Adding a shopping cart to your WordPress website is easy as a few clicks and can bring great benefits to your business. WooCommerce is a plugin that easily adds products to your website so you can sell them online, all while your WordPress website is still sat there in the background.
However, you may have noticed that after some time your site begins to slow down and the experience for customers is not ideal if they are sat there waiting.
That’s why we’ve included 5 key points below to supercharge your Woo Commerce experience!
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WP Super Cache
WooCommerce handles a lot of different data, from product images and descriptions to products tags and options. This data is pulled from the database but if that information hasn’t changed, there is no need to download it again which causes more queries to the server.
A way to speed this up is to use a Caching plugin, this essentially saves the data locally to be accessed much faster than querying the server and is one of the most recommended ways of speeding up your WooCommerce site.
The plugin is easily installed and is often the most effective way to boost your WooCommerce experience.
Find out more about WP Super Cache.
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Images Sizes
If you sell any kind of product online chances are you will also have an image or more to go with it. Images are one of the largest assets any website can load, especially for customers loading your site for the first time.
Let’s say you take a picture using a standard digital camera and upload those to your website. Each image can be 3mb to 10mb each, which can not only use a lot of bandwidth but also take a LOT longer to load on the page, especially when listing many products.
We would recommend optimising your product images you upload as well as the current images on your site. Something like Smush Image Optimiser would be ideal for images already on your store.
It will optimise your images by compressing the size of them and allowing them to load much quicker. The plugin should also optimise other images on your website too!
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Pick the right hosting
Choosing the right hosting for your website is crucial to its success. If a website is too slow, customers become agitated and shop elsewhere. We invest heavily on building and upgrading our core infrastructure to ensure that not only it is secure but also performs as best as it can.
However if your site has outgrown traditional shared hosting it might be time to upgrade. We offer a range of services from WordPress Hosting to Managed Dedicated Servers. If you think you may need to upgrade get in touch and we can offer advice on the best solution tailored to your requirements. Also remember to run your WordPress website on the most recent version of PHP possible. If you are unsure about this, please get in touch.
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Do some housekeeping!
Your entire WordPress site (including WooCommerce) is stored in a single database. Over time your database accumulates a vast number of information including products, categories, blog posts, pages, deleted items and much more.
After a while your database might not be performing as well as it could, and this would be time to do some housekeeping. You can optimise your database using a handy plugin called WP-Optimize, which essentially tidies up your database and removes irrelevant data making queries to it much faster.
While it won’t necessarily perform miracles, every little optimisation technique helps and could well make loading pages quicker overall.
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Keep everything updated
Updates are constantly being released for WooCommerce and WordPress; as well as the many plugins you may also have on your website. We strongly recommend keeping these up to date as they can not only provide critical security fixes but can sometimes bring performance benefits.
Having trouble with your WooCommerce Install?
No problem, get in touch with our friendly support team who are on hand to help. Just call us on 0800 107 7979 or send us an email to support@catalyst2.com. Alternatively you can get in touch via Live Chat through our website.
