11 Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce
Is your WooCommerce store a bit sluggish? If you’ve noticed your site loading speed slowing down to a crawl, you’re probably hoping for a quick fix. Unfortunately, there isn’t a site setting to change from slow to fast. But in this guide on how to speed up WooCommerce websites, we’ll offer our 11 best tips for optimizing your website’s speed.
Why WooCommerce Speed Matters
Your site speed is one of the most vital metrics of your website’s health and performance. A slow load time could kill your business. Slow WooCommerce sites can negatively impact your site’s conversion rate and search engine performance.
Impact of Site Speed on Conversions
Your customers are impatient. The slower your site is, the more likely customers are to leave before purchasing.
Next time you’re at the grocery store, watch people as they approach the checkout lines. They scan each lane and try to pick the one they think is moving fastest. The same is true when people are shopping online. The only difference is that instead of getting in a different line, they’ll leave your site and go to another online store.
The key to improving your customer experience and conversion rate is to reduce friction as much as possible. Slow-loading sites create unnecessary friction.
Site Speed Influences Search Results
Search engines, like Google, understand that consumers have short attention spans and will bounce from a site if it’s too slow. Search engines prioritize faster-loading sites to ensure their search results provide the best experience. The slower your site is, the lower it will rank in search results.
11 Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce
Now that you understand a couple of essential reasons a slow-loading site is problematic, here are 11 tips for how to speed up your WooCommerce website.
1. Choose a Good Host
Understandably, many business owners look for savings when launching an ecommerce site. But a bargain web host could come back to haunt you.
You won’t likely have problems at first because your site won’t get too much traffic. But as your business and traffic grow, the limits of cheaper web hosts become painfully obvious.
Your site will start loading slower, or you could get upcharges for going over your allotted usage.
2. Pick a Fast Theme
You want a fast and lightweight theme. Themes can contribute to page bloat and slow loading times.
In general, the more options a theme has, the more bloat it adds to a site. If the theme has 18 different skins and dozens of page templates to pick from, it probably won’t be fast.
You may only use 10% of the options in the theme, but you’re loading the CSS and JavaScript for the other 90% as well.
Check out our guide to WooCommerce themes for tips on where to find good themes and how to pick the best one.
3. Minimize Plugin Usage
Most WooCommerce sites experience slowdowns because of all the plugins people install. They install the plugins to add a bunch of bells and whistles to their stores. These features may allow customers to log in from 50 social networks, get highly customized dynamic discounts, and send 32 pre- and post-order notifications, but you don’t necessarily need them all. Is it worth slowing down your site for features you don’t even use? If you are selling three products and haven’t even launched yet, will these features actually increase your sales?
If you can’t clearly state how you will use the feature to increase conversion or sales, you probably should remove it. You can’t speed up WooCommerce if you keep slowing down your site with features you don’t use.
4. Optimize Scripts and CSS
Themes and plugins slow down sites for the same reason. They both load unnecessary scripts or CSS for your site. This extra bloat wastes resources and can cause your site to slow down significantly.
This slowdown is especially true for theme-based systems like WordPress and WooCommerce. If you’re not using all of the options or features in your theme, you’re likely loading extraneous CSS or scripts on most pages. Even if you pare down your plugin usage and pick a fast theme, you will still have extra JavaScript and CSS.
For help removing unused CSS, check out our post on eliminating unnecessary CSS from your WordPress site. And for all the extra JavaScript, check out our 10 tips for removing or reducing unused JavaScript.
5. Optimize and Compress Images
Loading too many or inappropriately sized images can quickly slow down your site. Image optimization is vital for a WooCommerce site since you’ll likely load several product images on a single page.
To speed up WooCommerce, you can:
- Use a photo editor to resize and optimize images before uploading them to your site.
- Use an image serving plugin to resize and compress images automatically.
- Serve images in NextGen formats like WebP.
6. Keep Everything Updated
Keep your site’s themes, plugins, WordPress, and WooCommerce up-to-date to ensure it runs smoothly.
Also, if you’re no longer using a theme or plugin, remove it from your site.
If you noticed your site speed decreased after installing a new plugin, try removing it to see if it’s the culprit.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network allows you to store your website files on servers across the globe. When a user loads your site, the CDN loads content from the server closest to the user, making the load time faster.
Your web host sometimes offers CDNs, but in other cases, you’ll purchase a CDN plan from a third party and use a plugin to integrate it with your site.
8. Optimize Your Database
Cluttered WordPress and WooCommerce databases will slow down your site. When you have a lot of junk in your databases, it slows down the queries because the system has to weed through everything to find the right information.
Common sources of database clutter include:
- Revisions. The database stores copies of your revisions to products, posts, and pages. The revisions can quickly get out of hand depending on how often you change things on your site. Consider deleting old revisions and modifying the settings to limit how many revisions your site keeps.
- Expired Transients. Transients are used to store cached data — typically something temporary like a large query response or the response from an API call. They are supposed to expire automatically, but sometimes they hang around, cluttering your database. In WooCommerce, customer sessions are stored as transients. Depending on how much traffic your site gets, this can lead to a lot of clutter. Getting rid of them should speed up WooCommerce.
9. Increase your Memory Limit
WordPress defaults to a 32MB memory limit for PHP. That’s not going to be enough for a WooCommerce site. When a site runs out of memory, processes time out, and some pages may never fully render. Check with your host on changing your memory limit to at least 256MB.
10. Offload Nonessential Functions
WordPress and WooCommerce can send emails, but are they really the best tool for the job? Try to offload as much as possible from your core website server.
For example, using an email marketing tool to send emails instead of generating and sending them from WordPress will free up the server resources and speed up WooCommerce.
11. Cache for Scale, Not for Speed
People often treat caching as a magic wand for fixing slow-loading sites. But caching doesn’t make a slow site fast.
First, if you’re unfamiliar with caching, it refers to temporarily storing a copy of a resource like a page, image, or script instead of making a new request and loading it every time.
Caching won’t significantly impact your site speed if you don’t take the other steps to optimize your site.
When caching can help is when you’re trying to scale your site. Your server can likely handle one server request. But what happens when you get a thousand or a million? By utilizing caching, you can rely on a cache-stored version of a resource and decrease the number of new server requests you make at once.
How Mindsize Can Help Speed Up a WooCommerce Site
If you’re interested in learning more about how to speed up WooCommerce sites, the team at Mindsize is ready to help. We’ve built our business around helping companies make sure their sites function as best they can for customers. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help with your WooCommerce site or other website improvements.