Speed matters a lot when it comes to the performance of a WordPress website, especially eCommerce websites.
A slow-loading eCommerce website gets low or no sales vs. the eCommerce stores that load faster.
In this blog post, I will share 7 actions that you can take to improve the loading speed of your WordPress-based eCommerce website.
#1 Delete The Unused Plugins
We often don’t care about the plugins we install and activate 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. However, it does make sense to remove all unused plugins.
#2 Optimize Your Images
Image optimization can also help your WordPress to perform well.
Optimizing product images on the server becomes essential to ensure the optimum loading speed of e-commerce websites, especially when hundreds or thousands of images may be present.
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?
You can access the options by navigating to the link https://your websitename.com/wp-admin/options.php and setting the gzip compression value to 1 (from the default value of ‘0’).
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.
Next time your users visit your website (provided the cached files haven’t expired), your website will load faster since your browser won’t need to download the files from your server.
#5 Check External Scripts
Does your eCommerce website have many elements that need external scripts to be read before rendering your web pages?
For example, does your website have widgets from Facebook, Instagram, and other third parties? If yes, this could also be why it takes time to load.
Have a thorough check and cut down the number of external scripts to improve the loading speed of your website. If you are unsure, you can also hire a web developer to do this job.
#6 Minify
What exactly is ‘Minify’?
‘Minify’ removes white spaces from the code of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Does it help?
Yes, if your WordPress e-commerce website uses many CSS and JavaScript files, it will help reduce the loading speed when you choose to minify.
Again, great WordPress plugins like Better WordPress Minify make it easy to minify your CSS and 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 monitor your trash and ensure that all trash files are deleted permanently.
If you don’t have time to check trash regularly, you can also put the code below in your wp-config.php file to ensure that all the trash files are deleted permanently after seven days.
define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 7 );