Speed Guide: How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Store for Fast Loading Times

WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin used to create various types of online stores. Fast loading times are important for both visitors and high Google rankings. In this guide, we will go through what you can do to improve the speed of your WooCommerce online store so that visitors stay on your website.  

Optimized performance at the server level 

Web hosting
One of the first things to look at is web hosting. If you use cheap web hosting, there is a high risk that it is a server with old technology that does not use SSD disks. This leads to slow and sluggish pages, which is not ideal for an online store.

PHP versions
PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is the programming language used by WordPress. At the time of writing, the latest stable PHP version is 8.3. Newer versions of PHP have optimizations that allow the code, i.e. the online store, to load faster. We therefore recommend running the latest possible PHP version.

Web server with Litespeed
The web server is what sends content to your browser when you visit a website. For PHP-based websites and WooCommerce, Litespeed can be a big advantage, as it is a web server that is optimized specifically for PHP-based websites. We use Litespeed as the web server for our web hosting.

Fast hardware with NVMe SSD drives
Unfortunately, there are web hosts that still sell packages with old technology and old hard drives. These should be avoided at all costs, as they do not meet today’s requirements, especially for an online store. Therefore, use a web host that has NVMe SSD drives, as this leads to better speed and performance.

Server-side caching
Redis helps reduce the load on the server and is a cache stored in memory, which means that all data does not have to be reloaded every time the page is loaded. This, together with the other measures, helps to ensure fast loading times for the online store.

Server at a data center in Finland
Use a web host that has data centers in Finland. The reason this is important is because a server that is closer to the visitor will load faster compared to a server that is far away from the visitor.

Optimizations in WordPress and WooCommerce

Select an optimized theme
There are numerous themes available for WordPress. Some of them are free, while others require payment. We recommend using a theme that has clean code and does not have too many features. The reason for this is that a theme with too many features, also known as bloat, slows down the online store. Instead, use plugins if you need more features on your online store. Some examples of good themes are: Generatepress, Astra, and Kadence. 

Optimize product images
The images on a website, and especially on an online store, have a significant impact on how quickly an online store loads. By default, images contain information that is not needed on a website. Therefore, it is important to optimize images for the web so that they take up less space. This means that unnecessary information, such as camera settings, is removed, resulting in smaller file sizes. We also recommend using more modern formats such as webp or avif if possible. These formats are designed to work optimally on the internet.

Use cache plugin
In simple terms, cache is a way of storing website content on the website so that not all content needs to be loaded every time a visitor comes to visit the online store. If you use our web hosting service, we strongly recommend using LiteSpeed Cache, which is a free plugin for WordPress.

Remember to exclude the checkout, shopping cart, and account pages and change the object cache to Redis.

Use plugins that don’t have bloat
Not all WordPress plugins should be used, as they can slow down your website. We therefore recommend that you carefully consider which plugins to install and, if necessary, test them on a separate test page before adding them to your actual website.

Bonus: Use a CDN
For companies with more international operations and customers outside the Nordic region, a CDN can be helpful. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a service that copies the content of a website to multiple servers around the world. This reduces loading times for visitors in other parts of the world.

Conclusion

In this guide, we have gone through how to optimize a WooCommerce online store for fast loading times and better performance. If you follow the tips in this guide, your online store will perform better, leading to higher rankings on Google and visitors staying on your site instead of going to your competitors. See our packages for WooCommerce below.