How to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store in 7 Easy Steps
Did you know that a slow-loading WooCommerce site can irritate your customer's experience?
Yeah! It impacts overall customer satisfaction.
Your target customers demand a smooth and faultless service from you. But if you don't develop your WooCommerce store properly for quick loading, it will create a huge chance of increasing the bounce rates.
On top of that, a slow-loading website can slow your overall business growth.
But how can you speed up your WooCommerce store?
Okay, don't take the stress.
Especially for you, we will discuss some impactful ways to boost your WooCommerce store's speed.
Before that, let's know more about why you should speed up your WooCommerce store.
Importance of WooCommerce Website’s Speed
In this section, we will discuss why it’s so important to focus on the improvement of your website’s speed.
1. Improve User Experience
User Experience (UX) is the way of designing and improving your customer's experience of a product, website, or application. It is a discipline that focuses on understanding the needs of users and ensuring the satisfaction of the users.
This is the process of planning, designing, and building the user experience of a product, application, or website. It refers to how a product is designed and built to make it easy and intuitive for users to interact with it in the most effective and natural manner.
Website speed is vital as it affects the user experience of your customers. The faster your website loads, the less frustrating it is for your visitors, and the more likely they will keep coming back.
You can improve your website speed by prioritizing user experience, particularly by reducing the page loading time, and by using optimization techniques to improve page loading speed across all pages.
2. Decrease Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is the measurement of how many visitors leave a website after viewing only a single page. It is one of the most important metrics for web marketers to understand and measure the quality of a website’s visitors and the amount of time they spend on the site.
When a visitor leaves your website, the bounce rate is the proportion of visits that consist of a single page view. Your website speed has a significant impact on bounce rate.
If a visitor needs to load several different pages to reach the main content, a slow-loading website is likely to cause the user to abandon their task or simply give up.
It is important to identify and understand the main cause of a slow page load and then quickly resolve the problem.
If you improve your WooCommerce website’s speed, bounce rates will automatically reduce.
3. Build Brand Value
The brand value of a company can be thought of as the value of the company to its prospective customers. A company’s brand value is influenced by its ability to build strong brands, develop a meaningful identity, and create a memorable relationship with its customers.
Also, a strong brand identity means developing a strong reputation. A strong brand identity campaign helps to increase a company’s brand awareness, which can then translate into more sales and higher profitability.
When your website runs faster, your promotional strategy will work more efficiently.
So, it’s your website speed that makes a big difference. Users are much more likely to stay on a site if they think it loads fast. More time on the site also means more opportunities for revenue, and this lets you spend more to promote your brand.
4. Increase Conversion Rates
The conversion rate in eCommerce is the percentage of people who make a purchase after viewing and clicking a website ad or link in a brand marketing campaign.
First of all, the conversion rate is the core metric of your digital business growth. It determines how customers interact with your site and purchase products from your site.
So, you need to make your store user-friendly and error free to increase the sales. Here are the recommended plugins that address the glitches that hinder conversion rates:
- WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery
- WooCommerce Product Feed Manager
- Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
- Advanced Woo Search
Also, you need to improve your WooCommerce store’s customer experience. If your customers are satisfied with your product and services, it will obviously improve your overall business conversion rate.
But how can you improve that?
For the improvement of your user experiences, you must speed up your website. Happy users will definitely contribute to increasing the conversion rate of your WooCommerce store.
7 Easy Steps to Increase Your WooCommerce Store’s Speed
You already know how your WooCommerce website’s speed impacts the growth of your business.
So now, we will discuss how you can boost your WooCommerce store speed.
Are you ready?
Ok, let's go.
1. Choose a Better Hosting Service Provider
Do you know what is the core part of your WooCommerce site?
A better hosting service is the most essential part of your WooCommerce store.
Website hosting is the process of keeping your website online. When people visit your website, your hosting provider keeps the site online and running so that the information on the site is visible to visitors.
But what is a reliable hosting service provider?
A reliable service provider ensures that the site is secure, which protects against hackers who might try to steal information or deceive visitors. Most people use their hosting provider’s services, which are often faster, safer, and more reliable than self-hosted services.
Also, better website hosting helps to improve website speed. Website hosting speed is one factor that has a large impact on a website’s performance.
For the best website customer experience, it is important to host your website on a prominent website hosting service provider that ensures advanced customer support and protection of your website and data, super-fast speed, and reliability.
There is no doubt that a good hosting service will improve your website speed.
2. Customize Website Images
We already know that website images create an effective impression on the customers.
But have you ever imagined that images could also slow down your WooCommerce site’s speed?
You might think about how images can slow down your site.
Well, image loading time of a web page can have a major impact on how quickly a visitor sees the page. Images can take a long time to load, which can slow down a page and frustrate visitors.
Suppose you have invested in a good hosting service provider. But you have added too many images on your WooCommerce site.
