17 Effective Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce (2025)
17 Effective Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce (2025) – For an ecommerce site, speed is money. The better the shopping experience, the faster your site loads. A better user experience leads to better SEO, higher ROI, and happier customers. This eventually leads to increased sales and profitability.
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Today’s shoppers expect high-resolution photographs and videos, live chat, user reviews, real-time inventories, personalisation, and a slew of other interactive tools.
Customers who shop online have a short attention span. As a result, all of the elements people want to have a faster and smoother purchase experience are the exact ones that slow down your ecommerce site if they are not implemented properly.
17 Effective Ways to Speed Up WooCommerce (2025)
WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform in the world, and it is completely free to use and customize to your specifications.
WooCommerce has been downloaded more than 88 million times. It is currently used on over 5 million websites.
Unlike other popular shopping platforms, WooCommerce does not require you to pay a percentage of your sales if you use it. However, there are some expenses associated with running a WooCommerce-powered store.
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However, there is a catch! Because WooCommerce is free with limited support, you are responsible for keeping it in good working order. The good news is that it’s simple to maintain if you know what you’re doing!
Do you want to know how to reliably speed up your WooCommerce site?
This is the guide for you!
Remember that your ultimate goal is to enhance the revenue of your store. So make sure to get our free ebook, 10 Ways to Increase WooCommerce Product Page Conversions.
Why Is Speed Important for an Online Store?
First impressions are important, and the first thing a user will notice about your site is its speed. According to a Google study, 53% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Another global study found that 80% of visitors find a slow loading website more annoying than one that is momentarily unavailable. According to the same study, 73% of consumers would move to a competing site if a website took too long to load.
A 100-millisecond delay in page response time can have a negative impact on user experience and online revenue. According to Akamai, a 100-millisecond delay reduces conversion rates by 7%, while a 2-second delay raises bounce rates by 103%.
If your site earns $1,000 per day, 100-millisecond delays in page load times might cost you $25,550 in missed revenues per year.
The larger the company, the greater the decline. Amazon, for example, predicted a $1.6 billion yearly revenue loss if their page load speed was hindered by just one second.
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According to the data above, if your website takes 6 seconds or more to load, you are losing twice as many viewers as if your site loaded in less than 3 seconds.
Aside from user enjoyment, the speed of your website has an impact on SEO. Google’s site ranking algorithm takes website speed and performance into account.
Google has switched to mobile-first indexing for more than half of the pages in its search results. Despite this, data from HTTPArchive.org indicates that the average load time for WordPress-powered mobile sites has increased in the last year.
It’s even more important to keep your site functioning as fast as possible during peak traffic periods like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. With so many offers out there, ensuring that shoppers do not abandon your site is important to closing sales.
Given these facts, speeding up your WooCommerce Store can provide you with a substantial competitive advantage.
Measuring the Performance of a WooCommerce Store
You can’t improve what you can’t measure!
Now that you know why speed is vital for your WooCommerce business, let’s look at how to measure it. When trying to speed up your WordPress site, it’s critical to understand how to measure progress.
A website speed test is an excellent tool for determining how responsive your WooCommerce store is. However, if you don’t do this correctly, your site may appear slower after making a change, even if it’s actually quicker.
I propose that you begin by using one of the following website speed testing tools: WebPagetest, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTMetrix.
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You can also use the free WordPress plugin Query Monitor to identify underperforming themes, plugins, and functions. It aids in the debugging of inefficient database searches, bloated functions, PHP problems, HTTP API requests, and so on.
There is no perfect speed testing tool, but choose one and stay with it. You can progress to more selections later on.
There is a distinction between real and perceived performance. The user experience is more important than the technological magic that powers the site.
As a result, rather than focusing solely on speed, employ the techniques listed below to improve your site’s overall user experience.
How to Speed Up WooCommerce
A speed test report will provide you with a concrete plan for optimizing your slow WooCommerce site. Excited? Let’s get this party started!
1. Optimize WooCommerce Performance Settings
Let’s begin with the fundamentals by improving the WooCommerce plugin settings.
First, modify the URL of your login page. The login URL for every WordPress site is domain.com/wp-admin/ by default. While this is simple to remember, it raises a significant problem: everyone, including bots and hackers, is aware of it.
