Speed is of the utmost importance with WooCommerce stores: even one second delay could cost your conversion rates up to 7%!
Speeding up the front end is important, but don’t neglect the administrative backend as well. While solutions for improving it might be trickier, there are still steps you can take to speed things up and optimize it further.
1. Plugins
Plugins extend WooCommerce’s capabilities to meet more complex business requirements, but when too many are installed at once they can create clutter and slow down your site. Some plugins increase CPU usage while generating unnecessary requests or database queries that impact website performance negatively.
This plugin removes unnecessary logging, thus decreasing the amount of data transmitted between browser and server, as well as improving page speed by decreasing cache flushes.
This plugin gives customers an intimate view of your products by displaying large images on product pages. This increases conversions and decreases returns by making it simpler for shoppers to ask any pertinent questions.
2. Theme
An efficient backend is essential to successfully managing and expanding sales for any online store, as research shows that 40 percent of visitors abandon websites taking more than three seconds to load.
Your site’s performance can also be negatively impacted by the theme you select, beyond any slow plugins. Any poorly optimized code or design features requiring lots of resources could significantly detract from its speed and user experience. Tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom can help identify issues like this but typically changing themes is the best solution to address them.
Cart Fragments plugin, which redirects users back to the cart page after adding items, may create numerous extra HTTP requests and should be disabled to improve site performance. Furthermore, compressing and optimizing images should also be performed both manually using Photoshop as well as using plugins like WP Smush for image optimization and compression.
3. PHP
As an eCommerce store, speed of checkout page is of critical importance. It affects users’ shopping experiences, conversion rates and SEO rankings – and can result in frustrated customers, poor user experiences and lost sales if your checkout page takes too long to load. A slow WooCommerce checkout page could result in frustrated users and lost sales – something an eCommerce store with limited stock cannot afford!
Your store could be slow for many reasons; one of the more frequent causes may be using ineffective plugins on your site. WordPress websites rely heavily on plugins for their performance; their performance has an immense effect on WooCommerce website speed.
Front-end caching and server caching for the database may help, with server caching saving you from having to create each web page every time someone visits it. Also limiting revisions on product pages reduces how often queries must be run against the database and reduces database query processing time.
4. Database
Customers expecting an enjoyable shopping experience when visiting your online store expect it quickly, which is why our Saucal team can help maximize sales through optimizing its speed.
When visitors access your checkout page, the page contents need to be transferred from your server to their device – something which takes time if there are many checkout fields and operations on a single page. One way of speeding up this process is using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Every time a customer makes a request to your store, the server needs to retrieve and process data – this can slow down your site considerably if no cache plugin is in place to aid with this process.
Keep in mind that speed is equally essential for both front- and backend elements of your site. An intuitive admin panel allows for efficient work flow, which will have a significant effect on its success.