An online store is likely to be more resource-intensive than other types of websites because of the large number of products and the high-quality photographs that may accompany each one. Tools like personalization, real-time inventory, and live chat are invaluable when it comes to providing customers support and inspiring them to come back.
On the other hand, a slow page lowers your store’s position in the search results, less profit, and more importantly, customers are more likely to leave a slow-loading WooCommerce store. It’s becoming essential for WooCommerce sites to provide the best possible user experience as the competition grows. If you’re fed up with a slow-loading website, you must settle it with a few steps. The faster your WooCommerce store can load, the more customers you’ll have; thus, you must optimize your site for maximum performance. Slow loading times are unavoidable, no matter how many features and tools you use.
43% of customers will abandon a slow website if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load; e-commerce sites have a negative reputation when it comes to page load time.
Why You Should Optimize Your WooCommerce Speed Performance
Mobile consumers are notoriously impatient. Speed is a critical performance component in WooCommerce. Page load time is a major ranking issue for WooCommerce websites, and let’s face it, if you are on page 5 of Google, you aren’t going to sell anything. Your website’s overall speed and the time it takes for pages to load are critical factors in client satisfaction. Optimizing your WooCommerce website as user-friendly, rich in content, responsive, and so on are the most important considerations while optimizing it. No one tolerates slow websites these days.
Let’s look at how fast your site loads and what you can do to speed it up.
Step 1: Select High-Performance WordPress Hosting
A WordPress host stores your website’s data. There are many web hosting businesses to pick from, each offering a unique set of services and capabilities. You can count on them for dependable customer service, strong security, and secure data backups. You can count on them for dependable customer service (through business phone services), strong security, and secure data backups.
You’ll find distinct types of WordPress hosting globally. If you don’t start with the appropriate one, you’ll only end up wasting time and frustration in the future.
When you sign up for a plan, all of your data is stored on a server in the host’s data center. Using the WordPress host, you may access, manage, and distribute your data to visitors.
We’ve narrowed our search to those that would provide you with the fastest WordPress hosting possible.
WP Engine
WP Engine is a leading managed WordPress host and was among the first to offer its services to clients. This is a suitable choice for a more robust backend and staging and development framework if your site is complex. Compared to other hosts, this one has a lot more features, and the price label reflects that.
Bluehost
Small companies and bloggers can benefit from the Bluehost hosting service. They specialize in providing business-class shared hosting services. One-click setup, automated backups, and 24-hour customer service provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. A WordPress-approved hosting company, it’s a safe bet to observe the website’s performance.
Step 2: Measure site speed
To begin, learn how your website is currently performing. You can realize this with the assistance of a wide range of tools, including:
- GTMetrix provides a score and specific performance recommendations; this tool also breaks down parameters like “complete load time.”
- Using Pingdom’s Website Speed Tests to see key performance indicators like page load time and size of a user interface.
- PageSpeed Insights to compare Google’s mobile and desktop rankings side by side.
- GTMetrix reports, you can get the most precise findings. This tool helps you to understand how quickly your site loads and how your optimization affects load time.
Step 3: Use A Lightweight WooCommerce Theme
Your website will suffer from PageSpeed Insights issues if you use page builders such as Elementor; you’ll need a lightweight and compatible theme with WooCommerce so that your e-commerce site can sell products. Picking the proper WordPress theme for WooCommerce is just as important as choosing the right hosting provider. There is a wide range of options available.
GeneratePress
A few Premium WordPress themes are popular and highly rated as GeneratePress. These modules require a plugin named “GP Premium” to be installed and activated before they can be used. Several extra modules are included in the premium edition. Free and paid versions of the theme can be used to build various types of websites. It has been one of the most stable, feature-rich, speedy, and best-supported themes with more than 200,000 active installations.
Hestia
Material UI Kit is the latest trend in web design, and this free theme incorporates it into its design. Sleek scrolling and a contemporary style give it a single web page design. With the help of Pinterest, Hestia has created an online shop with a full-featured slider. One of the most premium choices in themes for WooCommerce.
Step 4: Use Speedy Plugins
Your website’s load time will be slowed if you exceed the resources allotted by your hosting package. In order to display components on the front-end, many plugins rely on data from your database, which increases the server load. One of WordPress’ greatest assets is the plugin ecosystem, which provides limitless customization options and increased server resources consumed by additional plugins. As the number of HTTP requests increases, the amount of time it takes for a customer to complete a purchase. Consider these plugins for fast and smooth loading.
WP Contact Slider
It gives your website a clean and professional appearance, and it makes it easier for you to communicate with your visitors and grab leads. Displays simple text or HTML, supports shortcodes for Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, WP forms and Caldera forms, myCred, and Constant Contact forms via the WP Contact Slider.
Anyone hosting a WordPress site can benefit from the WP Contact Slider plugin. Display your contact button in various locations by creating various sliders and displaying them on different articles and pages. An easy-to-use contact form plugin, WP Contact Slider, can be used on any WordPress-powered page.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters can be used to adjust how your contact form plugin loads its scripts, for example, so that it only loads its scripts on the contact page. This is an excellent plugin to reduce the number of HTTP requests made throughout the site. On top of that, it offers a robust scripts manager tool that allows you to load JavaScript/CSS on specific pages selectively.
It doesn’t have a built-in page caching feature, but it’s a perfect complement to a caching plugin that does. For starters, Perfmatters may help you turn off a number of redundant WordPress settings. You may use Perfmatters to optimize a variety of smaller WordPress features.
Step 5: Consider Reducing The Size Of Images
JPEG files, which are smaller, are usually preferable to upload. You need to reduce the size of your images as much as possible because it is the most challenging task for your server to process. Avoid uploading a 2000-pixel image if the available area is 500 pixels wide.
After all, you don’t want to end up with fuzzy product images! Make sure you’re using the correct format, and the quality of the image must also be taken into consideration. Here are a few options to consider:
SMUSH
Smush has been ranked and tested as the fastest and most reliable service in the industry. As a result, it has been voted the most popular image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress. Optimize pictures, resize, compress, and increase your Google Page Speed.
Optimole
You’ll need to create an account and enter your API key to get started with this amazing plugin. Optimole can get more than just picture compression and resizing; you get image acceleration with the built-in CDN, and you get idle loading. It’s easy to use, with many other options and hidden tools.
Step 6: Include a CDN
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are similar to caching as they distribute content. On a network of distributed servers, they store copies of your website. An individual’s geographic location is taken into account, as is their browser’s IP address. As long as the customer accesses your WooCommerce store from a location where your site is hosted, the content won’t have to transfer too far from the browser to reach the customer.
Cloudflare
External resources such as websites, APIs, and applications are protected and maintained by Cloudflare. That includes apps, teams, and devices that aren’t accessible outside the firewall. It’s also a platform for building applications that may be used worldwide.
StackPath
StackPath chooses densely populated areas for its data center locations as a cloud computing and service provider. Instead of a few zones that are truly located outside of the city, they have dozens of places within the municipal regions.
Conclusion
Making your WooCommerceSo, in the end, speed is essential. Customers demand a highly personalized and engaging WooCommerce store without sacrificing the site’s speed. An increase in desertion results in decreased revenue. Improve the performance and efficient development of your WooCommerce website with these tried-and-tested methods now. E-commerce companies must offer a wide range of products and experiences to interest customers, but they also must meet their customers’ expectations for speedy web page loadings.