Changing your login URL to something unique will protect you from malicious actors’ brute force assaults. It will also assist you in combating rate-limiting HTTP problems such as 429 Too Many Requests.
This task is made much easier by free plugins such as WPS Hide Login and Rename wp-login.php.
You can limit the number of entries on your blog feed if your ecommerce site also runs a blog. This limit is set to 10 posts by default in WordPress, but you can change it.
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While this may appear insignificant, if you operate a high-traffic blog (here’s how to attract traffic to your website), the performance savings build up. This option may be found in the WordPress Dashboard –> Settings –> Reading section.
Then, on your website, disable pingbacks. They typically generate useless spam. The fewer inquiries generated by your site, the better.
If you have a large number of user comments on your articles or pages, WordPress allows you to divide them into smaller parts. The same setting applies to categorizing reviews on your product pages.
To improve your product page load time, keep this number between 10 and 20.
If you don’t want product reviews on your store, you may disable them in WooCommerce -> Settings. This will make your site load faster because it reduces the need to load a few scripts and widgets.
Finally, remove any old or superfluous themes and plugins from your site. The fewer themes and plugins you use, the easier it is to keep them up to date and address performance concerns.
2. Get a Quick WooCommerce Theme
It is critical to use the correct WooCommerce theme. There are hundreds of thousands of themes available, making it difficult to choose the one that is ideal for you.
A beautiful theme with incredible built-in features may sound wonderful on paper, but it may fail in practice. You must guarantee that your ecommerce site is fully compatible with WooCommerce.
WP Rocket tested the speed of several popular WooCommerce themes and came up with the following results.
As mentioned in the WordPress speed up article, Kinsta’s faves are Astra, OceanWP, and GeneratePress. They are WordPress themes that are extremely quick and lightweight. This tutorial contains 10+ additional very fast themes.
They can help you design nearly any site when used with a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder.
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WooCommerce has a free theme called Storefront, as well as paid themes like Shoptimizer, Divi, and WoondrShop. Because these themes are designed to run an ecommerce site, there is no need to install third-party plugins to get all of the features you desire.
If you’re on a tight budget, it’s completely OK to start with a free theme and then upgrade to a premium solution later.
To reduce bloat, I propose removing page builders. Choose a theme that works with WordPress’ block editor Gutenberg instead.
To choose a theme, make a list of all the features you require in your online business. Then select a theme that meets the majority of your feature requirements. This will allow you to reduce your reliance on bulky multi-purpose themes and third-party plugins.
This leads us to our next idea.
3. Be cautious with Plugins and WooCommerce Extensions
WordPress’s repository has around 54,000 free plugins. There are even more paid plugins available. As a result, it’s all too easy to get carried away and install dozens of them.
Many popular plugins, particularly those related to performance and security, do not work well in specific hosting setups.
WooCommerce functionality can be enhanced with a variety of free and paid WooCommerce extensions. They function similarly to plugins.
Contrary to popular belief, the quantity of plugins you install does not always result in poor performance. However, this is only true if the plugins are written using appropriate coding techniques.
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When there are too many plugins, vetting each one for quality becomes a chore. And that’s assuming you have the skills and experience to adequately screen them.
Some plugins even interfere with other plugins. When you have dozens of plugins on your site, the likelihood of a plugin conflict increases exponentially.
As a result, use caution when installing plugins and WooCommerce extensions.
4. Increase WordPress Memory Limit
By default, WordPress allocates 32 MB of memory to PHP. If it encounters any crunches, it will attempt to extend this restriction to 40 MB (for a single site) or 64 MB (for a multisite).
This RAM limit is usually insufficient for a WooCommerce site. You might even get an error message on your dashboard like:
“Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”
It is recommended that this limit be increased to 256 MB. Always make a backup of any file before editing it. If something goes wrong, simply replace the altered file with the original.
5. Compress Image and Optimize Delivery
Images take up the majority of the page size on any website, especially an ecommerce site. Product images and banners abound on WooCommerce sites.
If you don’t optimize photos for size and distribution, they can slow down your website.
HTTPArchive keeps track of the size and number of popular web pages.
While movies are a larger resource than photos, they are typically loaded on demand. As a result, they have less of an impact on perceived page load speed than images.
