Best Practical Tips to Fix WooCommerce Website Speed in 2024

eCommerce sites are all about speed and time, whether created with WooCommerce or not. The shoppers who shop online want to save their time while shopping. So, if your WooCommerce store takes too much time to load, they will go to your competitor’s site.

Crucially, WooCommerce website speed is key to WooCommerce SEO and Google search engine ranking factors. This means that a slow website can hurt your organic visibility.

Just think about it, you are investing so much money on PPC ads campaigns or may hire an SEO agency to bring organic traffic. Your store is getting hits but visitors are not staying on it to see the products. Or maybe your product pages are not ranking on search engines.

So what to do? Don’t worry. In this blog post, we will discuss the best tips to fix WooCommerce website speed. Let’s dive right in.

Best Tips to Fix WooCommerce Website Speed

Most WordPress beginners think that using a caching plugin will solve the speed problem of their site. However, it is not as simple as you might think. 

Yes, the caching plugin can dramatically increase your WooCommerce website speed. However, there are more things you need to ensure.

So what do you need to do? You can follow the tips below to fix your WooCommerce website speed.

Test Your Site Speed

You can not solve a problem without knowing the problem. No difference in website loading speed as well. If you don’t measure the current speed, you can not measure the speed differences after optimizing it.

So before starting to fix it, you should measure the speed. But, the question remains, how?

Well, there are many online tools to check the actual speed of your site. I will now discuss two of the most popular speed measuring tools. The first one is Google PageSpeed Insights, and the second one is Pingdom.

Google PageSpeed Insights: It is an official tool by Google that helps to measure website speed based on proper coding, next-generation image format, size of the images, and web pages.

After the test, you will get a cumulated score separately from 0 to 100 for both Desktop and Mobile. 

If your score is 90+, then further optimizations are not mandatory. However, your site needs improvement if the score is from 50 to 89. 

And, if the score is below 50, then you should optimize your WooCommerce website speed as soon as possible.

The Page Speed insights evaluate the site based on three criteria which are LCP, FID, and CLS, in short, Core Web Vitals. 

The good news is that it also shows the possible solutions that are stopping your site from loading faster. You just need to follow the instructions to solve the issues.

Getting a 90+ score for desktop and mobile devices is highly recommended from an SEO perspective. Because it is one of the major ranking factors of Google.

Pingdom: The Pingdom speed testing tool helps to measure website loading speed from various regions. You can check your site for the regions where you are getting traffic. 

After testing the speed, you will also get the reasons that are stopping your site from loading faster. However, if you want to fix WooCommerce website speed for various regions, you should set up a CDN for your site. 

Choose The Best Possible Hosting Provider

The website’s loading time highly depends on your hosting service. If your hosting is not good enough, you can not fix the speed of your WooCommerce website no matter how much optimization you do.

Getting dedicated or cloud hosting for the startup WooCommerce stores is difficult.

But as you know, eCommerce sites contain many products with high-quality images and videos. So, using shared hosting is not recommended at all. 

However, if you are on a low budget, you can choose a cheap hosting solution. But remember that you must switch to dedicated hosting as the number of products in your WooCommerce store keeps increasing.

You May Read: Best WooCommerce Hosting for Your Online Shop

Get a Faster WooCommerce Theme

If your WooCommerce site is slower, the first thing you need to check is whether you are using a faster theme or not. If you don’t know which themes are the fastest, just wait a bit; we will discuss that too.

Themes are essential for any WordPress site and are no different for WooCommerce websites. However, if you choose a heavy and poorly coded theme, it doesn’t matter how much you optimize your site; the load speed will be slower.

We often get impressed by the look and designs of some themes. But when we started using them, we realized that our sites were loading slower. It is also applicable for premium themes. So what things should we consider while choosing a theme?

To choose the perfect theme, we have to look for multiple things instead of only their visual look. So here are some of the crucial facts that we need to check before starting using a theme. 

Minimalistic Designs: The fancy loading themes often contain unoptimized coding. And, the size of them is usually larger than usual. So it is safer to get a theme with simple and minimalistic designs. However, the good news is. Some themes are properly optimized without compromising designs.

Size of the Theme: There is no fixed size of an idle theme. We think the size of an idle theme should not be more than 1 MB. Even better if the size is below 500 KB. Because the size is larger than 1 MB, no doubt your site will surely slow down as you keep adding product images. And it will be tough to optimize it for faster speed.

HTTP Request: The HTTP request refers to a site’s request to the server while loading a page. The speed of a site highly depends on the number of requests. So fewer requests can surely increase the loading time. So while choosing a theme, we should test the theme demo page using the GTMetrix to find out the number of the request.

Responsiveness: Last but not least, an ideal eCommerce site should also be responsive to multiple devices along with a faster loading time. So we should choose a theme that is fast and responsive as well for our WooCommerce store.

That’s all about the major checklist of choosing a WooCommerce theme. Now, it’s time to mention some of the themes that fulfill the above-mentioned criteria.

