WooCommerce can be rather demanding in terms of performance requirements, particularly when it comes to larger Woo sites that are receiving many orders.
WooCommerce is essential to have a good quality host – shared, cheap hosting won’t do the trick.
If you’re having trouble with a slow WooCommerce website, the simple process outlined below will definitely help, but if hosting is your bottleneck, you probably want to address that first.
- Test the Speed of Your Site
This is an important first step because it allows you to set a performance benchmark for your site right now, which will give you a baseline to work from.
When it comes to loading speed, we ideally want to be under the 1-second mark, a reference point at which the site load starts to feel instant. Loading times over 5 seconds will hurt both your rankings on Google and your sales, so we have to make sure your site always runs under at least 5 seconds.
Generally speaking, most sites can load at around 1.5 seconds without too much trouble and feel fast enough to the visitor.
- Use Good Quality Hosting
Speed issues with WooCommerce often are because you’re using a lower-quality hosting provider. Your hosting provider is the foundation of everything you do online.
Web host quality is directly connected to the overall effectiveness of your website’s SEO and search engine rankings, Google and Facebook advertisements, and also your conversion rate.
WooCommerce’s sites are different from regular WordPress because the backend speed is also important.
Woo sites are not just a website; they’re also a key line of business application, which means that it’s very likely you and your employees are going to spend a significant amount of time in there, managing orders and customers. The backend is also as significant as frontend speed, and on a cheap host, where the available CPU power is of limited capacity, it’s just not going to perform very well.
- Use a Caching Plugin
Besides a good quality web host, caching is another key element in speeding up and fixing your WooCommerce site.
A “cache” prebuilds your website’s pages and gets them ready to go when the next visitor makes a request. Without this caching plugin, your site’s pages will have to be compiled from scratch for every visitor who arrives at the site.
Caching plugins significantly speeds up your site as all the processing done to generate a page is done in advance and one time per page versus every page load.
These are the plugins we use and recommend:
- W3 Total Cache – W3TC is free and one of the fastest caching plugins on the market, BUT can be quite complex, so not ideal for the DIYer.
- WP Rocket is an easy-to-use plugin, perfect for the DIYer, but is a paid plugin (although still dirt cheap).
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN will make a significant improvement in your website’s loading times, regardless of where the visitors come from.
A CDN or content delivery network is a network of servers worldwide that serve up part of your website. This speeds up the site for international visitors and visitors further away and removes some load off your web host.
The one we use and recommend is Cloudflare. They have more than 150 server locations worldwide and have a free plan that works well for most sites out there. They also offer security features that can eliminate some of the risky traffic that may be hitting your site, as well as contact from spammers reaching your site.
- Image Compression and Optimization
The size of your site (or the amount of data the users will need to download once they hit the site) can be reduced with image compression. In some cases, compressing your site images can show a dramatic increase in speed, cutting several seconds of load times as the amount of data to download is significantly reduced.
Compressing the images won’t impact their quality (as long as you use lossless compression) but will reduce their file size.
Most image compression plugins are more or less equal in performance, with about a 3-5% difference in the performance of each.
- Switch to HTTPS from HTTP so you can use HTTP2
By making your site run in HTTPS (encrypted) mode, you’ll make your web browser software use the newer HTTP2 protocol (as long as your host supports it, that is). This protocol is considerably faster than the older HTTP 1.1 one. In the video below, you can see the difference in speed between them.
- Upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7
PHP is the programming language on which WordPress and WooCommerce are built
PHP version 7 is 2-3x as fast as the old PHP version 5.6. If your site is still running on 5.6, with the upgrade, you’ll notice around a 30% speed boost to your site’s front-end and back-end functions.
Note that not all sites are PHP7 compatible. You can use this free plugin from WPengine to test your site’s compatibility (and it can be used regardless of the hosting provider).
You can do the PHP7 switch directly from your CPanel or management console.
Right now, PHP 7 comes in four versions: 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2, and 7.3 – switch to the v7.3 if you can, as it’s the newest and fastest out there.
Final Words
We understand that the article is a bit technical. If you still have any questions about the topic or want to go deeper in detail, contact us, and we will be happy to answer.
