5 Ways to Optimize Your Online Store for Lightning Fast Speed

Running an online business is no easy task. It takes a lot of work to maintain your store, make sure you’re in compliance with the law, and keep up with all the new technology. But for many people, what’s most frustrating is trying to get their site to load as quickly as possible. When looking at a customer’s experience, it’s important to remember that speed matters. If your website runs slower than a snail, they’ll be frustrated and leave your site – maybe never to return again.

 

That’s why today we’re going to talk about how you can optimize your online store’s speed. So let’s get started!

Optimize WooCommerce Settings for Performance

 

One of the best ways to optimize your WooCommerce store for speed is to make sure you’re using the right settings. A kinsta alternative can help you out through every issue you might have in website optimization and performance, as these engineers give support in optimizing your site’s page speed and improving core web vitals metrics automatically.

 

If your ecommerce site hosts a blog too, you can limit the number of posts on your blog feed. WordPress sets this limit to 10 posts by default, but you can set a lower limit. If you have a lot of user comments on your posts or pages, then WordPress also gives you an option to break them into smaller chunks. The same setting holds true for breaking down reviews on your product pages.

 

Keep this number between 10 and 20 to optimize your product page load time.

You can disable product reviews under WooCommerce Settings if you don’t like having them in your store. This will help speed up your site as it eliminates loading a few scripts and widgets.

Also, if you want your site to load as quickly as possible, then you should use the “Desktop” template and turn off features like AJAX pagination or layered navigation. This will help your customers navigate through your products without having to wait for a new page to load each time they click on a link. It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s worth testing out in order to see if it makes a difference in performance.

Increase WordPress Memory Limit

 

WordPress is a fantastic platform, but it can be a bit of a hog. The most effective way to increase your store’s speed is by increasing the memory limit. The default memory limit for WordPress installations is 1GB, which can cause your site to crash and burn.

 

Luckily, this is an easy fix! Simply log into your WordPress dashboard and click on “Performance”. Once in Performance, you’ll need to find the “PHP Memory Limit” heading and change the amount from 1024M to 2048M. Always do a backup of any file before you edit it. In case something goes wrong, you can replace the edited file with the original one.

 

The next step is to click on the “Save All Settings” button at the top of the page and then refresh your browser window. In some cases, you may need to clear your browser cache for this change to take effect.

 

If you’re still having trouble loading your site quickly after these changes, there are additional steps you can take that involve installing plugins or hiring a developer to help optimize your site even more.

Optimizing Your Database

 

The first thing you should do is optimize your database. Information on the database includes customer contact details, credit card numbers, inventory levels, product information etc. Protecting this data is essential as attacks on web applications accounted for over 40% of incidents and were the single-biggest source of data loss. 

 

Database optimization is a process where you remove unnecessary data and make sure all the tables are in order. When it comes to your database, you want to make sure there are no duplicate entries or extra spaces in the database. You also want to make sure that you don’t have any unnecessary records that are slowing down your site.

Compress Images and Optimize Delivery

 

The first step to optimizing your WooCommerce store is to compress all of the images on your site. Compressing images can help improve the loading time of your site by around 30%.

 

But what if you have a ton of products with different sizes and you don’t know how to do this?

Luckily, there are plugins that can help automate this process for you. 

 

CompressorWP is free and allows you to automatically compress images on upload or bulk compress all of the images from your media library.

You should also look at the delivery settings for your website. There are two major ways that you can optimize delivery for better speed:

 

– Reduce image quality – The more pixels in an image, the larger it will be and the longer it’ll take for your page to load. Reducing image quality will make them smaller and will reduce loading time.

 

– Optimize caching – Caching is when a web browser downloads items from a web server so they don’t have to be downloaded again when revisited by another user at a later date. You can use cache plugins or server-level caching services like Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader to improve the loading time of your site by up to 100%.

Clean up your WooCommerce Database

 

One of the easiest things you can do to improve your site speed is to clean up your WooCommerce database. When you run your store, it creates a ton of data in the backend. This data isn’t necessary and often slows down the site because it’s having to load the information on each page view.

 

The best thing you can do is simply delete all the unnecessary data. To do this, go into your admin panel and click on “Tools” then “Database”. Once here, click on “Clean Up Database”. It will take a few minutes for it to finish cleaning, but once finished, you’ll see a message that says “Database has been cleaned”.

Conclusion

 

The world of e-commerce is a competitive online arena where brands and businesses battle for the attention and it’s not difficult for first-time business owners to start off on a shaky foot. However. the speed of your website is one of the most important things you should be looking at. For many reasons, this is true – speed plays a critical role in customer satisfaction. It can help you rank higher on search engine result pages and even increase your conversion rates.

What’s more, if your customers are unhappy with the speed of your website, they’ll go elsewhere.

 

The bottom line is that it’s worth the time and effort to optimize your Ecommerce site for speed. Doing so could help you gain a competitive edge and increase customer satisfaction on your website!