As more WooCommerce sites pop up online, it is important for each site to offer the best possible user experience. But there is no feature or tool that can make up for a slow website. Here’s a scary statistic: 40% of shoppers will not wait longer than 3 seconds for a retail site to load. This article discusses a few of these steps website owners can take to speed up their WooCommerce websites.
Increase WordPress Memory Limit
By default, WordPress memory is set to 32 MB. At some point, this limit will be exceeded and the user will receive an error message that notifies them of the same. Now, there are two ways to address this issue: the user does it themselves or contacts the hosting company.
Optimize the Website Images
Using non-optimized images can adversely affect website performance by slowing it down. Optimizing images is an easy and effective way to speed up WooCommerce sites.
Use image compression plugins such as WP-Smush.it, EWWW Image Optimizer, or Hammy. They reduce the size of images and optimize them on WordPress without adversely affecting image quality.
Use a high-quality hosting service
A hosting service enables website owners to use a host server to store website content — media and other relevant files. Thus, a low-quality hosting service will damage WooCommerce website performance as the number of webpages increases. Always choose a fast and robust hosting service.
Disable AJAX Cart Fragments in WooCommerce
AJAX Cart Fragments is a feature in WooCommerce. It is a script that automatically updates the customer’s shopping cart total without refreshing the page. This helps generate instant feedback to shoppers so they know that the right items have been added to their carts.
But this function can slow down website speed. It may even interrupt caching on pages that don’t need cart details. If there is a high number of AJAX requests on a WooCommerce site, disabling AJAX Cart Fragments will help to boost website speed and stability.
Testing WooCommerce website speed
There are multiple tools that allow website speed testing, but few of them actually test a site on real browsers and devices.
Try using a tool that is free and verifies site speed on real browsers, devices, and operating systems. Run a website speed test before and after using the WooCommerce performance optimization methods outlined in this article. WooCommerce speed optimization is one of the central aspects of building an eCommerce website that keeps users happy, attracts more visitors and grows consistently.
