Why You Should Speed Up Your Website?
When a user lands on your site the very first time, you only have a few seconds to grab their attention and convince them to stick around.
According to the Microsoft Bing search team, just a two-second delay in your site can decrease user satisfaction by 3.8%. This can also result in a revenue loss of about 4.3%.
Therefore, if your website takes too long to load, chances are you have already lost those prospects before you had the chance to convert them.
Aside from that, speed is now part of Google’s ranking signals. Meaning your site’s speed can have a significant effect on your SEO efforts. If you have a slow-loading site, you will lose your visitors because of impatience. This can signal search engines that your website has poor user experience, which can lead to a decline in search engine rankings.
Luckily, that can be fixed.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Ecommerce Site
Now that we have established how a slow loading site can negatively affect your business, we have listed down some effective tactics on how you can speed up your WordPress eCommerce site.
1. Choose the best web hosting provider
While picking a shared hosting provider might initially look like a good deal, it comes with a cost. That’s because you are sharing your web server’s resources with other websites. This can lead to server overload and eventual downtime.
A slow loading site with frequent downtimes will affect your online store especially during high spikes of traffic. Therefore, if your brand becomes popular and starts generating tons of online traffic, you would risk killing your WordPress site on shared hosting.
The stress and anxiety of watching your site go down after you introduce a big feature or sale on your site are not worth it. That said, invest in proper hosting.
2. Run speed tests on your store’s main page
For your WordPress eCommerce site, you can run speed tests on the main page of your store. After the test is done, it will then give you a report on what exactly is slowing your online store down.
These results may usually vary depending on the tool that you are using. Nonetheless, it should give you an insight into what makes your eCommerce website slow. Not to mention the tool’s recommendation on how you can speed things up.
To check your site speed, here are three tools that are used extensively:
- WebPageTest.org
- Pingdom
- GTmetrix
- PageSpeed Insights
3. Install an effective WordPress caching plugin
WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket have already been there for a long time, making complicated tasks of placing caching rules to various site elements easy.
Integrating these kinds of plugins could improve the loading speed of your site. So how does it work exactly?
Instead of going through the complicated process of page generation every time, the caching plugin produces a copy of the page after it first loads. Then shows that cached version to subsequent users.
The entire process is long and a bit complicated, but you can skip most of it when you use caching plugins instead.
4. Get a lightweight theme
WordPress themes have a lot of elements, widgets, sliders, social icons, and more that are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. But keep in mind that having too many elements can negatively affect your WordPress eCommerce site’s load speed. So, the best thing to do here is to use lightweight themes such as WordPress’s default themes. You can also opt for customizable themes like Astra and GeneratePress. Ideally, you need to look for a theme that is functional and is suitable for your brand. That way, it is much easier to keep things sleek, lightweight, and loading fast. There will be times that you might need to rebuild your site using another theme, although you do not have to do it often.5. Optimize your store’s images
Images are an essential component of your eCommerce site. To boost your page loading times, it is an excellent idea to spend your time optimizing images, thumbnails, and other multimedia on your online store. You can utilize WordPress plug-ins like TinyPNG as it is effective in optimizing and compressing images when you upload them. Another method that you can try with your images is lazy loading. It means that you have a set of images that are not loaded on the site until the user scrolls through the part where they are placed. That way, the overall loading time of your page is less likely to be affected since a user’s browser does not have to load your web page like a product or category page all at once. Because your eCommerce store’s media content is mostly in the form of images, lazy loading and image optimization can give you beneficial results in the long run.6. Database Optimization
If your website database is poorly organized and slow, this can bring your online store into a standstill. This case is true especially for eCommerce sites that run on WordPress. Online stores usually have more database entries and tables than an average website. Not only do you have to work on your important web pages, blog posts, user reviews, and comments, you will also need entries and tables for your orders, products, attributes of your products, and so on. You can go for popular WordPress plugins like WP Sweep or WP-Optimize. These plug-ins will scan your database, take off unnecessary overheads, remove fragments, and so on. When you clean your database consistently, you can significantly improve your page loading times because the database queries will be a lot quicker.7. Uninstall unnecessary plugins
Keeping unwanted plugins in your WordPress site will just weigh down your online store. That’s because it will just add junk on your web files. It will also add more load on your server resources as the backup files are generated. So, it is best to remove the plugins that you hardly use. Alternatively, you can also tap into third-party services whenever you are scheduling or automating tasks. For instance, when publishing your latest posts on social media.Over to You
Speed is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to the overall success of your website. Even the mere seconds of delay on its loading speed can significantly make a difference for your business.
One of the biggest benefits of decreasing your site’s loading time is that it helps improve the overall experience of your visitors. That is the same whether they are using their PC or mobile devices.
Aside from that, you will also get the chance to improve your rankings on SERPs.