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According to HTTP Archive’s State of the Images report, lazy-loading hidden and offscreen images can save 545 KB per page.
You can save 40.3 KB each page by changing your JPEG compression levels to 85 or lower. This number is taken directly from Lighthouse, Google’s mobile website performance test tool.
To optimize photos for your WooCommerce store (and the web in general), follow these 5 guidelines:
- Select the best format for your photographs (JPEG, PNG, SVG, WebP).
- Using the appropriate tools, compress the photos efficiently.
- To improve distribution for different devices, use responsive pictures.
- Offscreen and hidden pictures that load slowly.
- Transfer picture delivery to fast CDNs.
Picture size enhancements in WooCommerce 3.3 include on-the-fly thumbnail scaling, blurry image repair, and background thumbnail resizing. All of these characteristics render the use of a plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails for WooCommerce-related pictures obsolete.
If you’re starting from scratch, you can compress your photographs before uploading them to your site. Here are some of the best internet image compressing tips:
- Compressor.io
- Squoosh.app
- Shrinkme.app
- Kraken.io
- Imagify.io
- TinyJPG | TinyPNG
Do you already have a lot of photographs on your website? Then, to automate image optimization, utilize a WordPress plugin. In my experience, the following have consistently performed the best:
- Shortpixel
- Imagify
- reSmush.it
- Optimole
The majority of these plugins also support lazy-loading for images. The WordPress core team intends to include lazy-loading images as a built-in feature. This will make use of the newly added loading HTML attribute for image> tags.
But wait, there’s one more thing about image optimization. Avoid utilizing image compression plugins as much as possible, especially those that compress images using your server’s resources.
Instead, employ a service that transfers image compression to a remote server. Alternatively, before posting your photographs to your website, resize and compress them.
6. Use a CDN to deliver static resources
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers strategically distributed throughout the world. Points of Presence are the names given to these server locations (PoPs).
The basic function of a CDN is to cache and provide static resources such as pictures, JavaScript, CSS, and so on. CDNs with greater power can also host and distribute dynamic material such as audio and video.
Even if your site is hosted on the world’s fastest server, it is still constrained by its geographical location. A WordPress CDN will shorten the path between the individual user and the site’s resources, lowering network latency and time to first byte (TTFB).
It automatically assigns the nearest CDN PoP to provide the cached resources based on the origin of the request. As a result, the website loads faster and provides a better user experience.
For example, if your WooCommerce store is housed on a server in the United States and a user from India attempts to access your website, the CDN will deliver the assets from the nearest PoP. It would be from Bengaluru here (India).
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In general, the more PoPs there are and the larger their global dispersion, the faster your website will be for your users.
Using a CDN reduced site load time by more than 50% for users in geographical locations that were significantly farther away from the hosting server.
Aside from caching, many CDNs offer other performance-enhancing capabilities such as greater on-the-fly image compression, HTTP/2 support, hotlink protection, and enhanced security.
We recommend getting a fast CDN for a quicker WooCommerce store. Check out the following popular CDNs:
- Cloudflare
- Sucuri CDN
- Cloudways CDN
- StackPath
7. Remove Unused Scripts and Stylesheets
Most WordPress themes and plugins include scripts and stylesheets on all pages of your site. These items are loaded even when they are not used on the page.
Contact Form 7, for example, loads its scripts and stylesheets on every page. Its forms are only available on the contact page, while the assets are available on other pages. It’s really needless!
By removing these unnecessary components from websites, you can reduce bloat and improve page load times. This vulnerability affects WooCommerce and its extensions (for example, Smart Coupons and Follow-Ups).
For example, loading payment gateway scripts on your store’s homepage or shop page is unnecessary. You can choose that such scripts only appear on the checkout and order confirmation pages. Similarly, remove slider and carousel scripts and styles from your checkout page.
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Look at the waterfall chart in your website speed test report to determine which assets to remove. It will inform you of any superfluous assets that are being loaded.
The Network tab in Chrome’s DevTools is another nice place to start. It will provide you with a detailed perspective of how and what a web page loads.
Remove any scripts and styles that aren’t required for the page to work. Begin by optimizing your homepage and landing pages, as these will be the first points of contact for the majority of your users.
