An extremely slow website can be both frustrating and damaging, leading to decreased business metrics, cart abandonment rates and overall brand loyalty issues.
Understanding why a WooCommerce site is slow is vital to its successful management and performance enhancement. In this article we’ll cover some common causes and how you can speed it up:
Plugins
An irritating website is not only frustrating to use but can be disastrous to customer conversion rates and overall brand health. Even one second delay in load time could result in lost sales.
One of the main factors causing WooCommerce sites to load slowly is due to too many plugins installed. While some plugins are necessary, others may be slowing your store down with excessive requests or queries on its backend causing performance issues that make your store slower overall.
At times, plugins should only be installed simply because they look cool. While this shouldn’t be seen as an issue in itself, make sure each plugin you install serves an actual need – for instance WPML can use up too much CPU power and cause site speed issues; alternatively consider Polylang or qTranslate X which use significantly less processor resources while offering similar functionality to WPML.
Theme
If your WordPress theme is slowing down your WooCommerce store’s load time, it could be due to improper code optimization. Run a test with Pingdom or GTmetrix and examine its waterfall chart; long gray bars indicate requests that take an unusually long time to finish loading.
Use plugins like WP Query Monitor or Admin Debug Bar to monitor which processes are taking longer than necessary, and improve their speed. Furthermore, upgrading to a faster plan may also help.
Customers quickly lose interest if your store takes too long to load, leading them away and decreasing conversions by up to 7%. A slow website also can damage search engine rankings; hence it is vital that you optimize it for speed.
Hosting
Hosting can have an enormous impact on how quickly your WooCommerce site loads, which in turn has an adverse effect on sales – for instance, even one second delay can decrease conversions by 7 percent!
Cheap hosting providers may cause your WooCommerce site to load slowly due to providing low quality servers that are not optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. If your website is experiencing performance issues, consider switching to a higher quality web host.
If your website still is experiencing performance issues, caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Rocket may help to speed things up significantly. Caching stores pages of your website instead of having them generated every time someone visits it – significantly improving site speed in turn.
Database
WooCommerce is a free open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress that transforms any site into an effective online store, providing customers with an enjoyable shopping experience.
One of the primary factors causing WooCommerce websites to load slowly is an improperly optimized database. This database stores information about products, orders and customers in different tables; if these tables become overburdened with data it can take longer for servers to respond to queries than expected. Query Monitor can help pinpoint any potential issues within your database to improve performance.
An ineffective WooCommerce website can damage its brand image and negatively affect customer satisfaction, leading to decreased business revenue and visitors leaving your site altogether. Therefore, optimizing and speeding up your online store are vital in order to attract more visitors and increase conversions.