A faster loading WooCommerce store improves the user experience and helps you increase sales and conversions. In this article, we’ll show you how to speed up WooCommerce performance with easy and practical tips.
Why WooCommerce Speed Matters?
WooCommerce speed is important as it helps improve the user experience in your online store. Recent research has found that a 1-second drop in page speed results in a 7% loss in conversions and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
Over 73% of users switch to a competitor when faced with a slower website. Basically, a slow WooCommerce store will result in lower conversions and reduced sales.
It also affects your WooCommerce SEO rankings. Page speed is one of the most important factors that search engines like Google use to rank websites. Optimizing WooCommerce for speed and performance can help you make up for these losses and improve your overall conversions, sales and customer satisfaction score.
Tips to speed up Woocommerce
A) Set Caching For Your WooCommerce Store
WooCommerce speed is important as it helps improve the user experience in your online store. Recent research has found that a 1-second drop in page speed results in a 7% loss in conversions and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
Over 73% of users switch to a competitor when faced with a slower website. Basically, a slow WooCommerce store will result in lower conversions and reduced sales.
It also affects your WooCommerce SEO rankings. Page speed is one of the most important factors that search engines like Google use to rank websites. Optimizing WooCommerce for speed and performance can help you make up for these losses and improve your overall conversions, sales and customer satisfaction score.
This frees up your website’s server resources, making it faster and more responsive. The best way to add cache to your WooCommerce store is to use WP Rocket. It is the best WooCommerce caching plugin on the market, incredibly powerful yet totally beginner-friendly.
Simply install and activate the WP Rocket plugin. Once installed, it will automatically create cache and apply WooCommerce related settings.
B) Optimize Product Images in WooCommerce
You need product images to grow your business in a WooCommerce store. However, images take longer to load and affect your page speed. By optimizing your product images, you can significantly reduce their size without sacrificing quality. This will make all your store pages, product categories, and product pages load faster.
Now, there are several ways to optimize images. The most reliable is to optimize images before uploading them to your WooCommerce product. Most image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, allow you to export images for the web.
During the export dialog, you can choose an image file format (JPG, PNG, GIF) that gives you the smallest file size. You can then reduce the quality, colors, and other options to further reduce the file size.
Using your image editing tool to reduce file size is the most effective way to improve images in your WooCommerce store.
However, you can also use an image compression plugin to automatically adjust the image size. This allows you to optimize product images that you have already uploaded to your website.
C) Upgrade Your WooCommerce Hosting
Choosing the right hosting provider is the first step to increasing WooCommerce speed. Hosting is where all your WooCommerce files are stored. If your hosting provider doesn’t have a good platform, it will degrade your customers’ WooCommerce performance. Without a good WooCommerce hosting, all other tips for improving speed and performance are useless.
D) Keep WooCommerce Updated
WooCommerce releases new versions frequently. These new versions not only fix bugs and introduce new features, but also improve performance. Make sure your WooCommerce version is always up to date.
But WooCommerce relies on WordPress and the entire ecosystem of your theme and plugins. Simply updating WooCommerce does not mean you are using the latest software for your online store. You also need to make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress and have installed all plugins and theme updates.
You should always make sure you have a complete backup of your WooCommerce store before installing updates in the correct order.
E) Choose a Faster Loading WooCommerce Theme
Most of the beginners, when choosing the theme for their WooCommerce store, choose the coolest theme with a ton of bells and whistles. We understand the reason behind this. Beginners think they should get a theme with all the features they want to see in their store. Themes don’t have to work like that.
WordPress themes are only for controlling the look of your website and WooCommerce store, not for adding features. When choosing a theme, you should look at options such as layout options, color schemes, WooCommerce support. You should use plugins and extensions for functionality.
Choosing a theme with tons of plugin-like features can slow down your website. The theme installs a lot of extra code that you probably don’t use.
F) Use Latest PHP Version
WooCommerce and WordPress are written using PHP as the main programming language. PHP is an open source programming language just like WordPress. It is maintained regularly by a very active community of developers who release new versions frequently.
With each new release, they spend a huge amount of time and resources improving PHP performance by making it faster.However, WordPress hosting companies are usually not that quick to upgrade to the latest PHP version. They usually run several versions behind it to ensure software compatibility.
You can see which PHP version is being used by your website by visiting Tools ยป Site Health and switching to the Information tab.
G) Turn on DNS Level Firewall
A DNS-level firewall protects your WooCommerce store from malicious activity. It blocks suspicious requests to your website before they reach your server.
Hacking attempts, suspicious browsers and DDoS attacks can consume your hosting resources and slow down your website. A DNS firewall blocks them, which frees up your server resources to do other things.
H) Use an SMTP Service to Send WooCommerce Emails
Your WooCommerce store sends email notifications for account management, order confirmation and administrative notifications.
By default, WordPress uses the PHP function to send emails. This functionality can be abused by spammers, and many hosting companies intentionally limit or block it.
That’s why you need to use an SMTP server to send your WooCommerce emails. SMTP is the standard protocol for sending email.
Now your hosting company can provide a free business email address that you can use to send email via SMTP. However, hosting companies usually host the mail server on the same computer as their web host.
This means that sending a large number of emails at once can affect your website. Even when the e-mail is processed, it may end up as spam. You will need to use an SMTP service provider to fix this problem.
I) Upgrade Conversion Optimization Tools
Conversion optimization is a combination of techniques store owners use to encourage their website visitors to buy or sign up. To do this, they use a number of tools to display pop-ups, promote coupons, view targeted offers, and more.
The problem is that some of these tools are often not optimized for speed. They can load too many junk files, prevent the page from rendering, not display properly on mobile devices, and basically ruin the user experience in your store. We recommend using conversion optimization software that is fast, optimized for user experience, and works well on mobile devices.
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