To remove unnecessary scripts and styles, use the wp dequeue script and wp dequeue style methods. A plugin named Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster makes it simple to achieve the same result.
All scripts and stylesheets that will be loaded onto a page are scanned for by Asset CleanUp. You can disable any that aren’t being used on the page. Once you’ve finished making changes, test the page for good design and functioning.
The plugin’s pro version allows you to assign async or deferred properties to assets. Using this setting removes JavaScript from the critical rendering route of the page. It should assist to improve the perceived page load time of your site.
Another benefit of removing superfluous CSS and JS elements is that your website will use fewer HTTP queries.
You may achieve the same effects for free by combining the Autoptimize and Async JavaScript plugins. If you use the Autoptimize plugin, here is a complete step-by-step tutorial to the ideal settings.
8. HTTP/2 is Important
We would have labeled this section “Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests” if we were writing this post a few years ago. Because of significant advancements in how browsers connect with websites (and vice versa), this optimization is no longer required.
HTTP 1.1 was the first major revision to the HTTP protocol, and it was released in 1997. That was before to the advent of social networking, streaming services, smartphone apps, and even WordPress. Since then, the internet has grown at an exponential rate.
HTTP/2 built on the HTTP 1.1 protocol and debuted in 2015 to keep up with the internet’s expanding demands. It brought with it incredible gains in speed, efficiency, and security.
HTTP/2 improves performance for a variety of reasons:
- Improved multiplexing and parallelism on a single TCP connection.
- HPACK header compression using the Huffman encoding algorithm.
- ALPN acceleration for quicker encryption.
- Instead of waiting for requests, the proactive server pushes.
All of this adds up to one important benefit: websites load faster, even when they host multiple types of resources.
WooCommerce stores typically provide a large number of resource-heavy items like as photos, stylesheets, and scripts. Switching to HTTP/2 will tremendously assist sites like these.
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You can use KeyCDN’s HTTP/2 test tool to determine whether your site is ready for HTTP/2. Currently, HTTP/2 is supported by all major browsers. There’s no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of its significant performance advantages.
If your hosting provider does not currently support HTTP/2, it is time to find a new one.
Furthermore, HTTP/3 is on the way and is expected to make websites load even faster.
9. Cache WooCommerce to Improve Performance
Caching is the temporary storage of resources (cache) from one request in order for subsequent requests to be processed promptly. The cache might be kept on the server or the user’s device.
It’s one of the simplest ways to boost the speed of your WooCommerce store. It is also the most crucial.
- The user makes a request through their browser for a website.
- The browser then makes a request for a webpage (HTML document) to display to the user. A DNS server handles this request, which results in revealing the hosting server’s IP.
- Returning the webpage is handled by an application (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, etc.) hosted on a web server. With static websites, an application may not even be necessary.
- The application runs the scripts (e.g. PHP, JavaScript,etc.) and (5) queries the database (e.g. MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) to build a webpage. It then returns the webpage to the browser, which renders it and shows it to the user.
If everything goes as planned, the above procedures should just take a few seconds to complete.
However, that is only one request from a single person. What if there are simultaneous requests from thousands of users? This will place a tremendous strain on the server, resulting in a slower website.
This is where caching comes in handy. It decreases the amount of effort necessary to generate a pageview, lowering WordPress’ reliance on PHP and a database. Caching allows WordPress to run practically as fast as static websites, if not faster.
There are two forms of web caching, each with its own set of subsets:
Server-Side Caching
- Bytecode Cache (OPCache)
- Object Cache
- Page Cache
- CDN Cache
Client-Side Caching
- Browser Cache
If your hosting provider does not handle caching at the server level, you must rely on third-party cache plugins to complete the job. While they aren’t the ideal answer, they are always preferable to nothing.
Here are my top WordPress caching plugin picks:
- WP Rocket (premium)
- W3 Total Cache (free)
- Cache Enabler (free)
10. Clean Up Your WooCommerce Database
A database is an orderly compilation of all the data on your website. It contains the following in a WooCommerce store:
- Site content such as product pages, categories, tags, user data, reviews, site-wide settings, theme, plugins, etc.
- Transaction data such as order details, payments, inventory, etc.
