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Unbeatable tips to accelerate the speed and performance of your WooCommerce website

WordPress is the world’s number one choice when it comes to picking a CMS (Content Management System) platform. It offers immense customizability and enables integration with endless themes, plugins, and more.

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin by WordPress that is powering millions of online stores. Clearly WooCommerce apps and websites are ruling the eCommerce realm and enabling business owners to claim their space in the industry.

However, just like any other technological tool, WooCommerce has its own technical intricacies and challenges that you may have to deal with. In fact, just creating a website or online store and launching it is not going to be enough.

You also need to keep it optimized and updated. The speed and performance of your website must be consistent as it has a significant role to play in the overall success of your online business.

Today, we will share some handy tips and tricks that will help you achieve the same. So, stay tuned with us and discover the helpful strategies. Power your WooCommerce website’s performance and grow your conversions. Then you can develop e-commerce apps with DIY tools available online.

Know why speed matters for your WooCommerce store 

It is the age of fast internet and high-performing gadgets. It has been proven that the attention span of users has decreased over the years and online buyers demand a frictionless experience fueled with speed.

A high speed eCommerce website is essential for staying ahead in the huge competition that is ever-increasing. Go through the points discussed below and discover the significance of speed for your website:

#1: Reduces bounce rate

Most site, cart and app abandonments happen because of slow responses or long wait time. Thus, optimizing the website speed and performance can reduce your bounce rate and give a boost to your customers’ average session time. 

#2: Increases conversions

Decreasing the website and page load time can increase the conversion rate. A reduced bounce rate leads to more conversions and sales. People tend to spend more time on your website and make more purchases.

#3: Powers SEO practices

Google will obviously give preference to websites that will load faster and perform better. Thus, optimizing these metrics can also enhance your SEO practices and boost your ranking and visibility.

#4: Boosts user-experience

The prime rule of any business is to keep the consumers happy and motivated. A smooth running, and optimized website ensures the same. It enhances the customers’ experience and makes them move up the sales channel smoothly.

#5: Enhances communication

Your brand messages and goals are more likely to get conveyed well if your website has a good response time. If a page takes too long to load, visitors might miss some crucial messages and skip to only a few parts more important for them.

Bonus tip: Faster websites can lead to faster apps

If you have created an app with AppMySite online app maker, then faster websites will also lead to smooth running and fast loading mobile apps. As apps built on AppMySite get directly powered with the website that you have built it for, the performance gets replicated as well. You can discover more about this as you continue reading.

Suggested Read: What metrics are used to measure website speed and performance?

Tips to enhance the speed, security, and performance

The better the performance of your WooCommerce website, the more the chances of your growth in the eCommerce realm. Follow the tips listed below and give a boost to these crucial metrics and write a new saga of success:

#1: Keep the site updated to the latest version

WordPress and WooCommerce developers offer an enhanced and improved version with every update. Each new version also comes with fixed bugs and strengthened security that also contributes to the performance of the website.

Hence, you must keep your site and the integrated plugins updated to the latest version. For this you can login to the backend of your website and go to Dashboard >> Updates. Here, you can check the available updates for the plugins installed and proceed accordingly.

While you are at it, you may also want to ensure the latest PHP version as WordPress and WooCommerce are written in the PHP programming language. This can be checked under Tools >> Site Health >> Info >> Server.

Here, check for the PHP version details. If you find that your website is running on a PHP version lower than 8.0.0, then contact your hosting provider and ask to get it updated. This will lead to a better performing website and ensure growth.

#2: Find a reliable web hosting partner

It might interest you to know that a lot of the issues and metrics covered here, can actually be automatically addressed if you cover this one thing with a smart approach. In simple terms, choosing the right web hosting partner can help you work on many aspects at once.

A reliable web hosting partner can enable you to automate a lot of the things that are required to maintain a smooth-running website. When looking for the right web hosting solution, you may want to pursue the following factors:

  • One step and integrated solution under one roof
  • Auto migration to facilitate easy launch
  • Powerful development tools to ease management
  • Efficient CDN and custom caching
  • Staging to track performance issues
  • Additional treats like SSL certification and auto-updates
  • Complete security support with threat blocks

This is not all. With the right managed WordPress Web Hosting Provider, you can shed almost every strain related to managing your WordPress and WooCommerce websites.

We recommend WP Engine as it is one of the best and choicest solutions for WordPress website owners. It covers all the benefits listed above and has more to offer. As an AppMySite customer, you can avail additional benefits on their platform and host your website and app under the same roof.

