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When it comes to E-Commerce platforms, WooCommerce is preferred for good reason – it’s easy enough to set up a WooCommerce store. Just buy a domain and add the WooCommerce plugin to your WordPress website.

Tools like personalization, real-time inventory, live chat go a long way in giving users what they want and keep them coming back. However, there is no feature or tool that can make up for one basic flaw: a slow website.

Here’s a scary statistic: 40% of shoppers won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a retail site to load. Thankfully, there are a few things WooCommerce developers, QAs, and merchants can do to take their website from slow to fast. In this article we will look at some of these steps.

How to speed up WooCommerce?

1. Increase the WordPress memory limit

By default, the WordPress memory is set to 32MB. At some point, this limit will be exceeded and the user will get an error message notifying him. Now, there are two ways to solve this problem: the user does it himself or contact the hosting company.

To configure WordPress memory themselves, users can use the following steps:

Edit the wp-config.php file

  • Open wp-config.php, which is by default in the WordPress root directory
  • Locate the following line near the end of the file: / * That’s it, stop editing! Good blog. * /
  • Just above that line, add: define (‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’)
  • Save the changes

Edit the PHP.ini file

  • If the user has access to their PHP.ini file, change the line to PHP.ini
  • If the line shows 64M try 256M: memory_limit = 256M
  • The maximum amount of memory a script can consume is 64 MB.

Edit the .htaccess file

If the user does not have access to PHP.ini they can try adding the following line to an .htaccess file: php_value memory_limit 256M

2. Optimize the WooCommerce website images

Being visual creatures, people are drawn to visually appealing websites. Pictures are an important part of this look. However, using non-optimized images can adversely affect website performance by slowing it down. Image optimization is a simple and effective way to speed up WooCommerce sites.

Large image files create loading delays on the website UX. Slow WooCommerce sites can lead to website downranking in search engines in SERPs.

You can avoid this situation by using image compression plugins like WP-Smush.it, EWWW Image Optimizer or Hammy. These in fact reduce the size of the images and optimize them in WordPress, without negatively affecting the image quality.

3. Use a high quality hosting service

A hosting service allows website owners to use a host server to store website content – media files and other relevant files. The hosting service is the foundation of the website as it handles all traffic and data. Therefore, a low-quality hosting service will hurt the performance of the WooCommerce website, especially the traffic, products or offers, as the number of web pages increases. Always choose a fast and robust hosting service with the following qualities:

  • 24/7 technical support to resolve issues and answer questions
  • High-end cloud infrastructure
  • Flexible in its ability to adapt as a WooCommerce store grows
  • Data centers around the world
  • High uptime rate so that the website is never down
  • Provides SSD-based solution
  • A server located geographically close to the website audience, thus providing fast response times

4. Disable AJAX cart snippets in WooCommerce

AJAX Cart Fragments is a WooCommerce feature. It is a script that uses Admin-Ajax to automatically update the customer’s cart total without having to refresh the page. This is especially effective when it comes to generating instant feedback for shoppers so they know the right items have been added to their carts.

Despite its effectiveness, this feature can slow down the speed of the site. It might even stop caching on pages that don’t actually need cart details. If you are experiencing a large number of AJAX requests on a WooCommerce site, disabling AJAX Cart Fragments will help increase the speed and stability of the website.

Solve this problem with the following: wc-ajax = get_refreshed_fragments. You can also use the Disable Cart Fragments plugin which automatically disables the AJAX Cart Fragments feature in WooCommerce. However, as you do this, remember to redirect customers to the shopping cart page when they need to verify the information. Otherwise, deactivation will interrupt the user experience.

5. Use a cache plugin

With caching, a version of the WooCommerce store asset is stored on the visitor’s device, thus allowing the site to load faster. This occurs because caching reduces the amount of data sent between the visitor’s browsers, the site database, and the server.

Pay attention to the following:

  • Server Cache: Because the server generates the web page, server caching allows it to remember parts of the web page so that the whole page doesn’t have to be generated from scratch every time.
  • Browser caching – Helps the browser remember what a web page looks like so it doesn’t have to waste time exchanging data with the server. This is useful for visitors accessing multiple pages because static files (style sheets, JavaScript files) can be stored by the browser.
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