14 battle-tested ways to speed up WooCommerce store

Speed up WooCommerce Store

In today’s time, where the high-speed internet is available to each &  every individual around the world, speed of a website has become a kind of mandatory. And with the fast loading speed of the page, the website also benefits Google SEO. The first thing customers notice when they enter your site page is how long it takes to load.

When it comes to an eCommerce website, as we all know WooCommerce is one of the most popular CMS for developing e-commerce sites. Therefore, WooCommerce speed optimization is required to increase the potential of the site. You can’t expect to run an online business with a website that takes ages to load.

It is essential to speed up WooCommerce stores so that they can provide a better user experience and increase the visitors to the store. People spend less time on slow websites and they even give up on such pages and never return. In a study done by Google, it is found that 53% of users leave the page if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load you might be losing many of the potential customers of your WooCommerce store.

If you are having problems with WooCommerce speed and its performance?  And if you are searching for ways to speed up your WooCommerce site?

Then we have got your back. You are in the right place. We have come up with 14 battle-tested ways to improve the performance of your WooCommerce store.

14 battle-tested ways to speed up WooCommerce store

1. Choose a fast, reliable theme:

If the WooCommerce theme that you have chosen is more complex then it will take more time to load the website. So, you need to choose the themes which are fast and reliable. You need to check its pros and cons, compare it, and then use the themes which are best for your business. This might be a small and first step but it could affect your WooCommerce page speed optimization

Themes like storefront, shoptimizer, Diwi, etc. are built for running an e-commerce site which would help in WooCommerce performance optimization!

2. Wisely Choose WooCommerce Plugins: 

WordPress has more than 50,000 plugins. Apart from this, there are more premium plugins available for WooCommerce users. As the number of options is huge, you may likely fall for any of these plugins, as they make your work easier. Plugins are the best part of WordPress. That doesn’t mean you should use as many as you like. It might affect the WooCommerce speed optimization if the number of plugins is way more than needed.

A lot of plugins pull information from your database to display elements on the front-end, which increases the load on your server. The more plugins you have, the more server resources the website uses. And, if you go over your hosting plan’s allocated resources, your load time will suffer. Many plugins are not compatible with each other and often conflicted, due to which speed or some functions of your website may not work properly. 

So, while choosing the plugins make sure to choose plugins that have multiple functions. This way you can have one plugin which does multiple things rather than many plugins with the same feature which ultimately helps to make WooCommerce faster!

3. Optimize images to speed up the WooCommerce site:

Images are part and parcel of any e-commerce site. As without them, an eCommerce website is never complete. Also, it became essential to upload high-quality photos for a website, to enhance the user experience.

So, here are some tips, to help you speed up the WooCommerce site:

  • Select the right format such as JPEG, PNG, SVG, etc
  • Compress and optimize every image before uploading it
  • Offload images to fast CDNs

Choose the right format for your images(JPEG, PNG, SVG) & compress the images efficiently using the right tools. Use responsive images to optimize delivery for various devices. 

Some top online compressors:

  • Squoosh.app
  • Imagify.io
  • Shrinkme.app
  • Compressor.io

These would likely resize & compress your images before uploading. 

4. Set up a CDN:

A content delivery network is a distributed server around the world. It downloads images, videos & other assets from your site & serves them through its own network taking the strain off your server. It is useful to sell internationally & speed up WooCommerce stores

For example, if your server is located in India & someone visits from New York, your site would load from the Indian server. But CDN loads your site from the server that’s closest to the location of that individual. This helps users around the world view the same high-quality content without slow loading times. It improves WooCommerce performance and lets the page load faster!

5. Regularly Clean Up Database:

The database is a collection of your entire website’s data. It is a place that holds all your pages, categories, product pages, reviews, etc. This is the first thing that a visitor sees on your website.

But if your WooCoommerce stores keep old versions of your pages, posts, etc. then due to unnecessary junk files, the speed of your site will slow down!

Therefore to speed up the WooCommerce store, It is always recommended to clean up the database on a regular basis, In order to increase the response time of your WooCommerce store.

