7 Powerful Strategies to Speed Up WooCommerce Store for a Better Conversion Rate

Speeding up WooCommerce stores is essential for a better conversion rate as well as SEO rankings. Speed is like money for a WooCommerce store. A slow-loading WooCommerce store can be a major annoyance for a potential customer, leading to a poor user experience as well as lost sales.  

But, how can you  speed up WooCommerce store? Here, you learn the powerful strategies to speed up WooCommerce stores. 

Don’t worry! If you are not from a coding background. These solutions to speed up WooCommerce can be easily implemented by anyone without any coding knowledge.

What is WooCommerce and why it is important?

WooCommerce is a free E-commerce plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. It is commonly used to create small to large-sized ecommerce shops.

WooCommerce is a wildly popular E-commerce plugin that allows users to manage their online store. According to business intelligence platform statista’s market research for 2023, around 54% of e-commerce is based on WooCommerce platform.

With its beginner-friendly interface, and a huge arsenal of plugins, woocommerce is the go to ecommerce platform for a huge majority of startup stores.

Apart from being  beginner-friendly, Woocommerce is important for several other reasons.

WooCommerce offers unmatched Flexibility and Scalability:

WooCommerce offers a highly customizable shopping platform for building an online store. Whether you have a small business or a large-scale business, it can accommodate an online store of any size and also can scale up with your business growth.

You can set it up to sell almost anything from fashion to digital products & WooCommerce can handle the customization needed for your store to function properly. 

Be it allowing a digital download after the payment, or allowing users to choose from various sizes and color options for your online fashion store, speed up woocommerce can do almost everything.

When it comes to scalability, it will support you to run the store regardless if you have 10 products as well as 10000 products.

Woocommerce is SEO-friendly: 

WooCommerce is built with SEO best practices in mind. It will help your online store to rank well in any search engine results and help you get that sweet organic traffic with ease. 

It allows you to easily add or make changes to meta description, h1 tag, and even do URL customization to help your online store rank well on google.

WooCommerce is Cost-effective:

WooCommerce is a cost-effective solution for anyone starting out, compared to other e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Wix, and Square. 

In Shopify and many other e-commerce platforms, you need to pay a monthly subscription & that too is based on how many products you add. These fees add up quickly, but you don’t need to empty your wallet  to use WooCommerce. Just get your domain & hosting and a few hours of your time and your store would be up & running.

Why should you speed up WooCommerce stores?

A fast-loading WooCommerce website is crucial for several reasons,

• Speed up Woocommerce for a Better User Experience (UX):

 Speed Up WooCommerce website can improve user experience by a multitude. Users are more likely to engage and stay longer on your WooCommerce store if it loads quicker. Which inturn, will reduce the bounce rates.

According to Anna Crowe, SEO Director & Consultant  Alludo “The slower your site’s load, the more visitors and revenue you’ll lose out on.”

• Speed up WooCommerce for a Higher Conversion Rate:

A faster loading webpage leads to a better user experience. That means average on-page time will automatically increase. If the user spends a longer time on your WooCommerce website then the conversion rate is likely to increase. 

• Speed up WooCommerce to improve SEO ranking:

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) ranking indicates the position of your website in Google search. Since, core web vitals & user experience are both important ranking signals & both are directly related to pagespeed, a low WooCommerce website would affect the SEO ranking of your website negatively.

Making speed up WooCommerce store on the other hand would give you a leg up in your SEO effort to bring in organic visitors.

7 Things that slow down your WooCommerce Store

We know why it is important to speed up WooCommerce store. There is a list of things you should avoid in order to avoid slowing down your WooCommerce performance.

Lack of Image Optimization Slows Down Websites:

Speed up WooCommerce store needs a lot of product images. An unoptimized image is the most common reason for a slow website. Since images are usually the biggest element on the page by bandwidth, an optimized image will increase the load time of your WooCommerce store.

Now think about how many images you have on each of your product listings, all these images would drag the performance of your website  down unless you optimize them.

Unoptimized HTML, CSS, and JavaScripts:

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the fundamental elements of a webpage. But more often than not developers are using unnecessary space and comments in the code. While these spaces are necessary for the developers to form a better understanding. This evidently hurts the performance of your website.

Not Using a Content Delivery Network:

Sometimes, the physical distance between a user and the original server can be one of the common reasons for a slow website. When a user requests content, generally this request goes to the origin server. 