If your store’s database is not optimized, it may take too long to handle these queries. Finally, a slow server response time results in a slow website. As a result, you must clean up and optimize the database by deleting extraneous trash.
Here are six methods for speeding up and fine-tuning your WooCommerce database.
Delete Old Revisions
If your WooCommerce store has been up for a time, the pages, posts, and goods will be littered with outdated changes. It’s time to get these cleaned up.
The most convenient method is to use plugins such as WP-Sweep or WP Rocket.
If you’re comfortable with WP-CLI, you can alternatively connect to your server using SSH and run a few easy commands to accomplish the same thing. Here’s how you can go about it.
Limit the number of revisions stored
Limit the amount of revisions for posts and pages to avoid having many old revisions. If you frequently update your site’s content, this will help you keep modifications under control.
To set the limit, simply add the following code snippet to your wp-config.php file. Make sure it comes before the line that defines ABSPATH.
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 15);
In the code above, I’ve set the limit to 15. You can make as many changes as you want, but try to keep it under 15.
You may also perform the same thing using a free plugin like WP Revisions Control.
Disable Revisions (If They Aren’t Necessary)
You can completely deactivate revisions on your site. Simply paste the following code into your wp-config.php file. As before, place this snippet before the line where ABSPATH is specified.
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
You may also perform the same thing with a single click by using a free plugin like Disable Post Revision.
Before you disable revisions, I recommend that you erase any past revisions that are still present. As a result, your site’s database will be fully free of updates in the future.
Clean up Expired Transients
Transients are cached data with a unique name and an expiration date. They are typically kept in the wp_options table of the WordPress database.
Transients are similar to Options, except they also have an expiration time. They are handy for storing transient data such as API answers or huge queries.
The WordPress Transients API explains how to handle transients and automatically erase expired transients. However, not everything goes as planned.
A faulty transient cache can often generate nearly a million garbage entries with no end in sight. Customer sessions might accumulate over time, resulting in hundreds of extra rows in your database tables. A bloated database can bring your site to its knees in such instances.
The free Delete Expired Transients plugin makes it simple to remove all expired transients.
Clean up Your Database Tables
Everything required to run your ecommerce store is stored in your WooCommerce database. As data is added, withdrawn, and moved throughout your database’s tables, it becomes inefficient and ends up holding a lot of items that aren’t necessary to run your store.
You must clean up your database tables to remove this unwanted info. The wp options table, in particular, is prone to bloating and negatively impacting database performance.
Database maintenance is critical to keeping your WordPress site working as quickly as possible.
Manually optimizing your database is a time-consuming task. You can use the free WP-Optimize plugin to identify which database tables contain unneeded data and eliminate them. It can help recover storage space that has been lost due to data fragmentation.
You can set WP-Optimize to clean up and optimize your database on a regular basis.
Disable non-critical features that burden the database
WooCommerce themes and plugins have a slew of clever features that appear to be fantastic at first but wind up clogging the database.
Using the “Popular Products” and “Related Products” plugins is one such example. These capabilities can result in massive sitewide inquiries, especially if you have a large number of goods. If you require these functionalities, consider manually inserting them into your pages. Plugins like Advanced Custom Fields can be really useful in this situation.
Another example is image optimization plugins, which compress images on the same server that hosts the site rather than on a separate server. This consumes a significant amount of your server’s resources.
Also, avoid plugins that add counters to your site. For example, beside a username, include the amount of views/posts/comments. A protracted discussion involving numerous users will put a strain on your database’s ability to calculate these numbers.
This is also true when employing social counts. To improve database speed, reduce the use of auto-generated counters.
Fine-tuning your WordPress database is a continual effort, similar to cleaning.
The automated system examines and fine-tunes your MySQL database once every week based on the needs of your site to ensure peak database performance. If the system identifies something unusual that cannot be resolved automatically, it alerts the sysadmin team to take quick action.
If your website is hosted elsewhere, here are a couple database optimization plugins to help you out:
- WP-Sweep
- WP-Optimize
- WP Clean Up Optimizer
- Advanced Database Cleaner
Always make a backup before making changes to your database or WordPress core files.
11. Organize Your Store for the Mobile-First Era
There are about 4 billion internet users worldwide as of January 2020. Almost as many people use mobile internet. It is predicted to reach 5 billion by 2025.