6. Optimize To Mobile-friendly WooCommerce Store:

According to a recent survey in 2020, there are 4 billion internet users around the world and most of them are having mobile devices. Also, it is very convenient from a user perspective to search for anything over the internet via mobile.

Therefore keeping this in mind you should optimize your woo-commerce store by making it mobile-friendly. To check whether your WooCommerce site passes minimum mobile usability standards, you can use ‘Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test’. 

To optimize your WooCommerce site for mobile devices, you can use responsive themes.

7. Stay Up-To-Date:

So if you’re running an older version of WooCommerce or out-of-date extensions, now’s the time to start regularly updating your store (and keeping regular backups). Running the latest versions of the core software and any extensions you use will also ensure your site is protected against known security threats and vulnerabilities that could break your store. If you neglect to update WordPress, WooCommerce, and the extensions that power your store, you’re probably missing out on WooCommerce performance optimization!

8. Use a competent web hosting provider:

Many people choose cheap web hosting providers which affect their store speed and other features. Running a WooCommerce store on a cheap hosting provider which has poor features affects your overall performance of the WooCommerce site

It is not limited to offer a rental space on the server but also offers the entire underlying architecture that is needed to support a functioning store and handle the traffic while serving the relevant content requested by the users. So, choose a web host which has, 

  • Reputed web hosting 
  • Server location
  • Uptime and performance
  • Customer support and site migrations

9. Caching makes WooCommerce faster:

It is the easiest way to speed up your WooCommerce store as it makes the websites load faster & reduces the load on the server while ensuring that users have a smooth checkout experience with no hiccups. If your hosting provider doesn’t handle caching at the server- level then you can use WordPress caching plugins.

10. Optimize JavaScript Files:

WooCommerce page speed optimization also requires the removal of unnecessary javascript files that can also have a negative impact on the loading speed of your WooCommerce store. But if you minimize & compress javascript files then you can manage to speed up your WooCommerce store!

11. Limit external resources, widgets & sharing tools:

It is important to add a limited number of external resources because it becomes more difficult to optimize them. It could be a script, a font, a style, etc. Widgets & sharing tools like Facebook & Twitter also slow down WooCommerce sites. You should try to remove these widgets & external resources to speed up your WooCommerce store.

12. Minimize redirects:

On every click, WooCommerce stores redirect visitors to a linked page. Visitors have short attention spans, so redirects not only irritate visitors but also eat up your server resource & by reducing these redirects you will see changes in page load speed.

13. Have you tried using the Lazy Loading option?

A lazyload is an option that displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanisms and improves the loading time of your WooCommerce store

Using this you can lazy load thumbnails, all images in post content, widget text, avatars, and smilies. The major benefit of this plugin is that it reduces the initial loading time, making your WooCommerce page speed-optimized. This also reduces the page weight, allowing for quicker loading. Lazy loading does this by conversing the bandwidth and delivering the content to users only if they have requested it.

14. Having too many Affiliated Ads on your website:

Having affiliated ads is the ultimate way of earning. But having too many of these affiliated ads can also be the reason why your site is running slow. To optimize WooCommerce speed, you need to have limited affiliate ads.  Affiliated ads often display images or some kind of animation, which is hosted on an external server. The more dependency on external servers, the less optimized it will be for performance. Another alternative you have is to host the ad images or animation on your server, thereby optimizing the images and reducing DNS queries.

These 14 ways do make WooCommerce faster than before and help your business. The key point is to have limited and necessary plugins and extensions. Make sure your site is updated whenever there is a new update. And always upload images in the right format, size and compress them without compressing their quality. If you are looking for a Professional WooCommrece performance optimization agency then you can contact WordPress agencies like CreedAlly to get it managed with top-notch quality and assurance. 

We hope that this article was helpful, and can improve your WooCommerce performance. A fast user experience boosts sales, drives traffic, and ensures revenue.

If you have any questions about this article, “14 battle-tested ways to speed up a WooCommerce store” then leave a comment.