Then the server sends the requested content to the user, this is time-consuming. This is also known as latency. If the physical distance of the user is considerable from the origin server this might cause a noticeable lag in information retrieval.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers that are distributed worldwide. It stores the static resources like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and media files to reduce latency. When a user sends the requests to your website the static assets are served from their nearest edge server to reduce the latency & improve user experience.

Using Too Many Optimizing Plugins 

Plug-ins are used to improve your WooCommerce website & add functionally to it. But sometimes using too many plug-ins can increase the page load time.

Using plugins without the consideration of performance could have a detrimental effect not only on your core web vitals but also on user experience.. 

Using a Slow WordPress Theme:

The design of the website plays an important role in determining the loading time of the speed up WooCommerce site.

A wordPress theme that hasn’t been well optimized or a webpage design with a large number of unoptimized resources such as images, and videos, can slow your WooCommerce store to crawl.

You are Using a Slow Hosting:

Web hosting arrangements can have a huge impact on your WordPress site speed. It can be challenging to recognize if your hosting makes your store slow or not.

However, if you’ve fixed everything else, and still your WooCommerce site’s speed has not improved, then you need to switch the WordPress hosting. 

When you are running an e-commerce store, you need to choose a host that can provide you with enough server resources to make your store fast and stable, especially if you have hundreds of simultaneous visitors.

This can also be resolved by implementing a good CDN which would reduce load on your origin server.

The latest PHP version is not activated:  

WordPress is an open-source Content Management System (CMS). This is based on PHP. Many times cheap shared hosting providers do not have the latest PHP version that is not activated, This would have an impact on your page speed & might even cause issues with certain functionalities as well.

Negative Impacts of Slow WooCommerce Store

A slow WooCommerce website can cost you a lot. No one will wait on your WooCommerce website if it takes a lot of time to load a landing page. It also does not give a very flattering image of your brand to the visitors either.

• High Bounce Rate:

The bounce rate indicates the user visits your WooCommerce store. They are not engaging with the product of your WooCommerce store due to various factors like slow loading times, poor navigation or usability. 

Instead they navigate away from your online store without any interaction. 

This turns all your marketing efforts and ad spends to zero.

• Low Conversion Ratio

First, we need to understand what conversion is. Conversion occurs when a visitor converts to a customer. The conversion rate will show the percentage of users that make a purchase on your website. 

If a visitor spends a lot of time on your website, it is a good sign for your business. It means they are researching the product and the chances of them converting into a paying customer is higher. 

How to Speed Up WooCommerce Site 

There are various strategies you can apply to speed up WooCommerce sites. Here, we are mentioning powerful strategies that you can easily apply to speed up WooCommerce.

1. Optimize your product images to speed up WooCommerce store :

An image is the most powerful form of communication. Images can convey messages quickly. For an ecommerce store images can make or break your product & profits..

But, using too many large-sized images is also the most common factor for slow websites. 

To improve the WooCommerce website performance, you need to reduce the image size as much as possible. You can convert your image files to WebP format to optimize the image. 

To optimize an image file you can use image optimization plugins like RabbitLoader,imagify, ewww.

2. Enable lazy loading to speed up WooCommerce website:

Lazy loading is an optimization technique wherein the website prioritizes loading the images that are visible to the user above the fold of the webpage. 

The remaining photos are not loaded later on, so the user doesn’t feel any delay. Due to lazy loading, The Total Blocking Time of your WooCommerce website will automatically decrease.

For a woocommerce store which usually has a lot of images & graphical properties, lazy loading makes a huge difference in enhancing the user experience. It can be applied to other media elements as well.

Lazy Loading can be implemented by adding a plugin to WooCommerce or WordPress site, but if you are using RabbitLoader it takes care of the lazy loading along with other optimization features.

3. Use a Content Delivery Network to speed up WooCommerce site :

A content delivery Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces the distance between the user and the server by distributing the content across the edge servers worldwide. Thus a CDN will help you to speed up WooCommerce stores.

For woo commerce you can use Rocket CDN if you have WP Rocket already installed, but it is a premium service & would cost you a bit. If you are looking for a CDN service for free RabbitLoader has an integrated CDN serving with over 300 PoPs.

4. Use a cache plugin to speed up WooCommerce store:

Caching is a common way to speed up WooCommerce stores. Every time a user loads your online store, the browser needs to download all the data from the server. This is a time-consuming process.

But when you use a cache plugin, the browser will save a copy of the content of your WooCommerce site, so that the next time they visit your WooCommerce store, the webpage will load quickly.

Example, while loading this RabbitLoader.com blog, your browser has already downloaded a few elements onto your browser & won’t need to download them if you try to visit the page in the future, hence opening their page on your browser next time would feel much faster.

