WooCommerce is the most widespread eCommerce platform for a good reason. It is quite simple to set up a WooCommerce store. Purchase a domain and install the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website. The online store is now operational. As more WooCommerce sites compete in the digital landscape, it is critical for each site to provide the best user experience. Personalization, real-time inventory, and live chat go a long way toward giving users what they want and keeping them coming back. However, no attribute or tool can compensate for a fundamental flaw – a slow website or speed up WooCommerce websites?
Here's a frightening statistic: 40% of shoppers will not wait more than 3 seconds for a retail site to load. Fortunately, there are numerous things that developers, QAs, and WooCommerce service providers can do to transform their website from sluggish to sleek. This article describes a few of these steps in detail, so that site owners do not end up losing traffic, profits, or credibility as a result of them.
How to speed up WooCommerce websites?
1. Increase the WordPress Memory Limit
WordPress memory is set to 32 MB by default. However, it will reach the limit at some point, and the visitor will receive an error message informing them of the same. Hence, there are two alternatives for dealing with this issue: the user can do it themselves or notify the hosting company.
Users can configure WordPress memory themselves by following the steps below:
Revise the wp-config.php file
- Open wp-config.php, which locates by default in the root WordPress directory.
- Uncover the following sequence near the end of the file: /* That's it, no more editing! */ Have fun blogging.
- At or just above line, add: define ('WP MEMORY LIMIT', '256M')
- Save changes
Revise the PHP.ini file
- If the user connects to their PHP.ini file, modify the PHP.ini line.
- If the line indicates 64M, try 256M: memory capacity = 256M.
The maximum memory that a script can use is 64MB.
Revise the .htaccess file
- If the customer does not have direct exposure to PHP.ini, add a line to a .htaccess file: php value memory limit 256M.
2. Enhance the WooCommerce Website Images
People are drawn to visually appealing websites because they are visual creatures. Images play an important role in this appeal. Using non-optimized images, on the other hand, can harm page speed by slowing it down. Image optimization is a simple and effective way to speed up WooCommerce websites.
Large image files cause loading interruptions in the website's user experience. In addition, it can rank slow WooCommerce sites lower in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Use image compression plugins like WP-Smush. It, EWWW Image Optimizer, or Hammy to combat this situation. They reduce image size and optimize them for WordPress without compromising image quality. It is necessary for WooCommerce Speed Optimization.
3. Make use of a reputable hosting service.
A hosting service allows website owners to store media and other appropriate files on a host server. The hosting service is the base of the website because it handles all traffic and data. As the number of web pages grows, a low-quality hosting service will harm WooCommerce Optimization, particularly traffic, products, or offers. Therefore, always go with a fast and dependable hosting service that has the following features:
- 24/7 technical support to resolve issues and answer questions
- High-end cloud infrastructure
- Adaptability as a WooCommerce store grows
- Data centers around the world
- High uptime rate so that the website is never down
- Offers an SSD-based solution
- A server that is geographically close to the website's audience, allowing for Speed Up WooCommerce Websites.
4. Deactivate AJAX Cart Fragments in WooCommerce Websites
WooCommerce includes AJAX Cart Fragments. It is a script that employs Admin-Ajax to auto-update the customer's shopping cart total without a page refresh. It is especially useful for providing shoppers with instant feedback to know the correct items added to their carts.
Despite its effectiveness, this function has the potential to slow down website speed. It may even disrupt caching on pages that do not require cart details. If a WooCommerce site receives many AJAX requests, deactivating AJAX Cart Fragments will help speed up WooCommerce website.
Use wc-ajax=get refreshed fragments to resolve this issue. It is also viable to use the Deactivate Cart Fragments plugin, which deactivates WooCommerce's AJAX cart fragment’s function. However, remember to reroute customers to the cart page to confirm the information. Otherwise, deactivating will disrupt the user experience.
5. Use a cache plugin
Caching saves a version of the WooCommerce store's resource on the visitor's device, making the site load faster. It happens because caching limits the amount of information sent between the visitors' browsers, the site database, and the server.
Take note of the following:
- Server Caching: Because the server generates the web page, server caching allows it to remember parts of the page so that the entire page does not have to be generated from scratch each time.
- Browser Caching: It allows the browser to remember the appearance of a web page so that it does not have to spend time exchanging data with the server. Because the browser can store static files (stylesheets, JavaScript files), it is useful for visitors who access multiple pages.
Among the best WooCommerce caching plugins are:
- Breeze WordPress cache plugin: It has a file exemption feature, manages to combine. It minifies HTML, CSS, and JS files and uses a Plugin to reduce file size and download time.
- WP Rocket: It includes cache unloading, browser caching and GZIP compression. Furthermore, it includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript minification and concatenation. It also has a lazy image loading feature, which only loads images when navigating down the page.
- W3 Total Cache: Each caching type has its own settings page. It has database caching, browser caching, page caching, object caching, etc. In addition, it has an extremely high level of customization options.
However, exclude the cart, user accounts, and checkout pages from the cache when using plugins. These pages must be dynamic because they contain only relevant information to specific customers.
Offer to Speed up WooCommerce Websites
Test the website loading speed rather than losing customers by introducing them to a slow WooCommerce website. Numerous WooCommerce service providers offer WooCommerce speed optimization, but only a few of them deliver the best results.
Hiring Navicosoft to test a website before and after using WooCommerce optimization methods is a good idea. WooCommerce speed optimization is one of the most important aspects of creating an eCommerce website. It retains users, attracts new visitors, and grows steadily.
As a result, in this article, we learned about various extremely useful methods to speed up WooCommerce websites. You cannot afford to ignore your website's speed. It is one of the most important user experience points, aids in SEO, and provides numerous other benefits.
Navicosoft, the best digital marketing service provider, has expertise in developing WooCommerce stores that are fast and work flawlessly.