In 2019, mobile devices surpassed desktops in global website traffic, accounting for 52.6% of total pageviews. Mobile phones account for 70% or more of web page visits in some countries, such as India and Nigeria.
Smartphones accounted for 65% of site visits and 46% of ecommerce orders, according to a survey encompassing 500+ million online shoppers from 37 countries.
Surprisingly, mobile phone conversion rates are less than half that of PCs. There is tremendous room for development here.
To begin, make your WooCommerce store mobile-friendly. To determine whether your site meets the basic mobile usability guidelines, utilize Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool.
The test will display a screenshot of how your website appears on a mobile device. It will also report any mobile usability concerns that it discovers.
Using a responsive theme is the simplest approach to make your WordPress website mobile-friendly. All of the themes described earlier in this piece are responsive and look fantastic on mobile devices out of the box.
Mobile shoppers dislike scrolling indefinitely. As a result, keep your store pages as simple as feasible. Don’t stuff them with too much information.
If you have a lot of products on your store, make it easy for mobile consumers to find them by using search. Install the WooCommerce Product Search plugin to assist your consumers in quickly finding products using live product filters.
Finally, simplify the checkout process for your online customers. The fewer steps there are to do to place an order, the better the purchasing experience. Here are a couple WooCommerce extensions that can assist you:
- WooCommerce Social Login – Does away with the necessity for time-consuming account creation or login procedures. Allow your users to log in using their social accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
- Variation Swatches and Photos – Ditch the inconvenient dropdown menus for selecting product variations. Instead, provide your users with simple-to-tap buttons for all of your product alternatives.
- One-Page Checkout – Don’t let your clients leave your site so quickly. Allow people to buy what they want right away, with no additional processes. If you believe that guest checkout is a good fit for your store, you can enable it.
- Checkout Field Editor – Edit or add fields to your checkout page. If you solely offer digital things, for example, you do not need to collect delivery addresses.
- Payments, such as Bolt, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and PayPal, are the devil of the mobile purchasing experience. To make it easier to collect payments, you may choose from a variety of WooCommerce payment gateway extensions.
Finally, mobile shopping is about more than just completing a buy. Many people primarily utilize it to seek for product information and compare costs. Make your online store’s mobile experience exceptional for your customers.
12. Disable Get Refreshed Fragments AJAX Request
When a user makes changes to their shopping cart, WooCommerce uses the Get Refreshed Fragments AJAX request to dynamically update the contents of the shopping cart. From a user experience standpoint, refreshing the cart page without reloading it appears to be ideal.
However, it frequently slows down websites, particularly those housed on shared servers. Furthermore, many sites do not make use of this capability.
To be sure, I ran a Pingdom Tools test on an up-to-date WooCommerce store, and here are the results.
Despite its small size of 1.1 KB, the wc-ajax=get refreshed fragments request takes 0.76 seconds to complete. If your site loads in 3 seconds or fewer, you’ve saved more than 25% of the page load time. This test site is hosted on a cloud VPS, so you can estimate how long it would take to load on a less expensive hosting plan.
This WebNots page goes into additional depth about the problem. To disable this costly request, utilize the free Disable Cart Fragments or Disable Cart Fragments by Optimocha plugins.
If you disable this request, you should enable the ‘Redirect to the cart page after successful addition’ option in your WooCommerce Products settings panel.
By enabling this behavior, the user will be sent to the Cart page after adding a product to their cart.
Optimization WooCommerce Admin Panel
Speed isn’t just vital for your store’s frontend. A speedy backend is just as important for managing your store and making quick changes when needed.
Working swiftly in your WooCommerce admin panel is essential for productivity. It also frees up your time to focus on more important aspects of your WooCommerce store’s performance, such as online marketing.
Here are a few solutions for a slow WooCommerce dashboard.
Frontend optimizations come first, followed by backend optimizations.
Is the issue limited to the WordPress admin panel and not the entire website? If it is the latter, then perform all of the previous optimizations first.
Why? Because, in most circumstances, optimizing your WooCommerce store’s frontend will also optimize the backend. We can relate this to your server’s resources being freed up.
