Do you want to speed up your WooCommerce store? We know that speed is money in any online store and this is why this post shares some useful tips on how you can speed up your WooCommerce store.

If your site loads faster, the better the shopping experience for your customers. This means that there will be improved SEO and increased return on investment.

However, it is worth mentioning that shoppers expect high-resolution images and videos, user reviews, personalization, and many other dynamic tools. They have a short attention span and need a faster and smoother buying experience.

WooCommerce is free but offers limited support. This means that you are responsible for maintaining and optimizing it to remain in tip-top shape.

A recent study by Google indicated that more than 50% of mobile users leave a site if it loads for more than 3 seconds. Apart from that, if your site is slow, it negatively affects SEO. You can check the speed of your site using WebPagetest, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTMetrix.

Table of Contents

1 How to Speed Up WooCommerce Website

How to Speed Up WooCommerce Website

In this brief post, we will share some of the tips on how you can speed up your site. After conducting the speed test, the report will give you an actionable plan to optimize your slow WooCommerce site.

Here are some of the tips we recommend:

1. Get a Fast WooCommerce Theme

It is important to use the right WooCommerce theme. There are many themes available for WooCommerce on the market today. The first thing to check before you settle on a theme is whether it is compatible with WooCommerce.

An example of a free theme compatible with WooCommerce is Storefront.

2. Go Easy on Plugins and WooCommerce Extensions

There are many plugins available on the WordPress repository for WooCommerce. There are also many premium plugins for WooCommerce. However, you should only use plugins that are built with the best coding practices.

Some plugins may conflict with other plugins or your theme. This means that you should be smart about the type of plugins and WooCommerce extensions you use.

3. Increase WordPress Memory Limit

By default, WooCommerce allocates 32 MB of memory for PHP. If any problem occurs, it automatically tries to increase this limit to 40 MB for a single site, and 64 MB for a multisite. This memory limit is not enough for a WooCommerce site.

We recommend increasing this limit to 256 MB. However, you should always do a backup of any file before editing it. This will allow you to revert to the previous version if anything goes wrong.

4. Compress Images and Optimize Delivery

As mentioned earlier, customers expect high quality product images. However, the pictures might take a lot of space and this might slow down your images. Videos are also a heavier resource than images, but you can load them on demand, unlike images.

We recommend using an image optimization tool to offload image delivery to fast CDNs. some of the popular image compression tools include:

io
app
app
io
io
TinyJPG | TinyPNG

5. Cache WooCommerce to Speed It Up

Caching is temporarily storing resources/ cache from one request. This will ensure that subsequent requests can be executed quickly. It is an easy way to speed up your WooCommerce store and is the most recommended. It also reduces the load on the server.

We recommend downloading a Caching plugin to make your work easier. Some of the best include:

WP Rocket (premium)
W3 Total Cache (free)
Cache Enabler (free)

Conclusion

If you are running an online store, time is literally money. You should follow the tips listed above to boost user experience, SEO, revenue, and ROI. They will help you increase the speed of your site.

We hope that this post helped you to expand your knowledge on WooCommerce optimization.

Joe

Joe is an experienced full-stack web developer with a decade of industry experience in the LAMP & MERN stacks, WordPress, WooCommerce, and JavaScript – (diverse portfolio). He has a passion for creating elegant and user-friendly solutions and thrives in collaborative environments. In his spare time, he enjoys exploring new tech trends, tinkering with new tools, and contributing to open-source projects. You can hire me here for your next project.