10 Ways to Speed Up WordPress Woocommerce Site

WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress. Speed is a major factor for any eCommerce site.

Speed up WooCommerce site will give a better shopping experience. Better speed means improved SEO, enhanced ROI, and satisfied customers.

All search engines like Google generally rank websites in terms of speed, the ones with fast-loading time rank much higher than the slow ones.

So, speed here plays a major role and if you wish to improve your position, improving speed should be your most important parameter to keep in mind.

Speed also affects the number of visitors appearing on your site, sites that take longer than 2 seconds of loading time lose about 47 percent of their visitors.

As online buyers don’t like to wait much, they are very impatient and expect the page to load within seconds.

So, keeping all these factors in mind, if you are running a WooCommerce site, then you should get ready to make major improvements to make your business more productive.

How to Speed Up WooCommerce Website

Learn here how to speed up WooCommerce Website to the maximum and ensure that your WooCommerce store continues to make higher revenue and profits:

Use a Dedicated Server and Quality Hosting

One of the most basic steps to increase site performance is to choose the right hosting provider accompanying a dedicated server. This is considered a major factor that influences the speed of a website.

It does not matter how light your website is if you are using a shared server it will slow down your site which results in visitors getting a delayed response from the server.

Buying a dedicated server and choosing a hosting provider that keeps your site data on the cloud should be your first step to achieving the ultimate website speed and getting significantly faster results.

Use a Proper Lightweight Theme

Themes can be a crucial factor in website speed as they offer various features that slow down your site.

These features consist of code that gets executed every time you use that feature, sometimes the code gets executed even when you are not using those features.

When finalizing the theme for your website, you should pick a theme that is lightweight, optimized for performance, and has the only features that you need.

Keep in mind that solid feature-packed light themes are good starting points for any WooCommerce project.

Also, Read – Machine Learning Data Cleaning Techniques and Practices

Optimize Images to Speed up WordPress Woocommerce

Images are considered an important factor in contributing to the size of your webpage.

That is why some pages take a long time to load and refresh. So, the solution to this problem is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality.

Manually reducing the size of the image with the help of Photoshop or any other tools will not help.

To deal with this, there are plugins available that can easily help you optimize the image, like EWWW Image Optimizer, Optimole, etc.

Using any of the above-mentioned plugins will reduce the image size and improve the speed of your website.

Enable Advanced Page Caching Mechanisms

Page Caching is an excellent way to improve website speed performances. It is considered as one of the best ways to decrease page loading time and speed up the WordPress WooCommerce website.

As the WooCommerce site is dynamic by default, so you need to make it static to speed it up. For each request, the server will fetch the records from the database and waste time during this process.

Now if the caching solution is implemented, it would simply return the HTML. This would make your website fast and save a considerable amount of time as the server remembers the result, instead of processing each request separately. This’s exactly what is the main purpose of caching.

Keep Your Web Technology Updated

Another important measure is to keep your site and technology updated. Every update contains improvements, new features, and provides improved speed.

For this reason, it is important to stay up to date. Every update not only adds new features but will also help fix any security issues and bugs.

Themes and plugins also get regular updates. So, it’s the responsibility of website owners to keep their site, theme, and plugins updated to the latest versions.

Not doing so may result in making your site slow and unstable and make you exposed to many security threats.

Don’t Embed Video Directly

Embedding videos on your site seems an excellent way to engage visitors but with a problem that it makes your website suffer and get some speed and performance issues.

Before adding any video to your website please make sure whether you need it. Uploading a video to your homepage will have some loss of speed, as each time the video is played a certain amount of bandwidth is used, this will increase the load on the server.

It is a good idea to ignore uploading videos on your landing page until it is very important to speed up the woocommerce website.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

People visit your site from different parts of the world so the loading speed of the site will differ for each one of them.

If any visitor is further away from the computer that hosts your site, then it will take longer to transmit your site data.

To solve this problem there are various CDN (Content Delivery Networks) that help to maintain the speed of loading sites to a minimum for visitors across various countries.

CDN can be defined as a combination of various servers distributed across different locations to speed up the frequency of the content supply.

It works like a proxy server, reserves all content, and facilitates the approach of the users at different locations.

Minify Scripts and Files

Minifying your files and scripts is another simple yet pretty genius concept to speed up WordPress WooCommerce website.

While writing code files like CSS, HTML, generally developers use comments, variables, etc to make the code readable.

This helps others who work on the project later. Long scripts make your webpage slow as they take some time to download.

On the other hand, browsers and servers can read content without comments, which creates additional network traffic with no practical benefit.

That’s why it is recommended to minify the script and remove the comments, spaces, and code structure. You can minify the code manually by yourself or you also have the option to use multiple plugins created primarily for this purpose.

Keep Your Site Secure

Another technique to increase website speed is security. To speed up woocommerce website, you always need to keep an eye on the access log to check for any unnecessary attempts to force attack your website.

Some attacks may exploit your plugins or just break into your site to absorb your site resources for fun.

You should always check your server and log files for excessive load. Because high server load may be the reason for bots attacking your site.

You can defend yourself from Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) attacks and brute force attacks by using Sucuri or Cloudflare premium plans.

With the help of these solutions, you get web application firewalls to examine the bandwidth used and block DDoS attacks.

Analyze Performance Regularly

It is very important to execute the right diagnosis of your website. It depends on users how often they change their website. Accordingly, there must be a regular website performance check.

If the changes are made daily, then you must run performance checks weekly. And if the changes are minor and not too frequent then analyzing site performance once a month should be enough.

There are various tools available for measuring performance like 10Web Performance service, Pingdom, etc. It is important to keep track of prior reports to observe how your site speed has changed over time.

You should always analyze the test results and make changes that’ll optimize site speed further.

Also, Read – How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Conclusion

With all the tips and methods discussed, it is time to improve and speed up WooCommerce site performance. If your WooCommerce site takes more than two seconds to load, then it’s time to work on it and make it better than ever before.

The greatest advantage of decreasing your website’s loading time is that it will tremendously improve the experience of your visitors whether they are using mobile devices or PCs.

Moreover, it will further improve your rankings in the SERPs. An increase in site-loading speed will help you in both the short as well as in long run.