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0 Would you like to improve the speed of your eCommerce site?
Speed is quite essential for the progress of an e-commerce website. It not only boosts user experience but also impacts conversions and revenue directly.
When you first start your ecommerce store, you’ll experience several problems, including almost zero sales, little traffic, and server faults. In such cases, it’s often better to seek advice from a more experienced store owner who can figure out common e-commerce optimization errors that you must avoid.
This article will explain why speed is so crucial and some ways to optimize your WordPress e-commerce website.
Why Is Speed Crucial?
When it comes to customer experience, speed is quite crucial. A sluggish website, a slow computer, or slow applications are all things that nobody likes.
But for Online stores, a sluggish site might cost you company.
According to research, a single-second delay in page load time leads to a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% decrease in page views, and a 16% fall in customer loyalty.
In simple terms, sluggish sites might result in lower sales.
Besides customer experience and sales, the speed of your eCommerce website has an impact on your SEO rankings. Google and some other search engines consider speeding an essential user experience and ranking factor.
In reality, Google’s page experience search update is focused mainly on statistics such as bounce rate and website performance, which affects the customer experience. A quicker eCommerce site will assist you in attracting more free search engine traffic.
Some Ways to Optimize Your WordPress E-Commerce Website
Here are several ways to optimize your WordPress e-commerce website, which includes:
1. Provide live chat to answer customer queries
Firstly, providing real-time support is a straightforward approach to expedite the sales process. Casual browsers can communicate with your support team through live chat right on your WordPress e-commerce website, without any need to call or send an email.
Tools that have complete WordPress e-commerce website integrations, such as Drift, allow you to customize the live chat experience for various stages of the e-commerce sales funnel.
For instance, you can make specific messaging targeted at different pages to start a conversation and attract casual buyers to maximize conversions. Maybe you utilize a live chat prompt on product pages to motivate users to ask queries about product information. However, please change it to something more focused on the buying experience on the checkout page.
2. Select a Good Ecommerce Hosting Provider
If you don’t have a quality eCommerce hosting provider, all of the eCommerce performance optimization efforts you make will be in vain.
Not every WordPress hosting provider is the same. Select Choose an eCommerce hosting service that does the following for better performance:
● Offers a stable and updated platform to host your eCommerce store.
● It’s optimized for WordPress, WooCommerce, or any e-commerce plugin that you’d like to use.
● Their servers are designed for speed and efficiency. It means built-in caching, security, and other performance-enhancing features.
We suggest using SiteGround. They are one of the WordPress hosting services which is officially authorized.
SiteGround’s servers are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform recognized for high performance.
3. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
WooCommerce is a flexible e-commerce platform. It means your entire product data is saved in a database, and product pages are created.
WordPress must execute the process every time to achieve this. If many people try to access your eCommerce store simultaneously, it will slow down and possibly crash.
A caching plugin can assist you in resolving this problem.
Rather than producing pages every time, a caching plugin displays a cached version of the HTML page to the user. It frees up your server’s resources and allows it to run more smoothly, resulting in a faster website load time.
Many excellent WordPress caching plugins are available, and some prominent WordPress hosting companies, such as SiteGround and Bluehost, provide their own caching systems.
WP Rocket is a plugin, which we suggest. It’s the most beginner-friendly WordPress caching plugin on the market.
4. Use Latest PHP Version
WordPress and WooCommerce are both primarily written in the PHP programming language.
PHP gets better in performance and becomes quicker with every new version. It also patches bugs and security flaws, which can jeopardize the stability and speed of your site.
Consequently, it’s crucial to always use the most recent PHP version.
You can figure out the PHP version of your eCommerce store by visiting Tools » Website Health in your WordPress admin dashboard and switching to the ‘Info’ tab.
You have to click on the “Server” section to extend this, and you will see the PHP version used by your server.
If your site is functioning on a PHP version less than 8.0, you must contact your hosting provider and request that they update it for you.
5. Latest Version of WordPress & WooCommerce
Throughout each development cycle, WordPress and WooCommerce developers devote substantial time to optimizing performance. Both applications run quicker and consume fewer server resources due to this.
Every new version also patches bugs and security enhancements necessary for an eCommerce business.
As the e-commerce store owner, you must ensure that you use the latest WordPress versions, WooCommerce, other plugins, and your WordPress theme.
To install all available updates, navigate to the Dashboard » Updates page.
6. Optimize Product Images for Performance
One of the most visually essential aspects of an online store is product images. Quality product images can assist raise sales conversion by maintaining customers engaged.
That’s why it’s crucial to have high-resolution product images. Although, you have to ensure that large image file sizes are correctly optimized.
There are two methods for web-optimizing product photographs without compromising quality.
Before uploading every product image to your site, you can first optimize it on your PC. It necessitates image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Gimp, and many others.
Many of them include a web-friendly image export option. You can also change the image’s quality before storing it for upload.
Additionally, you can utilize an image compressing plugin for WordPress. Such plugins optimize the size of your product images automatically for better website performance.
Apart from image compression, the type of image file you select can also benefit. For instance, JPEG images are suitable for images with many colors. In contrast, png images are better for transparent images.
Some Key Takeaways
Speed is quite essential for the progress of an e-commerce website. It not only boosts user experience but also impacts conversions and revenue directly. If you are seriously concerned about e-commerce website performance, you came to the right place to resolve all your issues. We hope you are satisfied with what we have explained in this article.
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