Key Ways to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store for A Superb Shopping Experience

As eCommerce shoppers across the stores now expect a more smooth and effortless shopping and browsing experience than ever before, leading eCommerce CMS systems like the WooCommerce are accommodating new tools to meet the demands of the shoppers. Tools for live chat, personalization, real-time tracking of inventory, Chatbots, and several others are now available with eCommerce-specific WordPress CMS called WooCommerce. But these tools are often not enough to ensure optimum shopping experience just because many tools actually end up slowing the loading speed.

A slow eCommerce website is really killer for the business conversion. According to a recent study, a website taking more than 3 seconds to load is likely to be abandoned by 40% of shoppers. This is why, if you are building a WooCommerce website, you need to try all credible ways to speed up the loading speed. Fortunately, there are some effective ways to boost the performance and speed of your e-commerce store. ​

The Key Ways To Speed Up Your Website

• Evaluate through Google PageSpeed Insights

To evaluate and measure the speed of your website you need to use Google PageSpeed Insights. It shows the actual speed and performance of a webpage on both mobile and desktop devices. Besides allowing you to measure the loading speed this tool also offers effective recommendations for optimizing the website page.

The tool works in a simple manner and all you need is to type the URL of the webpage in a box and then tap on the ‘Analyze’ button. After that you will get two separate reports on your desktop and mobile website. The report will come with a separate score for page speed, web page optimization, the distribution of the load and page stats.

• GTmetrix

A great alternative tool to the above-mentioned one is the GTmetrix. At first people with less technical knowledge can feel a little intimidated as the report data is more technical than the one you get from the PageSpeed Insights. But if you want to dive deeper into the various performance metrics, this WooCommerce plugin actually comes as a better tool.

The report provided by the tool will offer both Performance Score and metrics on other Page Details. By using the GTMetrix tool, you can actually have a deeper understanding of the underlying problems responsible for the slower page speed and performance.

The GTMetrix report shows as many as a dozen of aspects that can boost the page loading speed. Besides, each of these aspects is measured with a score between A and F. While the A stands for the best condition while the F stands for the worst. Apart from this, you can click every issue to get more insights. Lastly, the report also ranks various issues to tell you which need priority over others.

• Increase WP Memory Limit

It is one of the tested and tried ways to boost the page loading speed to a great extent. To evaluate the WP Memory Limit, all you need is to go to the WordPress admin > WooCommerce > System Status and see the WP Memory Limit value. Normally, by default value of this remains as 64 MB and you can always enhance the same to 96 or 128 MB and it needs little editing with the wp-config file.

When settling value for the WordPress Memory Limit you must remember that the value cannot exceed the total memory limit of the PHP server. To further augment memory capacity of the server and proportionately you need to go for the appropriate hosting solution with the ideal memory package. Many web hosts also allow you to change the limit by editing the php.ini file.

• Optimize The Images

Images play a great role in the mix of offerings by eCommerce marketers. Optimizing the images is another proven and effective way to boost the performance and speed of a website. There are several methods for image optimization and compression. Actually, some of the best tools just come absolutely free. Image compression plugins will easily lower the entire load of heavy image files for your website and help it function more smoothly.

• Utilize a Quality Cache Plugin

Caching is a widely acclaimed way to boost the loading speed of a website. There are many credible options and among them you can consider the WP Rocket. The plugin doesn’t come free but fully worth the bucks given the kind of ease of use and features it provides.

Among cache plugins you can also opt for the W3 Total Cache. This plugin comes with a minify plugin to make the job simple. WP Super Cache is also a great plugin that offers more ease of configuration than the W3.

• Use Quality Hosting Service

A quality hosting service plays a mission critical role for the website speed and performance. A great hosting service allows you to store all your web contents as files. Thus, a good service helps you with hosting service that can access your contents as easily as possible.

Let us have a look at the key qualities of a great hosting service provider.

• Round the Clock technical support to help resolving all issues and addressing concerns.
• Unmatched cloud support.
• Should be adaptive to the future changes and growth.
• A hosting service with data centers across the globe.
• Higher uptime to remain reachable throughout day and night.
• The server ideally should be located close to your audience.

• Use A Content Distribution Network

The content distribution network (CDN) is a kind of framework comprising distributed servers to make web pages and web contents easily accessible to the web users. Based on the location from where the user is trying to access the content and based on the origin of the webpage, closest content distribution server takes responsibility to deliver the content or the webpage to the user.

The rationale behind using such a framework is to deliver contents to the user from a nearby server so that contents need to travel less from the server to the browser of the user. This ensures a faster page loading speed. A CDN service by solving the issues related to the delivery of contents from a distant server ensures fastest delivery time.

• Optimize the CSS File

Optimizing the CSS files is a trusted way to boost performance. When each plugin by rendering their own CSS files slows down the page loading speed, you should use a minifier plugin for the sake of compiling and compressing the CSS styles so that loading speed can be enhanced.

• Sanitize the Database

An eCommerce site needs to deal with a variety of data creating a large database load. By cleaning the database from all irrelevant elements, you can reduce this load and to a great extent increase the loading speed. There are several available tools to evaluate the debase load and the data that can be dropped. A lean database can always boost your page loading time.

Conclusion

All the ways mentioned above to boost the loading speed have already proved effective for the vast majority of eCommerce stores. A lean website with quick loading speed is something that no e-commerce business cannot do without.