When it comes to the performance of a WordPress website, especially eCommerce websites, speed matters a lot.
A slow-loading eCommerce website gets low or no sales at all vs. the eCommerce stores that load faster.
In this blog post, I will be sharing 7 actions that you can take and improve the loading speed of your WordPress-based eCommerce website.
#1 Delete The Unused Plugins
Quite often, we don’t care about the plugins that we have installed & activated on our WordPress e-commerce website but have never used them. I am sure this sounds familiar to you as well.
Yes, you got it right. Unused plugins can also slow down the performance of your website.
As a rule of thumb, you must always keep the number of plugins on your website to a minimum. Having said this, it does make sense to remove all of the unused plugins.
#2 Optimize Your Images
Image optimization can also help your WordPress to perform well.
Especially in the case of e-commerce websites, where you may have hundreds or thousands of product images on the server, it becomes even essential to optimize them in order to ensure the optimum loading speed of your website.
Fortunately, there are several great WordPress plugins like “EWWW Image Optimizer WordPress Plugin” that you can use to optimize the images on your e-commerce website.
#3 Turn On GZip Compression
Gzip compression is one of the easiest ways to speed up your WordPress site.
How to do this?
Just navigate to the link https://your websitename.com/wp-admin/options.php & set the value of gzip compression 1 (from default value as ‘0’).
For me, this particular step has improved my website speed by 5%. Not bad.
#4 Caching & CDN (Content Delivery Networks)
What is WordPress Caching?
WordPress caching involves saving some of your static files (e.g images, scripts, etc) on the user’s device for a specified period of time.
Next time when your users visit your website (provided the cached files haven’t expired), your website will load faster since the user’s browser won’t need to download the files from your server.
#5 Check External Scripts
Does your eCommerce website have lots of elements that need external scripts to be read before rendering your web pages?
For example, do your website has widgets from Facebook, Instagram, and other 3rd parties? If yes, then this could also be one of the reasons that your website takes time to load.
Have a thorough check and cut down the number of external scripts in order to improve the loading speed of your website. If not sure, you can also hire a web developer to do this job for you.
#6 Minify
What exactly is ‘Minify’?
‘Minify’ is a process of removing white spaces from the code of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Does it help?
Yes, if your WordPress e-commerce website uses a lot of CSS and JavaScript files, it will definitely help to reduce the loading speed when you choose to minify.
Again, with the help of great WordPress plugins like “Better WordPress Minify“, you can easily minify your CSS & JavaScript files.
#7 Clear Trash
Do you know when you delete any of your posts or pages, they don’t get deleted permanently? Instead, they are saved in the trash. If you have been running your WordPress e-commerce store for quite a long, there is a high chance that your trash may have lots of useless posts/pages.
It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your trash and make sure that all of the trash files are deleted permanently.
If you don’t have time to check trash on a regular basis, you can also put the below code in your wp-config.php file to make sure that all the trash files are deleted permanently after 7 days.
define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 7 );