The speed of your website is of utmost importance. It becomes even more important if we talk about WooCommerce. That’s why it is very important to speed Up WooCommerce.
A fast-loading site makes the user experience very pleasant and helps increase sales numbers. In this particular article, we will talk about how can you speed up your WooCommerce performance.
Why WooCommerce Speed is so Important?
User attention is the most important part when it comes to business. How will the business perform depends pretty much on how it is presented to the user.
Sometimes it is even more important than the product itself. It is strange, isn’t it?
That is why it is well said the first impression is the last impression. The situation gets even worse when the user has slow internet. Suppose a user visits your website to buy something. But the site takes too long to load.
What do you think the user will do? Yes, you guessed it right. The user will leave your site. According to a survey, ¾th of the users switch to competitors in this type of situation.
Other than this WooCommerce speed is also critical for SEO ranking. A fast-loading site improves site ranking on google searches.
Optimizing WooCommerce properly can help you achieve great success in your business. Let us talk about the ways by which you can boost your WooCommerce speed.
Tips to Speed up WooCommerce Performance
At this moment you know how important it is to optimize your online store. So, here I will show the methods by which you can optimize your online store.
1. Choose the Right Hosting
Choosing the right hosting is the first thing you can do to optimize your site. Because hosting is where all your files get stored. How fast will your site load and how much traffic it can handle highly depends on what hosting company you choose?
If you want to know how much traffic your WordPress can handle. Then you can check our detailed guide on how much traffic can WordPress handle.
There are plenty of companies available that offer hosting services. Some provide great services at affordable prices. You have to choose as per your needs.
However, when choosing a hosting company don’t just go by the prices. Research properly and choose what suits you the most.
Here are some good hosting recommendations.
2. Choose the Right Theme
This is the most common mistake among new WordPress users. The reason behind this is there are thousands of themes available. These themes have so many unwanted features and bloatware.
As a result, they choose the theme which looks the fanciest.
Themes are meant to control the appearance and layout of the site, not functionality.
If you choose a theme with much pre-loaded bloatware. Then, it will make your site slow, because of the large piece of unwanted code it has.
So choose a lightweight and well-optimized theme. Here are some recommendations from my side.
- OceanWP
- Atra
- OpenShop
- Blocksy
3. Optimize Images to Speed up WooCommerce
Images are responsible for bulking up the weight of the site. According to many surveys, images are the biggest part of a site. The number is even bigger if we talk about WooCommerce.
Because these sites have to show images with every product. If not optimized properly, the site will load like a snail. And believe me, nobody likes that.
If you want to know more about image optimization. Check our detailed guide on how you can optimize images for better web performance.
Here are some tips
- Choose the right image format.
- Compress Images
- Use lazy loading
- Use CDN
4. Use Cache to Boost the Performance of Your Site
By default, WordPress is a blogging platform. WooCommerce runs over WordPress to make it a full-fledged online store. Whenever, a user visits your site, it has to load a page. As a result, if the requests are high the site will load slower.
By using a cache plugin, you can solve this issue easily. The cache plugin will store the resources(cache) in the user’s device or server and will show the data whenever a user requests it. This page will load way faster.
I will recommend WP Rocket for premium and W3 Total Cache for free.
5. Keep Everything Updated and Clean Bloatware
For optimum performance keep everything updated. Be it a theme, plugins, WordPress itself, or WooCommerce update them frequently.
Many a time people use themes, and plugins that are no longer supported by their developers. If you will face this kind of situation then it’s time to say goodbye. Similarly, if these tools add bloatware then start looking for alternatives.
6. Don’t Let the Options Confuse You
One of the reasons for WordPress’s popularity is its open-source nature. Because of this, it has tons of options for everything. Be it plugins or themes, there is no dearth of anything in WordPress.
Sometimes these options become disadvantages as it gets difficult for a user to choose the right tool.
If a user somehow chooses the wrong set of tools to make his/her WooCommerce store. This includes unoptimized themes and plugins etc.
In such cases, the performance of the site will be very bad.
Likewise, if you add too many fancy features just to add a glittering effect here and there. Then this will also make your site load slower.
So, before choosing anything research properly. Check hows the support is provided by the tool you want to use.
Final Verdict
In this article, we tried to cover the importance of a fast WooCommerce site. A well-optimized WooCommerce site not just makes the user experience better but increases sales also.
I think now you understand why these big companies spend so much to make their site fast. As a whole, if you have a WooCommerce site then you must check if your site is optimized properly.
Otherwise, try to optimize your site as much as possible. Try to check Check all the points we have mentioned above on your site.
I hope this guide helped you, you might also want to see a detailed guide on how you can try WordPress for free.
