Today’s E-COMMERCE sites are busier than ever!
Ecommerce sites keep getting busier every year. More products (and/or more product displays), more calls-to-action, more promotions, more social proof, and of course…MORE EFFECTS! All this while hoping their pages load quickly for potential customers.
The scariest part of all is remembering how much you’ve spent on Google ads and Facebooks ads. You’ve finally attracted these precious shoppers…but is your site fast enough?! And is your site loading fast enough on mobile?
Yes, it’s tricky but you can be fancy AND fast!
COMMON PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS with WooCommerce sites
- Heavy theme – many WooCommerce themes are extremely bloated, offering endless layouts and options. Unfortunately, these features create massive database queries and decrease site performance even when you don’t use them.
- Heavy plugins – WooCommerce plugins tend to be very heavy, adding even more weight to your dynamic pages (cart/checkout) and sometimes their own CSS. It hurts even more when they call home to external servers.
- Dynamic processing – product carousels and sliders, cart items, checkout, logged-in users.
- Many images – tons of images (and image sizes), also slideshows and product widgets. Running an image-heavy site can be especially taxing on web-servers.
- External scripts – chat scripts, trackers, conversion plugins, social media. Many of these have to make external requests that greatly slow down your page load.
SPEEDING UP load times for WooCommerce sites
- Custom caching – ecommerce sites can be the most difficult to cache. It depends on how many products you have, how many visitors you have, how often your content and stock updates, and how often you work in the backend.
- Theme/plugin configuration – since extensions greatly determine your page weight, it’s absolutely critical to disable all unnecessary assets. You must know which assets should load first, and which assets can be safely deferred or dequeued.
- Optimizing images – careful compression will reduce image weight without noticeably decreasing quality. Disabling all unnecessary image sizes will great save server space (reducing the need for costly server upgrades).
- Optimizing CSS/JS – carefully optimizing all static assets and how they’re loaded will greatly affect visual page rendering. Compression, concatenation, and refactoring!
- Managing external assets – deferring assets, DNS-prefetching external sources, and even localizing or excluding external assets. The goal is not to adversely affect user experience.
How JVPS speeds up WooCommerce sites:
- Multi-layer caching – we deploy multiple caching mechanism to reach maximum performance. Static caching (prebuilt) for public pages and object caching for dynamic pages. We love handling giant stores with massive traffic.
- Strong servers – you’ll need a strong server to speed-up dynamic pages like carts, checkouts, and working in WP admin dashboard.
- Speed consultation – we’ve been there and done that. Seen it all! Our team can advise you on your current themes and plugins. What to keep and what to replace. Curious to know what our other clients are using?…simply ask them on our friendly Facebook group!
- Built-in security – ecommerce sites are especially vulnerable to hackers targeting sensitive data. Our servers automatically protect against brute-force attacks, XML-RPC spam, and DDOS attacks. Best of all, server-level protection is much more efficient than software-level protection (preventing attacks from slowing down your store)
- Comprehensive modules – ecommerce sites often use plugins that depend on various server modules and libraries. Need ioncube, GD, ImageMagick, iconv, cURL, and so forth? We can enable them…yes, just for you!
- High concurrency – our servers can easily handle your traffic whenever they come. 100 at a time? 1,000 at time? Even more??? NO PROBLEM! (Go ahead, and throw that Black Friday sale!)