At the end of the day, your website still remains slow. So you can't grow as much as you want.
To make sure your images load faster, you can easily use multiple image optimization tools on your WooCommerce website, such as Short Pixel Image Optimizer, Imsanity, Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, etc.
3. Optimize Mobile User Interface
Isn't this digital era more dependent on smartphones?
Obviously!
Do you have any idea how many people use smartphones all over the world?
According to Statista, currently, 6,567 million people use smartphones all over the world.
So the importance of a mobile-friendly website has become a marketing imperative in the digital age.
Today, more customers than ever before are accessing the internet on their mobile devices and expect the same quality of experience, regardless of where they are or what device they’re using.
The mobile experience is critical to keeping users engaged and excited about your brand, so it’s important to leverage a mobile-first strategy on your website.
From mobile-friendly websites or apps, customers can quickly purchase their desired products. So it's very important to develop a mobile-friendly version of your WooCommerce website.
This speeds up the performance of your digital store, which is beneficial to increase more revenue for your store.
4. Use CDN Services
First of all, you have to store your digital shopping data in a particular space so that you can quickly deliver your product data to your target customers.
But, the question arises.
Where can you store them?
The answer is content delivery network services.
Essentially, a CDN is a set of servers that host your static assets so that they are nearby and can quickly respond to any requests for those assets. It also makes it possible to host those assets at any number of locations instead of only on your servers.
How do CDN services actually work?
Every time a request for content is made anywhere in the world, the CDN is able to deliver the content quickly and reliably. It also improves the overall speed of your WooCommerce store.
This would allow you or any store owners from anywhere to provide the content globally without worrying about the distance, transport, or other logistical challenges.
As long as your content is hosted in the safe harbor, you can have full access to the internet and all the content on it.
So you must choose a better CDN server to speed up your WooCommerce store.
5. Select Better WordPress Themes
You know that your website design creates a better impression on your customers.
Well, when you choose WordPress, that means you already get a bunch of lucrative advantages such as multiple free and premium themes and plugins.
WordPress is free to use. Well, it is not just developers. Anyone can build a website using WordPress without a lot of programming knowledge. WordPress is also very easy to use, and it’s growing in popularity day by day.
WordPress website themes are designed to provide a complete solution for building your business website with a professional and clean look. The best WordPress themes are also responsive, meaning they provide a great experience across a range of devices.
Themes allow you to build a website quickly, with fewer resources than building a custom one from scratch. They are typically used for building blogs, WooCommerce stores, and other websites.
Then what is the problem with WordPress themes?
It becomes problematic when you use any poorly coded theme for your store. Because it slows down the overall speed of your WooCommerce site.
So when you choose your themes, you need to choose that theme which is well-developed with simple and minimalistic design.
But if you choose a more complicated layout and glittering theme, it will obviously turn down the speed of your WooCommerce store.
6. Use Caching Pugin
Cached website content is simply stored in the web browser’s cache. Website caching allows users to view a website without slower loading times associated with more traditional methods.
Website caching is a technique used to speed up website performance by decreasing the number of requests to the website and thereby reducing latency.
There are many WordPress caching plugins that are widely used in WordPress, such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc. Their common feature is that they cache website resources so that they can serve them faster for a similar request on a different day.
Caching reduces the load on your servers, which in turn allows you to serve more content to more people.
Also, these plugins are used to cache content and reduce the number of times that a server needs to be hit.
These caching plugins are a great way to speed up your WordPress site. They cache your WordPress site, which means when someone visits it the first time, they’ll get the HTML for the homepage instead of having to download it every single time they come back.
7. Understand the Buyer Persona
Do you think you need to know about customers properly?
You really need to have crystal clear information about your targeted customers. Because without knowing them you can't be able to provide them the perfect service.
Also, when you have a clear idea about them, you can easily optimize your website speed based on their requirements.
How can you know your customer's characteristics?
You need to build up the buyer persona.
The “buyer personas" are a commonly used fictional tool that helps you understand who your customers are and what they want. It is a set of fictionalized characteristics about a specific group of customers. This information is used to understand the needs and motivations of your audience, which helps you build a stronger brand.
They are also used to test the appeal of different content and offerings to understand what type of content will better connect with your audience. All customers have different buyer personas and different needs.
Conclusion
Your WooCommerce store speed is a vital part of your overall business revenue. Because slow websites always irritate the target customers. As a result, it increases the bounce rate.
In this article, we have discussed some important but easy steps to boost your WooCommerce website speed.
We hope that it will help to overcome your WooCommerce website’s speed-related issues.
Best of luck!
Author Bio
Fahim Muntasir
Fahim Muntasir works as a content writer at WebAppick - a giant WordPress plugin development company. His specialized sectors are WordPress, WooCommerce, Google Merchant Center, eCommerce, and other topics.
Viesearch - Life powered search