If your admin dashboard still lags after optimizing the interface, proceed to the next steps.
13. Remove bloat and keep everything up to date
Keep WordPress, WooCommerce, plugins, extensions, and the theme up to date. If a theme or plugin’s developers no longer maintain it, it’s time to consider abandoning it.
Similarly, if a theme/plugin adds extra clutter to your dashboard, look for better options. Consider alternatives to plugins that deliver aggressive adverts on your dashboard, for example.
This problem is so widespread that there are plugins dedicated entirely to eliminating bloat from some of the most popular WordPress plugins.
14. Disable Object and Database Cache
Caching plugins are an excellent technique to accelerate your WordPress site. However, if not correctly designed, they can produce unexpected outcomes. This involves sluggishing your backend.
W3 Total Cache, for example, is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It’s free, has numerous cache options, performs JS and CSS minification, integrates with a CDN, and is used by over a million websites.
W3 Total Cache supports the following cache types:
- Page Cache
- Opcode Cache
- Database Cache
- Object Cache
- Browser Cache
- Fragment Cache
Having so many options can be perplexing, especially for newcomers who are unfamiliar with what each form of caching does.
Object and database caching improve website performance by lowering the amount of database queries, but at the expense of offloading work to the server’s memory.
If your hosting server is smart and strong enough, this should not be a problem. For example, if your WordPress site is hosted by Kinsta, you don’t need to worry about caching because it’s already in place on the server.
Unfortunately, not every hosting provider is like this.
In that case, you’ll need to rely on a third-party caching plugin like W3 Total Cache. Its simple settings allow you to enable all forms of cache with a single click.
Disable the object cache and/or database cache in the W3 Total Cache General Settings window. Then, observe if you see any improvements in the responsiveness of your admin panel.
Experimenting with the cache is more complicated than simply ticking or unticking items in your plugin settings. Check to see if your site functions properly after making the modifications and flushing your old cache.
15. Remove plugins that consume a lot of resources
Some WordPress plugins consume a lot of server resources. They end up consuming the majority of your server’s CPU and RAM.
To locate the problematic plugins, utilize the free Query Monitor plugin. It will display all of the scripts, styles, and HTTP API calls loaded by your website, as well as their size and loading time. Keep an eye out for the ones with the most requests and the slowest load times.
The Classic Editor plugin is the slowest to load on the admin side of the test site below. Other potential bloat plugins include Loginizer, All-in-One WP Migration, and WP Bakery (previously Visual Composer).
The migration and Classic Editor plugins, I discovered, are unneeded. The removal of these two plugins significantly improved admin speed.
WooCommerce stores with a global audience utilize translation plugins like WPML to offer the site in various languages dynamically. It’s a nice plugin with a lot of capabilities, however it can significantly slow down your admin backend.
Switching to a lean translation plugin, such as Polylang, can provide a performance boost. It lacks some functionalities but is enough for most applications.
Plugins with several ongoing processes/scans will slow down your WordPress backend. Sitemap generators, analytics graphs and charts, website builders, and chat plugins are a few examples.
16. Make Use of Appropriate CDN Settings for WordPress
The CDN allows your WooCommerce store to be served to users all over the world at lightning speed. It accomplishes this by saving a snapshot of your site’s resources and delivering them to the user from the nearest server.
By default, most CDNs disable caching on the WordPress backend. However, some CDNs do not, which might significantly slow down your store’s admin interface. To increase performance, you should omit your admin dashboard from the CDN’s cache.
If you use Cloudflare, you can disable Cloudflare capabilities on WordPress admin pages via a Page Rule. Here’s how you do it:
- Go to the Page Rules section under your Cloudflare dashboard.
- Add *example.com/wp-admin/* in the URL field.
- In the settings fields, choose Cache Level and Bypass options.
- You can also add extra settings such as Disable Performance and Disable Security (not recommended). These settings are optional.
- Then click Save and Deploy.
The settings should take about 3 minutes to take effect.
If you utilize KeyCDN, you can perform the same thing using their WordPress Cache Enabler Plugin. For other CDNs, please contact their support to resolve this.
17. Streamline Heartbeat API for WordPress
By keeping a regular connection between your browser and your server, the WordPress Heartbeat API provides near-real-time updates. Every 15-60 seconds, the API sends queries to the server, which subsequently triggers events (or callbacks) when data is received.