For WooCommerce speed optimization, you can use popular caching plugins such as W3 total cache, WP Rocket, RabbitLoader , LiteSpeed cache.

5. Pick a fast-loading WordPress Theme to speed up WooCommerce store:

A good woocommerce theme can increase the success of the online store, if it’s optimized for the performance.When you are choosing a WooCommerce theme next time make sure it is doing good on core web vitals.

Good themes for woocommerce should not only look good, but it needs to perform well as well if you wish to give your visitors a lightning quick online store.

6. Database Optimization to speed up WooCommerce store:

It is recommended to keep your database clean and optimized. To speed up WooCommerce store, you need to delete old tables left by old plugins.

It is advisable to do this part manually & only an experienced database admin should take on tasks like this. Hence, might be the only optimization strategy on our list when you might need a little help from a techie.

7. To speed up WooCommerce store you need to avoid using too many plugins:

WordPress is a highly flexible and adaptable CMS. The main advantage of WordPress is its army of plugins, which allows you to do almost anything & everything on WordPress & WooCommerce.

But each and every plugin has its own features and code. Adding a lot of them to your WooCommerce store might add to its page load time. Using too many of them might result in a sluggish WooCommerce website.

To increase the website’s pagespeed, it is more advised to use fewer plugins. You need to choose only the plugins that are necessary. 

For example, to improve the pagespeed most store owners tend to use one plugin for image optimization, one for cache & the list is endless, one might have 5 or 6 plugins installed just for performance optimization, and these plugins would all conflict with each other making the store even slower. 

This can be solved by using RabbitLoader alone, a single plugin for performance optimization instead of 5 or 6 plugins.

The Impact of RabbitLoader to Speed Up WooCommerce Site 

All the above mentioned strategies can be implemented on your ecommerce website by installing RabbitLoader.

We would test RabbitLoader on a real website cellofy.shop and see the improvement of the website after installing the plugin.

Checking the WooCommerce store’s Pagespeed scores Before installing RabbitLoader.com

Let’s check the pagespeed performance score of this WooCommerce website in Google pagespeed insights without any optimization. 

Mobile Version:

The mobile score is very crucial for SEO rankings as most of the users nowaday visit any website from their mobile devices. 

In mobile mode, the pagespeed performance score is only 36. That indicates this website fails the performance test for the mobile version of the store.

Here you can see some core web vital metrics had a heavy impact on the website’s low pagespeed performance. 

First Content Paint (FCP) is 5.0s whereas Large Contentful Paint (LCP) is 5.8s and the Total Blocking Time (TBT) is 1440 ms, all of these numbers are very high & they must be reduced in order to get a good score & pass core web vital.

Desktop mode: 

While the pagespeed score of the desktop version is 50, which is just passing the pagespeed insight test, not impressive but still it’s far better than the mobile version. 

The core web vital metrics that had an impact on its pagespeed score are: 

1. First Contentful Paint  – 1.9s
2. Large Contentful Paint  -2.4s
3. Total Blocking Time  – 650 ms
4.  Cumulative Layout Shift  -0.01

Checking the WooCommerce store’s Pagespeed scores After installing RabbitLoader.com

Finally, we would install RabbitLoader and check the pagespeed performance of cellofy.shop. The website is checked within 5-10 minutes of installing RabbitLoader and here are the results.

Mobile mode:

Here, after installing RabbitLoader, the pagespeed score of the mobile version has improved. RabbitLoader managed to increase this website’s pagespeed score to 82, a very respected score.

The performance of core web vital metrics also improved.

1. FCP ( From 5.0 seconds to just 3.3 seconds)
2. LCP ( From 5.8 seconds to 3.6 seconds)
3. TBT ( From 1440ms to 40 ms)
4. CLS ( From 0.005 to 0).

Desktop mode:

Finally, for the desktop version, RabbitLoader achieved a near-perfect score of 99 out of 100. 

Core Web Vital metrics are also improved.

1. FCP ( From 1.9 seconds to 0.6 seconds)
2. LCP ( From 2.4 seconds to 0.7 seconds)
3. TBT ( From 650 ms to 10 ms).

Conclusion

If you have a slow-loading WooCommerce store then this is the best time to speed up WooCommerce store for a better user experience as well as the conversion rate. Here, we have suggested powerful strategies to speed up WooCommerce stores.

Now it’s your turn. You must apply these great techniques to recover a slow WooCommerce website. However, most of these strategies take time to implement manually. 

Using RabbitLoader would make the task easier for you and save you a lot of time that you can invest in growing your business.