The site’s speed is money for online stores. The faster your website loads, the better your sales will be. User experience means better SEO, higher ROI, and happier customers. This will result in higher revenues and profits.
Today’s consumers expect high-quality images and videos, live chat, user reviews, real-time analytics, navigation, and many other engaging tools.
Online shoppers are fast-paced and have a shorter attention span. So all the features they hope to speed up and improve sales are the same features that will slow down your e-commerce website if you don’t do it right.
WooCommerce is undoubtedly the world’s most popular e-commerce platform that is free to use and customizable to suit your needs.
Unlike other popular shopping platforms, you don’t have to pay WooCommerce a certain percentage of your income to use it. There are some fees involved in running a store managed by WooCommerce.
But here’s the catch! Since WooCommerce is free and has limited support, it is your responsibility to keep it in the best possible condition. The good news is, you can speed up the WooCommerce backend by following specific tactics as it’s essential in the overall ranking of your store.
Why Speed Matters for an Online Store?
The customer expects the site to load quickly. Speed significantly affects how your audience perceives a brand on a website. If your site is slow, your customers may leave soon because you’re not interested.
Users want to load a site in less than three seconds; after that, he was impatient. If your store has a speed-up WooCommerce checkout process, you can generate more leads. Therefore, the fast loading of a website is the key to ensuring a good user experience and generating more revenues.
Also, keep in mind that the speed of your business website will affect your SEO rankings. Speed has a significant impact on change.
For example, if pages take too long to load, customers and profits will be lost. Therefore, improving the loading speed of pages is very important for an online business website.
What is the Optimal Load Time?
There is no optimal time frame to load a website. However, the most famous advice is to invest in less than 2 seconds. As you might expect, page load time is an important performance indicator in WPO. If your Loading a WooCommerce store takes more than two seconds, you have to do all the work by yourself.
How to measure the loading speed of your site
Now that you know that the speed of your website is essential in translating your business, the next step is to identify slow criminals. Why isn’t your page loading as fast as expected? What are you doing wrong?
The speed checker helps you find out how fast or slow your website loads and how quickly. Identify any issues causing your problem (such as communication speeds and latency). To speed up WooCommerce admin need to utilize available tools.
WebPageTest, Gtmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom are some of the most popular and give you a better idea of the quality of your website. You’ll also receive specific suggestions on what you can do to improve your productivity, and once you’ve taken the necessary steps, you can review the site again to see what’s working and what’s affecting your business.
However, it is not enough to rely on automated tests alone. Someone recently unveiled a set of metrics to add to Google Core Web Vitals and indicated that they would emphasize user experience or categorize websites. You should follow their example.
Put yourself in the visitor’s shoes, take a closer look at your store, and notice parts of the site that aren’t loading as fast as you’d like. Also, compare your site to direct competitors to see its ranking.
The Quick Test report gives you a roadmap for improving your WooCommerce website. So the question is how to speed up WooCommerce and not lose customers?
Excited? Let’s get started!
5 Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce site
1. Get a Fast WooCommerce Theme
Enhance your user experience with a fast WooCommerce theme. Make sure the theme is compatible with WooCommerce.
The best way to improve your WooCommerce store is to use the fantastic WooCommerce theme with many features. The choice of a suitable theme should also be considered, as many themes are readily available.
We prefer a clean, coded, lightweight theme because they are usually quick. You can also use Page Builder to help you add just what you need to speed up the WooCommerce store.
2. Go for Reliable Hosting
In many ways, hosting is the most crucial factor in the performance of WooCommerce stores. The main hardware structure is responsible for processing traffic and providing relevant information to users. That’s why the best hosting for WordPress should be your top priority.
Cloud hosting offers the best solution and performance to speed up the WooCommerce database. The good news is that many hosting services are fitted with a distributed model to ensure you pay only for what the store uses.
If you don’t want to spend much time setting up your WooCommerce product services, managed hosting WooCommerce is the best solution for your store.
3. Keep an eye on WooCommerce Plugins and Extensions
There are over 54,000 plus free plugins in the WordPress repository. There are also better guts out there. So most of them are easy to destroy and install.
Many popular plugins, especially performance and content, do not work well in some hosting environments.
WooCommerce can be extended with many free and advanced WooCommerce extensions. WooCommerce plugins like WooCommerce pre order contribute to the performance of Woo store by providing a better user experience. But contrary to popular belief, the number of installed plugins does not always cause problems if you integrate the right and reliable plugins.
Checking the quality of all installed equipment becomes a problem if too many of them. The idea is that you have the skills and ability to learn thoroughly.
Some plugins cause conflicts with other plugins. If you have many links on your website, the generation of other disputes is likely to increase. So be careful when choosing the plugins and extensions you install to speed up the WooCommerce store.
4. Optimize Your Images
WooCommerce stores are full of great images and great image files that can slow down your site. Images account for 51% of all web content and 50% page load time. Therefore, your product images need to be improved and embedded.
According to the HTTP Archive, images make up more than 50% of the page size of any WordPress site. In addition, hundreds of product images in your online store can slow down the crawl of your website.
To resolve this issue, you can upload your images to websites such as Compressor.io and Squoosh.app before uploading them to the site.
If you already have images on your website, you can use WordPress plugins to optimize your images to optimize WooCommerce speed automatically. This is your best bet:
WP Smush: This allows you to add an image to the list so you can match all the pictures on your site.
Imagify: Upload JPG, PNG, and GIF files; it automatically reduces image size by 70%.
ShortPixel: It has a stable, comprehensive, and up-to-date photo gallery. You can also select any picture, even pictures not in your library.
5. Use cache plugin for server and browser
Cache allows retailers to speed up their WooCommerce stores by accessing or storing copies of store assets. This reduces the amount of information the customer sends between the browser, database, and server so that future requests for that information can be submitted quickly. In short, you should pay attention to the following for WooCommerce speed optimization:
Server Caching
The server is responsible for creating the website and installing the server so that it remembers the website’s appearance so that it is not repeated the next time.
This saves time as the server has no problem redoing the entire page. And since the WooCommerce store is robust, you need to make sure it’s put to accelerate.
Browser Caching
The browser’s cache is responsible for remembering the appearance of a web page so that it no longer asks the server to return the web page.
It is ideal for visitors to visit multiple pages, as the test can store both template files such as stylesheets and JavaScript files. This speeds up the viewing of the page, even if you do it frequently.
Conclusion
Nobody likes to wait. The last thing you want is to lose sales from people who will buy your product. However, this isn’t a perfect option if your site loads slowly.
Fast WooCommerce Store improves user experience, enhances search engine optimization, increases revenue and ROI. Just a few simple steps will significantly increase the speed of your online store.
