There are certain elements that every bustling online store has in common. Some of them are productive customer support, reasonable prices, smooth user experience, and swift performance.
WordPress is so far the best e-commerce platform. All credit goes to the powerful WooCommerce plugin. Stores that are slow to load don’t attract large traffic. Hence, it is imperative to know ways to speed up your WooCommerce store in order to get your business up and running once you’re done buying a website or building it from scratch.
“There’s always room for improvement.”- The saying always holds true for a WooCommerce site. Therefore, we present you this article wherein we are going to teach you effective ways you can optimize your WooCommerce store to perform better. So let’s get started!
1. Compress your Product Images
Images are crucial to any contemporary website. But their importance increases manifolds for online shopping sites. In case, you’re selling a website or any product, you need to put the right image at the right section of your site.
Customers are never going to run out of options in today’s world. Hence, you should keep no stone unturned to be able to utilize every aspect of technology to gain customers’ attention.
Now, for example, you can allow only high-quality shots of the products advertised on your website. This will make your website stand out from others. People shopping online are hugely dependent on their sight. They should be able to zoom in on your product images to verify their authenticity in detail.
But, then again, high-resolution images that don’t blur on zooming in means chunky file sizes. You will have to provide three to four images of the same product from different perspectives upon that.
Therefore, it’s important to compress the images that are to be displayed on your site. That way you will reduce file size and loading times without considerably compromising with the quality of the images.
There are numerous websites to get the job done. However, if you have a site that is rich in images, you can take help of plugins. There are user-friendly plugins that optimize the resolution of your images to fit their sizes best so that it can drop the unnecessary bulk added to the image files owing to their high resolution.
2. Incorporate a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
It is a known fact that the faster your website loads the more customers will prefer your website over slower ones.
The time your WooCommerce store takes to load is determined by the distance between your visitors and the server hosting your website, among many other factors.
Larger distance will cause your website to take longer to load regardless of the speed of internet connections.
One way to avert this issue is to use a CDN: these services store or ready cache copies of your WooCommerce website on data centers around the globe. So, when someone wants to access your site, the CDN will redirect them to the copy of it that is available nearby.
This mechanism greatly helps you slash down the time your website takes to load.
There are plenty of CDN providers to choose from. Some will even offer you free trials for a limited period of time.
3. Use a Robust WordPress Hosting Provider
Unless you own a small website that mostly has low traffic opting for a budget-friendly, lightweight WordPress hosting is fine. But you would want to be equipped with a suitable system to manage traffic surges if it’s a WooCommerce site that you run.
Let’s consider you are running a campaign for an ongoing sale on your website through e-mails. This is likely to cause a surge in the traffic consisting of first-timers and old customers.
If you don’t have a proper hosting plan in place that can handle multiple users at the same time, then you will be losing sales.
There are several providers of great WordPress shared hosting. They can efficiently handle concurrent users.
Using a Virtual Private Server to accompany your WooCommerce store is even better. However, VPSs are costlier.
In short, the performance of the hosting website becomes a determining factor for conversions if loading times can negatively impact your sales. Growing a successful WooCommerce store demands you to choose the hosting provider wisely.
4. Have a Caching Solution
Just how a CDN increases the speed of loading of your website by saving copies of it at various locations around the globe, a caching solution helps to return customers caching your website on their systems. This way they won’t have to load your website every time they visit it.
You would be wrong to think that configuring a CDN is enough as it saves copies of your online store. In reality, even the best CDN can’t do much by itself for visitors with weak internet connections.
To tackle such issues, you will need to optimize your store for returning visitors. This basically works by reducing loading times in a way similar to what a CDN does.
There is a variety of caching solutions on the market. Investing in a caching solution is worth it.
5. Conduct Regular Purges of Your Database
Your entire WooCommerce site exists on a database. A WordPress site keeps stashing data with time. This includes drafts of posts, deleted comments and many more.
Additionally, WooCommerce websites store pages displaying products, categories, tags, prices, etc.
WooCommerce sites need cleaning up more frequently than other sorts of websites. This step won’t miraculously speed up your website. But every way of optimization helps in its small way.
Nowadays, there are a variety of plugins that help boost sales by making optimization a matter of a few clicks here and there. You just need to select what all you want to delete from your database and hit the run option.
However, we recommend you backup the data just in case.
Wrapping Up
There are a lot of factors affecting the performance of your website. In case, you don’t have your own site, you should be careful before buying an existing online business. Website acquisition is not so easy as there are several risks you should avoid while planning to take over an existing WooCommerce site.
In that case, you should check the acquisitions forecast regularly to find the best possible WooCommerce site available before you invested on the site.
Remember, WooCommerce sites are the most complex and vulnerable ones. They have to tackle hundreds of products, descriptions, images and various other integrations to make shopping for customers a fun and hassle-free experience.
So, you need to keep an eye out for new techniques and products on the market meant for optimization.
It is a continuous process. And only through consistent effort can you expect your WooCommerce site to succeed.
Hope we were able to provide valuable insights into the process of optimization of your WooCommerce website.