Theme	PSI Mobile Score	Page Size (WPT)	HTTP Requests (WPT)
Botiga	72%	204 KB	30
GeneratePress	65%	244 KB	35
Kadence	62%	260 KB	37
Storefront	56%	261 KB	47
Neve	67%	261 KB	35
Blocksy	72%	263 KB	29
Astra	66%	274 KB	37
Shoptimizer	64%	283 KB	39
OceanWP	46%	440 KB	52
Divi	40%	635 KB	44

Keep Plugin Count Low

If you are using WooCommerce for some time, you should know that the free version has limited features. And, if we want to expand its functionalities, we must purchase their extensions. So the problem is you have to purchase multiple extensions to ensure all the essential features are on our site.

Some popular and useful third-party plugins are available as alternatives to the WooCommerce extensions. However, the same problem comes again; you have to get multiple plugins. 

It contains two problems:

First, you must spend a lot of money to ensure all essential features. 

Second, using multiple plugins on a single site can significantly impact your site’s loading time.

By the way, you may not be concerned regarding the first one, at least for now. But, the second problem is quite concerning and affects your website directly. 

 The solution? 

You should keep the plugin count as low as possible. 

Don’t worry; I will not recommend you compromise any of the essential features to maintain a speedy site. Instead, a smarter solution for both problems is using a single plugin that offers all of the required features. 

ProductX Gutenberg WooCommerce Blocks is an all-in-one solution for creating a conversion-focused WooCommerce store. It offers multiple Gutenberg-based product blocks, starter packs (premade templates), and various add-ons to expand the functionalities of the WooCommerce store effortlessly. All of that with only $49 for one year. Amazing, right?

So indeed, it is cost-effective if you get it as an alternative to the WooCommerce extensions.

Compress Images Before Upload

We would have hundreds of products on our WooCommerce store. And all the products have multiple images. As you may know, images significantly impact website loading time. 

To avoid loading time, we always compress the images before uploading them to our site. Don’t worry about the image quality because most online compression sites will let you compress images while keeping good quality.

Now, you might think: what about the existing product images? 

Well, we recommend you manually download, compress, and re-upload the images. 

However, you can use an image compressor plugin if you have numerous images on your site. There are multiple free and premium plugins available. Below are some of the most popular plugins to compress images.

• Shortpixel
• Imagify 
• reSmush.it
• Optimole

However, it is not recommended to use this kind of plugin frequently because these plugins use your server’s resources while compressing images. So, it will be better to compress the images before uploading them to your site.

Use a Caching Plugin

Now comes the most advanced and effective way of fixing WooCommerce website’s speed: a caching plugin. 

A caching plugin lets you optimize your sites to load faster than before. How?

It caches the predefined posts/pages from the sitemap and shows the cached versions of the site.

There are numerous caching plugins on WordPress. Some of them are free, and some of them are paid. You can start with free plugins and see where it goes. 

After implementing all the recommended settings, check your site speed using Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

You should see a good score if all other optimization has been done properly. Below are some of the popular and useful plugins available for free.

• W3 Total Cache
• LiteSpeed Cache
• Autoptimize
• WP-Optimize – Cache, Clean, Compress

However, if you are not getting the expected results, you should go for a paid solution. There are various solutions available if you want to spend some money. Some of the free plugins that I mentioned earlier also have premium versions.

But, as We have already used the WP Rocket plugin and got positive results, I recommend you try it. The pricing starts from $49 per year. 

Check this WP Rocket review to see whether this caching plugin has everything to speed up your website.

After purchasing it, you must download and install it on your site. Then you have to configure the settings according to your need.

Setup CDN

CDN or Content delivery network is a group of servers located in various locations. So, if you use a CDN, the static contents of your site will be cached on all of the available servers. So, your visitors will see a cached version of your website from their nearest server. As a result, the loading time will surely increase.

Now the question is how you can get and set up a CDN. Well, you can get a CDN from various sources. The most recommended sources are your hosting provider, caching plugin provider, and other third-party sources.

First, you should check out which hosting package you are using. Because it may already have a CDN that you overlooked before. If so, you should turn it on and start using it. 

If not, you can go to your hosting provider site to check how much charge is required to get that for your website. So you can compare it with other available options that I will explain. 

If you purchase WP Rocket, you can also check out their CDN. For that, you have to pay some extra money. However, you must consider getting it. If you use them, the setup process will be easier compared to other third-party solutions. 

If you are not impressed with the above sources, then the third-party solution may suit you. For that, We can recommend Cloudflare CDN without any doubt. This CDN is also compatible with WP Rocket. 

It’s ultimately your choice which options you want to go for. But you must use a CDN if all other optimization tips can’t provide the expected website speed.

Conclusion

That’s all you need to do to fix WooCommerce website speed. It may seem a bit difficult. But actually it’s easy if you follow all the tips properly. However, you may not need to do all the steps if some of them are already applied on your site.