It supports some incredible features like autosaving posts, locking posts, and login expiration warnings. When you’re logged in as an admin, though, sending a few calls to the server per minute will cause your admin panel to slow down.
The free Heartbeat Control plugin from WP Rocket allows you to control the frequency of these API requests on the dashboard, frontend, and post editor. It even allows you to turn off the API entirely.
Begin by increasing the time frequency. If that doesn’t resolve your WooCommerce backend’s performance issues, disable the heartbeat API.
If performing all of the aforementioned improvements does not resolve your WooCommerce store’s speed difficulties, then…
Quality Hosting is Foundation of WooCommerce Speed
Like driving a car with flat tires, no matter how many improvements you do, your site will not get any faster if it is housed on a bad server. A large percentage of your site’s performance depends on the quality of your hosting.
WordPress hosting comes in two varieties: managed and unmanaged. The first option is ideal for most users because the hosting company handles all WordPress server optimizations. The latter is more suitable for technically savvy users who can customize and operate the server themselves.
Choose Managed WordPress Hosting for your WooCommerce website. Remember that managed hosting is typically more expensive than unmanaged hosting.
There are four major types of Managed WordPress Hosting. Each has advantages and disadvantages, so choose the one that best fits your budget and goals. I’ve compared them for various aspects in the infographic below.
Each form of hosting can be given under several plans at different pricing points. So, when looking for hosting within your budget, consider the services provided to determine whether it meets your needs.
WooCommerce sites are inherently dynamic. They produce a large amount of data and queries that cannot be cached.
The checkout page, for example, is unique to each user and cannot be provided via a cache. As a result, even if your site receives little traffic, the server must be sturdy enough to run it smoothly.
When choosing a WooCommerce hosting package, the following features should be considered:
- Server-level caching is enabled, with WooCommerce-specific cache rules.
- 2 to 4 PHP workers to process uncached WooCommerce requests without timing out.
- WordPress has a memory limit of 128 MB or higher.
- Scalable infrastructure to accommodate traffic and load spikes.
- Automatic daily backups (hourly suggested) to ensure the safety and security of your ecommerce data.
- A fully safe hosting platform that includes security features such as regular malware scans, IP Geolocation, and abusive IP blocking, as well as free SSL, SFTP, SSH, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3 web server software.
- PHP 8, LXC containers, WP-CLI, Git, MariaDB, staging environments, and more developer-friendly features are supported.
- High uptime with data centers located all over the world. Choose one with servers near your intended audience’s location.
- Integration with Cloudflare for improved performance and security.
- A dependable 24/7 support service to rapidly handle any concerns.
- Excellent user feedback and a proven track record.
With these criteria in mind, you may easily dismiss Shared Hosting.
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is similar to shared hosting, except that you have your own virtual area on a shared server. If you’re on a tight budget, you can begin with a mid-tier VPS account. However, if your site becomes more popular, you’ll need to upgrade shortly.
This leaves us with the options of Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Hosting / Server.. If your conditions are met, both are suitable for WooCommerce sites.
Prices for dedicated server plans are greater than those for cloud hosting plans, which can range from $50 to thousands of dollars per month.
If you’re spending a lot of money on marketing, a slow site will drive away all of your leads, therefore it’s well worth looking for the quickest WordPress hosting alternatives.
Finally, it’s preferable to invest a few additional bucks each month on quality hosting than to spend hours ripping out your hair and wondering why your site still has a high bounce rate.
Summary
For an ecommerce site, time is literally money. A quick WooCommerce store improves the user experience, SEO, income, and ROI.
While you are not required to follow all of the performance optimization tips provided in this essay, I encourage that you do so. This will assist you in locating any blockages in your site. Nobody enjoys waiting for a website to load. Let’s get WooCommerce moving!
Save time, money, and improve site performance by using:
- WordPress hosting professionals are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Integration with Cloudflare Enterprise.
- With 34 data centers worldwide, you may access a global audience.
- Our built-in Application Performance Monitoring allows for optimization.
All of this and more is available in a single plan with no long-term obligations, supported migrations, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Check out our plans or contact sales to find the appropriate plan for you.