As a consumer, you will most likely seek online products to purchase. If one of the websites you find takes forever to load and creates a frustrating shopping experience, you will leave and go to another online store. This is why WooCommerce site speed is essential. If shoppers cannot navigate your online store, they will quickly move elsewhere. You can avoid this situation by considering the following actionable ways to enhance your WooCommerce store speed.
Select a High-Performance Host
Your host is the speed foundation for your whole website, so it’s essential to pick one that focuses on performance. Look for features such as updated software, sufficient resources for your site needs, and SSD drives. In addition, select a hosting provider that limits the site number on each server. Or you can upgrade to a dedicated plan to have your server space.
Go with a Fast, Reliable Theme
If the website theme is complex, it will install more code on your website. As a result, this will slow down your site loads. It will be slower if you utilize a theme with page builders or plugins. Make sure you consider the pros and cons of a “heavy” theme because many themes will allow you to shut off features you’re not using. Fortunately, this is a great way to balance your website needs with speed concerns. If you want to know if a theme is fast, reading customer reviews or running its demo pages will help.
Limit the Number of Plugins You Use
Although plugins benefit WordPress due to their endless flexibility, it still doesn’t mean you should install all of them. Plugins can affect your WooCommerce speed by adding database queries, consuming hosting resources, and sending additional HTTP requests. Keep in mind that if you go over your hosting plan’s resources, your load time will suffer.
Compress Your Image Quality
Images can be some of the heaviest, most complex files for your server to handle, so you want them to be as small as possible. But it’s also critical to balance image quality with size. After all, you want to avoid blurry product pictures by doing the following:
- Select the appropriate format. Unless your image has a transparent background, it’s ideal for uploading JPEG files (smaller files).
- Only utilize the necessary size. Avoid uploading a 2,000-pixel-wide picture if the space you’re filling is only 500 pixels wide.
- Run the picture via compressor because they will strip your images of unnecessary data, thus minimizing their file size.
The last thing you desire is to lose sales from consumers who intend to buy your products. But if your WooCommerce site loads too slowly, you may chase away customers before they really have a chance to browse your store. All it takes is a few easy steps to enhance the speed of your online store significantly. Get started today!
Do you want to draw more visitors to your website? Running a website can be overwhelming, to say the least. Fortunately, collaborating with an accomplished eCommerce web design company like Adventure Web Interactive will help increase your website speed and sales.
Craig Kahl is the President and CEO of Adventure Web Interactive. AWI has been recognized as Baltimore’s Top Web Design Firm by The Daily Record and named one of Silicon Review Magazine’s Top 50 Most Admired Companies in the country. Before founding Adventure Web Interactive in 1997, he was VP of Operations for Campus Concepts, Inc., and the youngest division head in history for Pitney Bowes at age 24. He has a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of Maryland and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from Loyola University. Craig is a member of the International CEO Club and Rolling Road Golf Club and loves spending time outdoors with his wife and son.