Wp engine

#3: Ensure efficient caching to manage traffic load

All the data on a WooCommerce website is stored in a database and results are generated when a user visits your website and requests for them. For this, WordPress often requires running the same process again and again. This sometimes results into slowing down or crashing of the site during heavy traffic.

Caching helps you resolve the issue by temporarily storing resources (cache) from a request and using it to execute the subsequent requests quickly. The cache can either be saved on the server or on the user’s device. Hence, it reduces the load on the server and enables the website to load faster.

It is one of the easiest and the most significant ways to enhance the speed of your WooCommerce store. You can do this by opting for an efficient hosting partner that takes care of all your caching needs.

#4: Use a robust CDN and DNS system

Using the proper CDN system and settings for your business website is as important as using a reliable mailing service for communication. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is basically a group of servers located around the globe that work to cache and deliver static resources such as images, audio, video, etc.

It eliminates your websites geographical limitation and connects visitors with the nearest resources. This leads to a reduction in latency and leads to a faster load time.

Besides performance, security is yet another crucial aspect that you should focus on. For this, you will need a DNS level firewall that is capable of blocking potential threats and enhancing website security.

Only a secure website can ensure smooth performance and fast speed. Hence, it is important that brute forces and DDoS attacks get blocked and your site remains protected from hackers. Picking the right web hosting provider will also ensure that this is taken care of.

#5: Integrate standard themes and plugins

WordPress offers immense customizability by supporting endless themes and plugins. While themes help you boost the aesthetics, plugins add a myriad of functionalities to your WooCommerce website.

However, unfortunately some plugins and themes can mess with your website’s speed and performance. When choosing the theme and plugins, striking the right balance between functionality and compatibility is important.

Thus, when picking a theme, you must ensure that it is compatible with WooCommerce. Also remember not to get carried away when picking the plugins to integrate with your website, as too many plugins can slow down your website and affect its performance.

Suggested Read: How many plugins are too many? Here’s how plugins can slow your website speed

#6: Optimize product media without affecting quality

The media (images, videos, etc.) you use on your website can also determine how fast the site responds and loads. In fact, the latest updates on WooCommerce address this issue. It has introduced size enhancements, thumb-nail resizing, quality optimization, and more.

However, you must also contribute by optimizing your website media to make it suitable for a fast loading website. You must pick the right format for your images (JPEG, PNG, SVG, WebP) and compress them by using efficient tools. Do this without affecting the quality as the new-age shoppers demand high quality media.

You can also implement lazy-loading and let the textual and less dense contents load first on the website. The images can follow if the visitor’s network and response is strong enough to load them smoothly. You may also use more videos as they are often played only as per demand and do not really affect the load-speed of the page.

#7: Declutter your WordPress database

It is important that you keep monitoring, optimizing and clearing your WordPress database and various aspects related to it. For instance, you can begin with optimizing the login page URL. By default, every WordPress site’s login URL is domain.com/wp-admin. You can change it to something unique and protect your site from attacks and security threats.

You may also want to eliminate unused assets or control how they load. For example, you do not need to load payment gateway scripts on your homepage, and you may limit it to specific pages like order-confirmation and checkout. You can look at some analytics reports for your website and remove any unnecessary assets straining the load.

Similarly, you may want to reduce other such useless database requests and optimize the database for a faster website. Look for database calls that can be avoided and declutter your website from time to time.

Suggested Read: Reduce app load time and increase speed – Your ultimate guide to a better UX 

Make shopping effortless for your customers with an app

build your shopping app

That was all from our end today. Keep diagnosing the site at regular intervals and ensure a smooth and frictionless experience for your online shoppers. Additionally, also keep enhancing the WooCommerce specific aspects like your product listing, conversion tracking tools, and more. Also, do not forget to make your website more mobile-friendly.

Today, more people are using smartphones to access the web than ever. In fact, people mostly use their mobile devices to access anything they want to purchase or get done. Therefore, it is also important that your website is optimized for mobile.

Moreover, you can go a step ahead and complement your website with an app. While you can still use the website to entertain new traffic and mark your territory online, you can redirect the regular and loyal traffic towards the app.

If you are worried about the investment of resources, then brush it off. Take the advanced and affordable route and create your own Android and iOS apps with AppMySite’s free app builder.

It is easy, quick, code-free, and absolutely affordable. In fact, you can create, customize, and test your apps for free and only pay to publish when you are prepared to take your app to the app stores.

You can also complement your subscription with the WordPress web hosting add-on that enables you to power your websites, and ultimately enhances the speed and performance of your apps as well. So, what are you waiting for? Get the wholesome solution and grow your online business now!

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