Best Ways To Speed up WooCommerce

WooCommerce from WordPress is one of the most preferred mode of powering online businesses or stores. WordPress offers a wonderful performance, which makes it one of the most popular choices for developers and users worldwide. But one of the major concerns that people using WooCommerce are facing is its speed. It could be because of the number of add-ons or plugins that are further added on to the WooCommerce-powered website of yours.

However, at AcoWebs, we have found that some fixations can in fact contribute to improvising the speed of WooCommerce site.

Also Read – WOOCOMMERCE vs MAGENTO

1.Code: Less is Always More – Let us Apply This

Code has always been one of the contributing factors to the speed of any website – regardless of the framework or platform on which it is being set up. The same goes for WooCommerce as well – as you add code, its speed tends to slow down. So we suggest that it would be great to keep code to minimum in order to help improvise the speed, which ultimately impacts performance.

If you are the brains behind the code, it would be excellent to make sure that you have implemented the appropriate checks for running only the necessary code in any specific scenario. For example, if there is a particular piece of code meant for payment or subscription, don’t introduce the mistake of getting the product page interfere into it.

2.Rummage Through What You Need and What You do Not Need: Plugins

As we had discussed in the beginning, it is important to differentiate what is needed and what is not necessary for your WooCommerce site, especially when it comes to plugins. Of course, we need plugins to expand WooCommerce further, but make sure that we are not overcrowding it with unnecessary set of plugins. Some of these plugins might have dirty code that would do no good to your website.

So if, for example, you had your site set up quite a few years back and still it is running on the same code. Probability is that you have a lot of unnecessary code or plugins on your site that either needs to be eliminated or updated.

Also it might be that this carry bugs or security concerns within them. Some of the examples include Beaver Builder and Visual Composer.

3.Does my WooCommerce Site Contains Errors

Bugs keep bugging us always. No online site is free of these. In fact, no web server comes without an error-log; this is one of the most important tools that will help in improvising your WooCommerce’ s speed and enhance its functionalities. The error log captures all PHP-related errors. Here you will understand what errors you need to fix immediately.

Every WooCommerce site contains loads and loads of pages – and we do not have the least idea of where the errors are hidden – in fact, the number of pages makes it difficult to identify where your errors hide or how to handle these. In this scenario, it is not easy to test all pages on your site and we never know when a user encounters an error on the site.

It has serious impacts on the performance. Sometimes, it happens that when there are errors, we might think that it would not interfere with the performance of our process – but remember not all errors happen in a day. Over time, it takes shape and will end up resulting in disastrous errors, which are not good for your store. When you fix the errors, the more you are contributing to the site’s performance. The front-end of your site is the most important aspect of your online store and it is this that needs more attention. However, server resources are utilized by PHP.

Whenever there is a bug in the front-end, it might affect the performance of your site. So you should be taking into consideration the console. Test and examine your CSS and HTML output as well as it is important to check and fix JavaScript errors.

4.W3C Validator can be Used for Testing Whatever Pages Belong to The Mainstream

With an excellent structure and well-written HTML, the output will be displayed with unprecedented ease. It is always good to have the W3C validator to help you with the process of checking the HTML code that was initially organized and written. So if your HTML is well-formatted, there is lesser burden on the browser’s shoulders as it does not have to infuse in a lot of intuition to understand what would be the visual exhibition of your site. Instead everything happens automatically, thereby saving time and resources.

5.Indexing and Database Table Types

Everything is organized within the database and hence, it is important to have a greatly performing database. It is advisable to choose the latest in the lot as you do not want to stand out in the competition. Some of the plugins used for querying database can slowdown the process as some of those might not be needed. Use queries that will implement the indexes properly.

6. .htaccess and more on how do we control it

It is always advisable to keep your .htaccess smaller. Wondering what it is? It is an Apache Server configuration file, which is usually used for rewriting in WordPress and also, more often, used with other functionalities and redirects.

There are certain plugins that are no longer used and if you have introduced any of these, undoubtedly, your site will have to suffer low performance issues as it slows down the process. So when you position .htaccess files within any folder, the web server starts hunting all paths based on the file being called. This process could take a lot of time. All this combined with .htaccess could result in trouble if ‘.htaccess’ is larger than usual. Upon any access, the server is forced to re-read and reparse the results.

So if you are adding anything to .htaccess, make sure it is not slowing down WooCommerce. You could use the default WordPress standard along with plugins such as ‘redirection’ to help with the redirects.

7.Images and Size of Images have a Vital Role to Play

No e-commerce site is complete without images. When it comes to WooCommerce, media function for managing images is offered by WordPress. This actually means that the images being uploaded will be automatically displayed in any size or multiple sizes.

8.Which Host are You Choosing?

Hosting is another factor that can slowdown your WooCommerce. Regardless of how well you design your site or what all plugins you install, you cannot stop your site from slowing down if the host is not good enough for your site. Choose one of the fastest hosting sites available for your needs. When you choose your host, ensure that they will be able to provide you with high speed and optimizations on the basis of your hosting needs. Also when choosing host for your e-commerce site, it is important that you check database performance. A faster database reading can improvise the performance of your store. Ensure that the hosting will not feed on the platform’s cache because such a hosting that depends on cache is bound to render slow and dull performances. As you are aware, your cache needs to be refreshed at regular intervals. Else, it could affect your site.

9.Caching is Important

There are aspects that you need to keep in mind when caching. It is recommended to not use full page caching as it does not act as a performance enhancer, but otherwise in WooCommerce. Let us not torture the site with aspects that can be avoided. You can choose to use object caching and transients for better results.

With object cache, the database output or results are saved to the memory on a temporary basis. So this helps in reusing the results at an unimaginable pace whenever the page loads next. This could be one of the brilliant ideas that you can implement when data within various sections of a page are being used again. This would help in eliminating any redundant queries.

Again, transient is similar to object caching in more than one ways. Here, the results are saved within the database. This could mean that page views has a great role to play here. You can fill in the transient with any elements that you wish.

But if you could save query results that take longer or even utilize a greater computing speed, then transient is the best option for you.
It would be great if you could set up an expiry date for the same.

These are some of the simple hacks or ideas that you can introduce the speed or performance of your site. If you have worked on WooCommerce site and have tried techniques apart from the ones discussed here, you could always share it with us.

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