7 Ways to Accelerate Your WooCommerce Development

Creating a speedy store is really easy if you wish shoppers around on your site, so that they can purchase more of your products. Nowadays, people are in need of quick gratification. They lack patience and do not appreciate waiting, be it standing in the queue at a supermarket or even waiting for Netflix to buffer, for that matter. Consequently, if your product pages take time to load, you tend to lose your customers instantly as they would not even think twice about abandoning your store and buying from your rival.

According to the recent study, about 47% of shoppers demand a web page to launch within 2 seconds or even less, whereas almost 40% of folks will potentially abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, a 7% reduction in conversion is caused if there is a delay of 1 second in page response time. Now all these stats imply, if your ecommerce site supposedly makes a hundred thousand bucks per day, a 1 second delay could possibly result in a $2. 5 million loss in sale each year.

Therefore, in this blog, you will learn all the essential tips and tricks to keep your store running smoothly, as well as will assist you in speeding up your WooCommerce store and helping you to accomplish your pivotal target of having a swift and successful WooCommerce store! Let’s have a read below:

An Incredible Host and 3 Caches

To accelerate your WooCommerce development, you must have a really good host along with the most optimum caches. Usually, ‘Kinsta’ is used for the ‘WordPress’ websites, as it has an incredible cache tool. It is essential that you take a look at the cache and speed as parameters followed by price.

There are three kinds of cache available to you that helps in making your WordPress works in the best way possible! These caches are:

1. File Cache
2. Object Cache
3. Database Cache

You must have a File Cache to your static files, as well as for static pages. CSS, JavaScript, and other such static files are stored in this cache, along with some parts of the pages too.

The second cache you need to have is Object Cache. It caches some parts of pages or in some instances the complete page resulting in reduced load time. It automates right away and helps you avoid going to database time and again.

The third one you require is the Database Cache. It stores all the database information and queries alike. One of the many reasons to have this level of cache is that it reads data much faster than your regular MySQL page. There are a number of WooCommerce sites having 30 or even more of such queries. This mode of cache tends to speed it up for you resulting in more efficient WooCommerce store.

With regards to hosting, you shouldn’t be worried to invest a bit of money. There are numerous sites that have literally failed to get high traffic as they were launched on the low quality web host. Therefore, the top most priority must be a good host for your WooCommerce development.

The key is, the faster your site is, the more sales you will enjoy. Therefore, I suggest SiteGround’s top shared plan for a single ‘WooCommerce’ site.

Image Downloads Optimization

As you must know, image downloads are the biggest part of any site. Therefore, it is mandatory to optimize these images in order to speed up your WooCommerce site for a better user experience.

You may optimize your images prior to uploading them on your WooCommerce site. The best option to save the time is using a plugin for optimization.

One of the outstanding plugins you can opt for is WP Smush pro. It works best in image optimization on the server with a cloud service. It does not only optimizes the image but also helps in optimizing the image sizes as well as thumbnails. It generally gives incredible results but you got to be careful on cheaper hosts with GPU limits as it tends to burn a plenty of GPU time on SiteGround Shared Hosting.

You can also resize the images as each and every pixel counts. Therefore, you have to ensure that you are taking as much steps as possible to reduce the page load.

Another useful tip can be using GTMetrix.com, you can quickly check your images by adding your URL and running the test. This tool will let you know whether you need to compress or resize your images to further accelerate your site, and will even compress the image for you.

Minifying CSS and JavaScript

To minify JavaScript and CSS, you should be using AutoOptimize plugin. It’s an incredible plugin and does a fantastic job in minifying your file. Moreover, you can minify your CSS and JavaScript by combining your files into single downloads. A good choice for this can be WP Rocket.

Other than the plugins, you can use built-in cache tool if you are using SiteGround.

Enabling HTTP/2

If you have already checked the first one from the list, i.e. a good host, along with an SSL, then HTTP/2 must surely be enabled. You can still check it by visiting GTMetrix.com. All you need to do is, load up your WooCommerce page in GTMetrix and you shall observe a different loading pattern when using HTTP/2. You will notice that all the files are loaded at once thereby giving a huge reduction in page load times.

Fundamentally, you should observe it in the Waterfall Tab. HTTP/2 is enabled if you see a number of files starting to download instantly.

https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test is another great tool that can let you know whether or not your server supports HTTP/2.

Adding Google Tag Manager to Accelerate Your Store

To have a better page load time, you should be using Google Tag Manager rather than using Google Analytics default method, as analytics and other such scripts all add more weight to your page. Facebook, as well, is highly notorious for slow JavaScript load times.

Therefore, if you don’t need Hotjar, retargeting and all these other fancy statistics, you should get rid of them now since page load time is much more necessary than these stats or other features that you aren’t using. Even if you want to use them, load them with Google Tag Manager and check your load time.

You should stick to Google Tag Manager as it is the best way to load tracking scripts and get asynchronous loading!

Do not Indulge Yourself in Google Fonts or Typescript

One has to realize the importance of fonts and transcripts used on the page. For you to have a faster WooCommerce store, you should avoid having fancy fonts on your site. These fancy fonts increases the load time and do not actually improve page conversions. It’s always recommended that you use system default fonts.

This literally helps a lot in saving time and reducing the page load time. It’s been recorded that at least half a second is saved by removing such fancy fonts.

Removing Cart Fragments to Boost up the Speed

You don’t need cart fragments on the homepage of your WooCommerce store as they load your WooCommerce cart in the background on every page load resulting in slowing down the speed of your page. A clean script in your child theme serves the purpose. Therefore, remove the cart fragments from your WooCommerce store now.

Quick tips to accelerate your WooCommerce development:

•  An excellent theme alongside a good host tends to go a long way for your WooCommerce store to perform well for your business.
• You have to be sure that you are ruthless about these external JavaScript files, as well as getting the images on your WooCommerce storefront reduced in size.

Always remember, a fast store is always a good store! Accelerating your WooCommerce development services by the aforementioned tips will not only keep your customers satisfied and keep them coming back for more, but will definitely boost more sales and help your WooCommerce store grow.

And that’s it!

Please feel free to comment or reach out if you have any questions. In case you need any help with installation, integration, upgradation and customization of your WooCommerce web store, please get in touch with us.

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