10 Steps to Speed Up WooCommerce Store and Protect Your Revenue in 2022

• 3 seconds – Optimum time to display content to users.
• <1.3 seconds – Time to show the first byte to visitors.
• <500 KB – Google’s suggested page weight for mobile pages.

Your hosting service is the first thing to check if your site has speed issues. The WooCommerce themes and your store’s pages can all be totally sorted, but a slow website hosting service can cripple your speed.

Let’s explain a few reasons why your hosting provider may be ruining your use experience:

• Your hosting service has oversold its services. They have a fixed capacity for their servers and hardware. If they have too many tenants, then they will have slowdowns.
• Your hosting provider has noisy neighbors. Your WooCommerce website could be on a shared web hosting with other websites that are super busy.
• Your hosting provider is not optimized for WordPress. Many hosting providers set up their servers to support multiple ecommerce platforms from a single web server.

The only way to fix a bad hosting is to get a different hosting. If your current provider can make an upgrade, then they may also help you migrate all your files. If not, then you should find a better host and move.

Large file sizes hurt load times because the user has to download the file. For product pages, this is especially damaging if the user has to wait a long time to see your product images.

The key things to remember about images, especially on products pages, are:

• Choose the right image size. You probably don’t need a huge image.
• Compress your images to save file size. Aim for 70-90% compression.
• Use modern file formats, such as WebP, instead of older formats.

If you haven’t optimized your images, then their larger file sizes will be slowing down your WooCommerce store.

Unfortunately for database administrators, there are many easy-to-fix, database related issues that can cause website speed problems. Slow queries are a major bottleneck in most databases and often indicate a poorly optimizing application.

Poorly indexed tables can be responsible for large chunks of wasted time, as the searching time shoots up when data is not properly managed. Many other different problems plague databases too – such as locking or fragmentation – but luckily they’re also usually easy to spot and fix if you know what you’re doing. Data causes website speed to slow down quite regularly because of so many little things that add up over time.

A bad plugin can have a powerful negative impact on the speed of your website for three main reasons.

1. It may be coded poorly which means that it isn’t as efficient at work and is utilizing more server resources than necessary to do its job. This impacts your server performance even if not all visitors are using the plugin and therefore negatively affecting their experience.
2. A lot of plugins are installed directly on visitors’ computers through an executable file (rather than remotely through a web host) which makes them slow by nature – bad plugins exacerbate this issue by taking up memory or CPU time unnecessarily when they could just be quietly doing their job in the background and have insignificant impact overall.
3. Some plugins like analytics programs can purposefully take up extra memory to do their intended job. Analytics plugins for WooCommerce stores can create huge file sizes and really slow down your WordPress site.

An easy test to see how your plugins are performing is to run a speed test with your plugins switched on. Then, switch them off and test again. The difference (especially if you repeat this process a few times) is the result of your plugin performance.

There are three ways to increase your WordPress memory limit. WordPress makes this fairly easy, but you can consult a developer if you feel nervous about making these changes.

These methods were put together by the team at labinator.com.

Here’s how you get it done:

Method 1 – Change The WP Memory Limit Using The (php.ini) File

1. Find or locate your php.ini file. If needed, create your own and place it in the root directory of your WordPress folder.
2. Open your php.ini file then edit it.
3. Find the line: memory_limit = 32M
4. Change the 32M or any number you find there to your desired limit (e.g. 256M).
5. Save your changes and reboot your localhost or server.

Method 2 – Change The WP Memory Limit Using The (wp-config.php) File

1. Find your wp-config.php file in the root directory of your WordPress installation.
2. Open the wp-config.php file with a text editor then locate the line that includes: define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
3. Then add after it, the below line of code: define (‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);
4. Save the wp-config.php file then refresh your website.

Method 3 – Change The WP Memory Limit Using The (.htaccess) File

1. Search for your .htaccess file which should be located in the root directory of your WordPress installation. If you can’t find it then it might be hidden. Thus, make sure to check your hidden files when locating it.
2. Open the .htaccess file with a text editor and add the following line of code:
3. php_value memory_limit 256M
4. Save the .htaccess file then refresh your website.

Running your WooCommerce store with a Content Delivery Network will speed up your site by bringing your files closer to your users.

Let’s cover the two main things to evaluate when you choose a CDN:

1. The performance of the CDN itself. There are two main speed KPIs to check:
   1. Latency, or the lag between the user’s request and the server’s response, should be as low as possible.
   2. Throughput should be as high as possible.
2. How much the CDN will cost. You have many options for a CDN, so don’t overpay.

A CDN should dramatically improve your page load speed, especially if your website features many static pages.

Most WooCommerce customer sessions are cleared automatically after a period of time. However, sometimes this doesn’t happen. The result is a bloated, slow wp_options table in your WordPress database.

• Transient records should be cleared automatically after a set period of time. If they are causing problems, you can use a plugin like Transient Cleaner to sort them out.
• WordPress customer sessions should also be removed automatically. Unremoved sessions can really affect website performance. Here’s how to fix it:
  • Run this query on your wp_options table to see all the sessions currently in your table:

• You can then run this command to remove these sessions:

Of course, many people get a bit nervous with this level of work on their websites. If you suspect these problems, you may consider hiring a WooCommerce developer to resolve these problems on your websites.

WooCommerce store owners almost always use WordPress plugins to increase the functionality of their stores. However, your WordPress plugins can slow down your stores and cost you sales.

Here’s how plugins affect your website speed:

• High bandwidth crawlers
• High bandwidth IP addresses
• High bandwidth download files
• High bandwidth files (eg. images)
• Total bandwidth usage (for monitoring)

Any of these five things will slow down your site. To find problems, use GTMetrix to run a website speed test. A close examination of the waterfall chart will show you which plugins use the most resources.

If you have plugin issues, you can resolve them easily. Let’s list a few simple steps you can take:

• Swap your plugins for lightweight alternatives.
• Disable plugins on selected pages to boost performance.
• Use another plugin such as Asset CleanUp or Perfmatters.

One easy way to make your ecommerce store run faster when you have slow plugins is to just use less of them. Disable any plugins you don’t really need.

What are AJAX cart fragments? Here’s a simple explanation of cart fragments from SERT Media:

WooCommerce sites, especially larger ones or ones who are hosted on a slow host, tend to have one small yet slow request. The request is an AJAX request that WooCommerce makes by default on all fresh installs of woocommerce.

The resulting cart fragments can slow down your cart page, which is one of the most important pages on your ecommerce store.

Here’s how to fix cart fragments:

1. Step 1: Go into your WooCommerce Settings go to products and turn off enable ajax add to cart buttons on archives. Also go ahead and redirect them to the cart page on addition. This step is technically optional but it’s done to force users to redirect to the cart page to avoid issues with caching setups.
2. Step 2: Dequeue the cart fragments JS. You can do this in a couple of ways for instance you can simply copy the below snippet into your child theme functions.php file or into a plugin like Code Snippets.

A plugin such as Perfmatters can do this for you if you don’t feel comfortable messing around too much with your site’s code and scripts.