifying the HTML, JS, and CSS of your website has made, just compare sizes using GTMetrix or any other speed testing tool.
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4. Improve Site Cache
There are multiple tools that you can use for site caching. A few of the best tools we prefer for site caching are WPRocket, Nitropack, and W3 Total cache.
If you are already using Cloudflare CDN service for your website, then the best option available is Cloudflare Supercache. Since Supercache already works with Cloudflare CDN, it will automatically optimize your site performance and align it with the Cloudflare CDN.
5. Add SSL and CDN
Another way to improve WooCommerce store performance is with CDN service as we have already discussed in the past. You can use multiple CDN services like Stackpath, Cloudflare. Bunny CDN, Akamai CDN, and various other CDN services.Â
By adding a CDN service, your content will be delivered from the edge servers to the users. If your servers are in the US, a visitor from Australia will take 5+ seconds to load the website. However, with a CDN service, the same visitor can get the website loaded within 2 seconds. This is the significance of a CDN service. Â
All of these CDN services can be integrated with your WordPress website with the help of a plugin.
6. Optimize Product Pages
Next, optimize the product pages available on your website. Here are a few things your product pages should have:
- Images
- Videos
- Product descriptions
- Product specifications
- Product reviews
- Checkout button
- Awards and trust badges
Check if the images are loading fast on the product pages. Each product page should be 200kbs or less. If you have to add too many images, make sure that they all have reduced image size.
7. Optimize Website Database
Website databases can also cause issues with site performance. If your website is slow, one reason for that can be because of junk accumulating in the database. There are plugins available like WP Optimize that you can use to clean junk from your WordPress database. Apart from that, you can also clean the database manually by running a few commands.
Many times random comments get accumulated in the database as well. Clean them from your WordPress website for faster response time.
8. Improve Email Marketing
There is no better way to increase brand awareness through targeted marketing than email marketing. Moreover, email marketing serves as a technique for generating leads. Emails are helpful in cross-selling and other strategies because your clients are at various stages of the buying cycle. This also emphasises on smooth deliverability of emails.
To make your eCommerce store’s email delivery seamless, you need a robust SMTP plugin, just like Post SMTP. Post SMTP makes it simple to configure and comprehend the inner workings of your email delivery, whether you need to sell your items, convey some important news, or tell a narrative. Significant features of Post SMTP to improve email marketing includes:
- Notification – Post SMTP lets you know in case of email sending failure
- Chrome Extension – The only mailer plugin that notifies you about the issues inside your chrome
Ready to Improve WooCommerce Store Performance?
These are some of the best tips you should follow to improve your WooCommerce site performance. Since we have already discussed how site performance can make a significant difference in site performance, your optimization is the key to business success.
If you are unsure how to improve your WooCommerce store performance, and would need help with site optimizations, then our experts can help.
Nirmal 
