The faster your e-commerce site will load, the better the customers’ shopping experience will be. In this blog, we will discuss 9 proven ways to speed up your WooCommerce store to attract maximum customers and maximize your ROI.
As per Forbes research, 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Keeping this in mind, WooCommerce stores are embracing tools, such as personalization, live chat, real-time inventory, and more to have a quick and efficient site that gives shoppers an incredible shopping experience.
WooCommerce leads the e-commerce pack with over 5 million active installations, yet there are so many questions that keep on whirling in WooCommerce store owners’ minds, such as why is my WooCommerce site so slow? How do I speed up my WooCommerce backend? Is WooCommerce good for SEO? So on and so forth. However, an experienced company that is well-versed in WooCommerce development can answer all your questions.
9 Powerful Tips to Boost Your Slow WooCommerce Store
Optimize for a Mobile-First Experience
Mobile devices have taken over desktops. Mobile phones account for over 70% of web page views. With that being said since the majority of users access Google search with a mobile device only, Google has started giving preference in indexing to mobile-first websites.
Thus, it is advisable to make your WooCommerce store mobile-friendly to make your online store experience great for your mobile users, resulting in faster load time and bringing maximum traffic to your WooCommerce store.
Increase WordPress Memory Limit
Increasing the WordPress memory limit is one crucial step every WooCommerce store owner should take to speed up the WooCommerce site. WordPress allows 32 Mb memory for PHP by default, and to run an e-commerce store on WooCommerce. You need to increase the memory limit.
It is recommended to increase the limit to 256 Mb at least so that you can run your WooCommerce store without any disruption. This way, you can boost your WooCommerce store speed instantly.
Optimize and Compress Images
Images are the core of e-commerce stores, using optimized and compressed images on your WooCommerce site is one of the effective ways to increase your WooCommerce site performance. Heavy image files slow down the online store as well as user experience. There are many ways to optimize and compress images manually, but using plugins can save your time and ease the job. You can use plugins such as EWWW Image Optimizer, WP Smush, ShortPixel, and more.
Use a Responsive WooCommerce Theme
Themes play an integral role in your e-commerce store. When finalizing the theme of your WooCommerce website, it is always advisable to use a responsive theme that can drastically speed up your WooCommerce site. Opting for a lightweight, well-optimized, and responsive theme with a clean codebase can help you improve your WooCommerce store performance right away.
Use a Cache Plugin
The cache stores a copy of the sources of your WooCommerce store, due to which your WooCommerce store visitors experience faster loading speed. WooCommerce doesn’t get the resources, such as CSS or JS; instead, it directly serves visitors.
As a result, static pages are rendered instantly; however, dynamic pages show the content to visitors in less time. There are many cache plugins available to operate easily like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and more.
Get a Quality Hosting Provider
Every e-commerce store needs a hosting provider that can offer maximum uptime without any disruptions. Getting a reliable hosting provider is essential for your WooCommerce store as a quality hosting provider can manage an unexpected spike and help you drastically improve the load time of your WooCommerce store.
There are four types of hosting available shared, cloud, virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated server. Out of all, it is advisable to always invest in dedicated hosting to speed up your WooCommerce site.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A high-speed e-commerce store is every online store owners’ priority. A content delivery network service boosts your WooCommerce store load time by serving cached static content from servers located near the users’ geographic location. There are many popular CDN options available, such as MaxCDN, Sucuri, Cloudflare, and more that can work wonders for your WooCommerce store.
Optimize Your Store Database
A WooCommerce database is a standardized collection of your site. It contains site and transaction data, such as product pages, categories, reviews, tags, order details, payments, and more. A slow server response time leads to a slow site.
Thus, it is recommended that you should optimize your WooCommerce database and remove useless junk by deleting old revisions, restricting the number of stored revisions, disabling revisions altogether, cleaning up expired transients, and more.
HTTP/2 Is a Must
HTTP/2 has improved the HTTP 1.1 protocol and keeps up with the ever-increasing demands for the internet. HTTP/2 is faster, efficient, and secure. HTTP/2 helps in the advancement of performance due to various reasons, such as ALPN extension for more secured encryption, HPACK compression for headers, proactive server, and more. Thus, having HTTP/2 in your WooCommerce store is a must-advised.
Conclusion
Give your WooCommerce site a boost with the mentioned tips. A well-optimized WooCommerce store not only enhances your customers’ shopping experience, but also improves your SEO ranking, revenue, and ROI drastically and encourages more sales that help your online store to thrive.
