WooCommerce is a free WordPress attachment that adds e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website or store. Once this assemblage is plugged in, your WordPress website quickly transforms into a full-fledged e-commerce website.
Launched in 2011, WooCommerce has quickly become a popular plug-in that is used by thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, small businesses, and other users looking to open their stores in an online mode.
WooCommerce features
WooCommerce quickly transforms a simple website into an e-commerce store. However, its popularity is not just because of its simplicity and easy availability, rather because of its feature-packed setup.
Here are some of its most attention-worthy features-
- Privacy in data such as customer history, purchases, etc
- Payment gateway optionality-choose from cheques, COD, bank transfer, etc
- Geolocation feature to automatically add taxes in the price of your products
- Customizable checkout process; choose which countries to sell, etc
- Choose default currency from a range of currencies
- Unlimited products can be added
- Multiple product types can be added
- Display product variants such as color, size, print, etc for your customers to see easily
- Easy shipping process
Optimization of WooCommerce store
Setting up a WooCommerce store is not going to immediately bring profits. WooCommerce is a free and extremely popular e-commerce platform. Unlike other e-commerce platforms, it does not require one to pay the percentage of their revenue.
While this feature is extremely desirable especially for rookies it also has a downside namely that since it provides limited support users are responsible for maintaining its shape and appearance.
Online shopping is the new thing and for e-commerce stores speed is money. Online shoppers have a very short attention span and us creating attractive e-commerce websites that have aesthetics, high-resolution images, user reviews, personalization et cetera are good for attracting attention.
But don’t worry, here’s a guide for you to optimize your WooCommerce store!
The importance of speed
Speed is extremely important for e-commerce stores. A study by Google showed that 53% of mobile users left a site if that site took more than three seconds to load. This should be a good indicator for you to realize the site speed is of utmost importance.
Good speed means a better interface which leads to a better user experience and thus searches engine optimization. High page responsiveness means better WooCommerce SEO.
How to improve the speed of your WooCommerce store
First things first, measure the speed of your WooCommerce store using a website speed test. Remember, What you can’t measure, you can’t improve.
1. Optimize your WooCommerce settings for performance
- Change your login URL from the standard com/wp-admin/to something more unique. This will protect. You from nefarious people like hackers since the above URL is common knowledge.
- Next, disable pingbacks on your website. Fewer queries are better for your website. If you have a lot of user comments then WordPress gives you an option to break them into smaller pieces. The same is also possible for reviews. Keep this number between 10 to 20.
- Also, remove any updated themes and plug-ins from your side. The fewer things in plug-ins that you have the easier it will be to maintain them.
2. Get a fast WooCommerce theme
But commerce gives you multiple things to choose from. Using the right team will make a big difference. Simply choosing a good-looking theme with built-in features might sound appealing but it might just fail in actual usage.
To properly choose a theme to evaluate all of its features and the ones that you would need in your online store. Also, do some additional research and look for the best eCommerce themes and ones that are the most trendy.
Choose a theme that covers most of your website requirements; do not choose a bloated multipurpose theme with third-party plug-ins. This can slow down website responsiveness.
3. Do now use too many Plugins and WooCommerce extensions
What press offers 54,000+ free plug-ins. When Tech on the premium version there are even more numbers of plug-ins available. Use yourself and get carried away and end up choosing dozens of them. This slows down the website.
If your chosen plug-ins are not made with the best coding practices, they can cause you performance issues, which can be worrisome for your search engine optimization.
Hence be careful about the extensions and plug-ins that you choose for your website.
4. Compress images and optimize delivery
Images can make up for the bulk of a website space size. While good quality pictures, product videos attract viewer attention it is not desirable for them to take up a lot of website storage.
It is important to optimize images for size and delivery. While videos are of more Mbs, they don’t affect page loading the way images do. Set your JPEG compressions to levels 85 or lower and you can save up to 40.3 KB per page.
Steps to optimize images
- Choose the right format for your images
- Compress the images using the right tools
- Make use of responsive images
- Lazy load of the screen and hidden images
- and offload image delivery
This will help you free up space and also enhance your SEO.
5. Increase WordPress memory limit
What does default memory is that at 30 2MB but it is expected to exceed at some point to another and you will get if we do that or message? To address memory limit issues you can either adjust yourself or contact the hosting company.
6. Use content delivery network (CDNs)
A content delivery network or content distribution network, geographically distributed servers, and data centers provide high performance by distributing the service spatially. It is based on a user’s geographical location, the web age origin location, and the content delivery server.
When content delivery networks have used the information about the customer that visited your store doesn’t have to travel far which can prompt a slow page load.
A CDN solves the geographical distance problem which has caused many e-commerce sites to suffer from slow stores.
7. Clean the database
Your database in the case of an e-commerce website has two types of data namely site content and transactional data. The former generates HTML pages like product page content page et cetera and the latter collects the data from the user’s actions.
Cleaning your database will vastly improve your page loading speed and unload a lot of space which will help your e-commerce store to run smoother and have better search engine optimization.