How To Speed Up Your WordPress eCommerce Store

Editorial Team January 19, 2019 5 min read

WordPress is the most powerful tool in Content Management System. It is not only used for blogging purposes but it has wide use in eCommerce website. The number of eCommerce websites that are built with WordPress are increasing day by day. So, speed up of WordPress eCommerce store is hot topics for these days. Fortunately, there are several techniques that you can apply to get the job done. In this article, we will discuss how to speed up your WordPress eCommerce store a lot faster.

Why should you speed up WordPress eCommerce Store?

There are many reasons to speed up WordPress eCommerce store. Some of them are as following:

If you concentrate on your site’s google rank, then you have to focus on loading time. of your sites. Because Google Search Engine rank a website with fast-loading times higher than the slow-loading ones. So, to improve your SERP’s position improving speed should be your one of the priorities.
According to the research by Akamai, if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, 47 percent visitors will bounce off the site. So, to keep the interest of your visitors to your store you should speed up WordPress.
If you are running a eCommerce store or going to start a eCommerce store, you must know that online buyers are very impatient. They expect to load a page within a second. So, to make your business profitable and considering online buyers you should speed up WordPress.

Test the loading time of your WordPress eCommerce Store

Before you start the first step to speed up your WordPress eCommerce store, you should test the current load time for your website. Keep in mind that the speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on various factors like:

size of that particular page,
number of requests it generates,
whether the page is cached or not and
what types of content, static or dynamic it host.

The homepage of any website is usually used as a benchmark to test the load time. There are several tools to check the speed of a website like:

Here are the ways to speed up WordPress:

1. Choose a better web hosting provider for your WordPress eCommerce store

The main factor that influence the speed of a website is the web hosting of your WordPress site. Unfortunately, the web hosting industry today is filled with web hosts that often provide low service. This can adversely affect the performance of your site store.

You may like to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains and more. Keep in mind that shared hosting environments fail to deliver good loading times on peak traffic hours, and most fail to provide 99 percent uptime in any given month.

Shared hosting tends to deliver a poor performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites and you don’t know how much resources others are using. Also you don’t know exactly how the servers are optimized.

Thankfully, the web-hosting industry has advanced with new technology and the prices of cloud hosting providers have decreased with the passage of time.

you can buy dedicated cloud servers from SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services at a nominal price. There are few web hosting providers like Cloudways who make the task of setting up optimized cloud servers as easy as click and launch.

2. Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network made up of servers all around the world. Each server will store “static” files used to make up your site. Static files are unchanging files like images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your WordPress pages which are “dynamic”.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) service speeds up your store load speed by serving cached static content from servers located near the users’ geographic location. A CDN keeps a copy of your store in various data centers located in different places. The main principle of a CDN is to serve the webpage to a visitor from the nearest possible location. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are among the most popular CDN services for integrating with a WordPress eCommerce store. You can also use CloudFlare’s free plan to test waters, though for optimum performance.

3. Use a Light WordPress Theme/Framework

While selecting a WordPress theme for your website, it’s important to pay special attention to speed optimization. There are plenty of WordPress themes built for eCommerce that will add unnecessary features like special light boxes and other requests. It’s usually better to go with a simple theme and use quality plugins to get the features you need. Before use any theme consider the following factors:

Cleanly coded theme.
Not bulky with extra features.
Support mobile phone.

The best option here is to use WordPress’ default themes. For a feature-rich website, you can also use a good framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.

4. Reduce Image sizes

In this modern age of visual marketing, images are the core of the design of eCommerce stores. However, many store owners make the mistake of using massive images that severely impact the performance of the store. Large image files slow down the page load speed. As a result, search engines down rank the store in SERP.

You can manually optimize the images using Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension or Photoshop or any other tools. But this process will take hell a long time. Fortunately, there are plugins available in WordPress for image optimization. Some of them are:

You ca use any of the above plugins on your WordPress site. This will drastically reduce image sizes and improve the speed of your website.

5. Minify Java script and CSS files

If you already used Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you probably notified about minimizing the size of your CSS and JS files. This means that by reducing the number of CSS and JS files, you can improve the site-loading speed. There are plugins that will help you achieve this goal like Autoptimize. It can help in optimizing CSS, JS and even HTML of your WordPress website.

6. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin

Caching is the most common solution for speeding up WP websites and blogs. There are many WordPress caching plugins available for a long time. You can consider a reliable and reputed WordPress caching plugin. Some of them are:

But make sure that the plugin that you are selecting is compatible with your WordPress eCommerce plugin. If you are using WooCommerce platform you don’t need to take worry, most caching plugins keep WooCommerce stores in mind and are fully compatible with the same. For all other eCommerce WP plugins, you may need to check your plugin’s documentation.

7. WordPress database optimization

After using WordPress site for a while, your database will have lots of information that you probably don’t need any more. If you delete unwanted data from your database to keep its size to a minimum and this will also helps to reduce the size of your backups.

You can use popular WP plugin such as WP Optimize or WP Sweep. This types of plugins can scan through your database, remove fragments and unnecessary overheads, etc.

8. Deactivate/Uninstall Unused Plugins

Keeping unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites will add a lot of junk to your web files. It will also increase the size of your backup. It is better to uninstall the plugins that you don’t use.

Conclusion

We have discussed some ways to avoid loading unnecessary scripts on eCommerce pages, optimize databases, employ caching, web hosting and CDNs, etc.to speed up any WordPress eCommerce store.

If you are running or managing a WordPress eCommerce store, you can consider the above strategies.