Influential Ways to Accelerate Your WooCommerce Store
If you build an eCommerce store using WooCommerce, you probably don’t want your site to be too slow, which can negatively impact your conversions and sales. The good news is there are lots of steps you can take to speed up WooCommerce store, and we’ll go over some of the most powerful here.
Why is WooCommerce Popular as an Online Shop?
You can find a lot of benefits when you choose WooCommerce as your online store over its other competitors. Following are only some of them:- Easy-to-use
- Free of cost
- Appropriate for selling both digital and physical products
- Available with a lot of products management tools
- Allows you to add any number of products to your site you want
- Provides helpful resources and extensive documentation
- Integrates effortlessly with the many prevalent payment processors
- Self-hosted platform, providing you complete control of the project
- SEO-friendly
These amazing features make WooCommerce the most suitable starting point for almost any online store. Possibly its most appreciated asset, but, is the fact that it runs above WordPress.
A lot of people feel easy and convenient to launch a WooCommerce online store because they are confident that they will perfectly manage it with the WP dashboard, which is an interface they are already familiar with. The conversant backend is far from just optimistic about operating an eCommerce project over WordPress, though.
The owners of the WooCommerce store have access to a massive pool of add-ons. Premium and Free plugins can assist with anything from the frontend functionality of the site to its SEO performance. At the same time, highly customizable themes, as well as page builders, can so much assure you will be competent to achieve the exclusive design, you are after.
How Can You Measure the Speed of Your Store?
There are a lot of tools for measuring the website speed up WooCommerce store, you can choose the best one for your requirements.
Depending just on the automated tests is not sufficient, though. Lately, none other than Google declared the introduction of a set of metrics known as Core Web Vitals & said it would begin paying pretty much more attention to the user experience at the time of ranking websites. You must pursue the suit.
Tips To Speed Up WooCommerce Store
1. Use Caching
- The faster your site loads, the better your users feel about it. When people have a good time on their first visit, they are more inclined to come back a second time.
- Installing a caching plugin for WordPress, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, will allow you, as the owner of an eCommerce website, to make use of caching (W3TC). Caching reduces server load by storing data in a user's browser (where it won't count toward your monthly data limits) so that visitors can get around slower servers and faster load times. Installing a caching plugin will help speed up your website not only for users visiting from work or home but also for international visitors on slower connections!
- Once upon a time, WordPress powered a static website. These days, thanks to things like extensions, themes, WooCommerce products and multiple contributors, a WordPress site can be very dynamic.
- Caching is an excellent way to make your site load faster. By using server caching (with Varnish), object caching (with Redis) or page caching (via plugins like WP Rocket), you can speed up your site without even touching code!
3. Choose Fast WordPress Hosting
A good hosting provider can make a difference in your website’s speed, but not all of them are created equal. Some can slow your site down if you’re running a WordPress site or have a lot of plugins. Do your research before you settle on any one host—you should be looking for reliability, fast customer support and excellent uptime scores that indicate a server that rarely goes offline? This can save you a lot of headaches down the road!
4. Turn Off Multimedia Files
Multimedia files can be fun, but they’re also a major drag on your website speed. It’s important to note that it’s not just multimedia files that slow down your website—it’s bad quality ones. We’re talking about significant Flash elements, sluggish video players, cumbersome audio players—you get the picture. If you want to run a fast store that makes sales, consider turning off all multimedia until you need them. You can always turn them back on when you have something cool to show off.
5. Enable Gzip Compression on Your Web Server
When you enable Gzip compression on your web server, your site will load pages more quickly for users. By enabling Gzip compression, every page of your site will get served with a particular compressed version that’s ideal for transmission over slow connections like mobile data.
6. Set up the Correct Permalinks
Using proper permalinks can speed up your store’s loading time. To learn how to set them up in WordPress, check out one of these guides: For Shopify users, we recommend using a trailing slash.
As noted on their knowledge base, adding a trailing slash will WooCommerce optimise your URLs for search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
- If you are not already aware, adding a trailing slash is easy—go into your WordPress dashboard and, under Settings > Permalinks, select Custom Structure (make sure that no other settings are set).
- After doing so, click Update Settings at the bottom of that box. It would be best if you now had (%post name%) in your permalink structure; click Save Changes at the bottom of that box.