6 tips to improve your Woocommerce Website speed

For any website, user experience is the key to success, especially for eCommerce websites. For websites, user experience is defined by the user-friendly interface, usability, user research, and the most important is the page loading speed. According to an estimate by Amazon, a delay of only one second would cost them approximately $1.6 billion every year. Hence, the page’s loading speed is the most important for eCommerce, or else the customers will prefer to faster loading websites for products of their interest.

Hence, WooCommerce optimization is vital to your business growth. Furthermore, the variation of website user experience across different devices is also very important. After all, 55.4% of the online buyers shop using their mobile devices. If you are also looking for ways to improve Woocommerce Website speed, scroll down for the best effective tips.

WooCommerce settings 

If you notice a minor delay in your website’s loading times, the first go-to step is to optimize the WooCommerce settings in your WordPress website dashboard. Starting with the most basic step is to change the login page URL. The login URL is domain.com/wp-admin/ by default which is common to everyone and prone to database breaches and hackers. Changing the URL not only keeps from the hacking but rate-limiting HTTP errors such as 429 too many requests, as well. You can use free plugins for this purpose, such as Rename wp-login.php and WPS Hide Login.

Next, you must go to the Woocommerce – settings and get to the products tab. Now, ensure that the Enable AJAX Add to Cart Buttons on the Archive button are checked in the Add to Cart Behavior.

You can also try to limit the number of posts for a blog website, comments, reviews. Further, you can disable the pingbacks and the outdated plugins and themes.

1. Hosting provider

Woocommerce speed optimization has a lot to do with the optimal hosting plan as well. Standard and cheap plans attract us a lot, I get it. However, you will soon have to get rid of them to improve Woocommerce Website speed.  You can either choose to request more space for shared hosting or use managed hosting. Managed hosting is, however, an expensive plan yet perfectly efficient to drive lots of traffic. It would help if you bought hosting within the geographic boundaries that contain most of your audiences. Your host provider must have the following features;

• Data centers at different points across the world.
• SSD based solution
• Flexibility to comply with the expanding Woocommerce business.
• Maximum uptime for high performance and the best user experience with the website.
• 24/7 help service to address performance issues.
• High-end cloud infrastructure.
• Lastly, it must have a server nearby the potential audience.

2. Content delivery network

Integrating Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that significantly helps improve website performance. Integrating CDN, you can store the static files of your websites like images and JavaScript on the CDN. The closer the customer is to its server, the faster the losing speed of the website will be. If you have a large business spread across different countries, you may choose among KeyCDN, JetPack photon, MaxCDN, and Cloudflare.

3. Image Display and Delivery 

Images are vital to any WooCommerce website. Hence, to speed up WooCommerce, you have to choose the right dimensions of the images. Furthermore, to improve Woocommerce website speed, ensure that the resolution of the images you upload is up to the mark. Furthermore, there is no specific optimal number of images for the products at the eCommerce store. This is where the CDN proves to be the best solution. Images and videos take up most of the website page. Therefore, it is a good practice to optimize and compress images. You can compress your images in the way described below.

• Use the right format of images
• Use efficient tools to compress the images
• Responsive images help optimize the delivery for different devices.
• Lazy load off-screen and hidden images.
• Integrate CDN for offload image delivery.

Above all, WordPress offers built-in image optimization, but you must ensure using the latest version.

4. Checkout process

Reviews indicate that most of the bounce rates are at the checkout point. Therefore, to improve Woocommerce Website speed, the checkout process must be seamless. It is vital to get to the final goal of generating a conversion. One of the best approaches s for this is to reduce the UX friction between the users and final sale down to zero. Make the checkout process an easy, simple, and one-page procedure. The lesser they have to navigate through the website, the more likely they will convert.

Another way for WooCommerce Optimization is the software such as WooCommerce blocks or Divi Woo Modules. With such software, one may combine the WooCommerce shortcodes and design the whole checkout process, from discovery to shipment, on the same page.

5. Cache Plugin 

A cache refers to either hardware or software that stores the data to attend to future requests at a faster pace. Hence, using a cache plugin proves to be helpful for WooCommerce optimization because it stores a version of the website on the user’s device. Therefore, much lesser data transfer between the user and the site database, which ultimately reduces loading times.

However, sometimes caching plugins prove to be problematic just because they are not set up properly. For example, you should never cache your checkout pages. If you find cache plugins useful, learn to configure the plugin or get a WooCommerce development agency on board.

Caching may be of two types; server cache and browser cache. The former enables the servers to remember the parts of the website and saves the data and time. The latter browser caching makes the browser remember the page, so there is less data exchange between the browser and server. However, it is only useful for visitors who happen to visit multiple pages.

6. Website code

The last but not least point of Woocommerce optimization is the website’s coding because the bloated code is one of the major causes of extended loading time for the page. As you obsolete certain features such as comment section or review, you must remember to minify, defer and optimize the Javascript, CSS, HTML code accordingly.

You can also use the cache plugins or themes available that minify the codes automatically. Minifying means removing the unnecessary spaces in the coding file. Such an approach is handy to improve Woocommerce website speed because the heavy coding of web page loading times is longer.