Whether you’re expecting an increase in traffic for the holidays (otherwise known as Q4) or just want to improve your site’s performance, this article will help you improve your WordPress eCommerce site. We’ll cover some of the basics, give you tricks to achieve near-perfect performance, and tips for your high-traffic sites.
Now, when we say basics, we mean basics. These are things that hopefully you’ve already got set in place, but may have slipped your mind at some point. Even if you’re already a pro, use this as a checklist to make sure you’re ready to go! Luckily, if you’ve forgotten any of these steps, they’re usually pretty easy to fix. Let’s dive in!
Renew your hosting plan and domain name
When you’re promoting your products at any time of the year, the last thing you need is for your website to go down (especially during a sale or traffic spike)! One silly-yet-common mistake that happens is forgetting to renew your hosting plan or domain name.
Before you space it off, dive into your domain authority or check in with your managed WordPress host — when does your subscription renew? Especially if you paid for a year of service during a sale (looking at you, Black Friday shoppers), make sure you’re set to renew before the expiration date hits and that your credit card on file is up-to-date. Sure, it seems obvious, but it happens, so save yourself the stress and double-check!
Install an SSL Certificate
If you’re setting up a new WordPress eCommerce site, installing an SSL certificate is essential.
What SSL Does:
- Security: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encrypts data exchanged between your site and its users, ensuring sensitive information like passwords, credit card details, and banking credentials remains secure.
- Visual Indicator: SSL is represented by a padlock icon next to your site’s URL in the browser.
Importance for WordPress eCommerce:
- Customer Trust: An SSL certificate assures customers that their personal and billing information is protected, which is crucial for maintaining trust and compliance.
Installation:
- Traditional Process: Previously, installing SSL involved purchasing a certificate, coordinating with your hosting provider, and handling activation manually.
- Simplified Solution: Many modern hosting providers now offer free SSL certificates, often integrated with their services to streamline the process. This eliminates the need for separate transactions and management.
Ensuring you have SSL installed not only secures your site but also enhances customer confidence and complies with best practices for online security.
Check your site information.
Before launching your WordPress eCommerce site or running a big promotion, such as Black Friday, it’s crucial to ensure everything is in top shape:
- Product Accuracy: Verify that all product prices, descriptions, and specifications are correct and up-to-date. Add any missing details that customers frequently inquire about.
- Promotion Testing: Test any discount codes to ensure they work correctly in both lowercase and uppercase. This prevents issues during checkout.
- Site Performance: Expect increased traffic during major sales events. Make sure your site can handle the load and that all information is current to provide a smooth user experience.
- Policies and Details: Update your return policies and promotion details. Be clear about shipping restrictions and any other potential issues, such as whether you offer international shipping. Keeping these details visible helps avoid disappointment and potentially negative feedback.
- Inventory Management: Regularly update your site to reflect stock levels and make adjustments as items sell out.
Ensuring these aspects are covered will enhance the user experience and help prevent issues that could negatively impact sales and customer satisfaction.
Be prepared to run out of inventory
Managing inventory and ensuring a smooth user experience is key to maintaining customer satisfaction on your WordPress eCommerce site. Here’s how to handle out-of-stock items effectively:
- Update Inventory: Ensure your site reflects real-time inventory levels. If an item is out of stock, make sure this is communicated to shoppers.
- Estimated Shipping Times: If possible, update estimated shipping times for items that are low in stock or on backorder. This helps manage customer expectations.
- Alternative Actions:
- Email Notifications: Replace the “Add to Cart” button with an option for users to sign up for an email alert when the item is back in stock. This way, you can capture their interest and email them directly when the product becomes available again.
- Future Promotions: Collecting email addresses also allows you to inform customers about future promotions and new products, encouraging them to return to your site.
- Proactive Communication: Send personalized email reminders to users when items they are interested in are restocked. This targeted communication can help drive repeat visits and purchases.
By being transparent about inventory and offering convenient solutions for out-of-stock items, you enhance the shopping experience and increase the likelihood of bringing customers back to your site.
Achieve perfect performance
These seven tips will help you optimize your site for blazing-fast load times.
These days, if your site doesn’t load within a couple of seconds, many users will simply close the tab and never return. When they come to your site, they want information now, not several minutes from now. Plus, a site that loads slowly instantly loses credibility. Many users will start to wonder why it’s slow. Instead of thinking about the technical aspects behind managing a WordPress eCommerce site, they’ll assume the worst, such as hackers, malware, or spammy advertisements. So while there’s no such thing as “perfect performance,” with a few simple tweaks to your site, you can get pretty dang close and drastically increase the number of users that stick around to purchase your awesome products!
Eliminate clunky plugins
Plugins can enhance your WordPress site, but too many can also slow it down. Here’s how to manage them effectively:
- Evaluate Necessity:
- Assess Plugin Needs: Before installing a new plugin, determine if you need it. Consider whether it adds value to your site or if it can be replaced with a simpler solution.
- Check Compatibility: Review the plugin’s update history, ensure it works with the latest version of WordPress, and read any available documentation.
- Minimize Plugins:
- Limit Plugins: Only install essential plugins. Excessive plugins increase the risk of conflicts and performance issues.
- Research: If a plugin doesn’t seem to be the perfect fit, look for alternatives or do more research before installation.
- Monitor Performance:
- Use Performance Tools: Plugins like P3 Profiler can help identify which plugins are affecting your site’s performance. It generates a report showing how much each plugin contributes to load times.
- Run Tests: Conduct a P3 Profiler test each time you activate a new plugin to ensure it doesn’t negatively impact your site’s speed.
By carefully selecting and monitoring your plugins, you can maintain a fast and efficient WordPress site while still benefiting from added functionality.
WooCommerce performance tips
A super popular plugin that we recommend for your WordPress eCommerce site is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a very popular eCommerce plugin, but it can cause performance issues if you’re not careful. Don’t worry, we have a few handy recommendations to improve performance specifically for sites running WooCommerce!
Be strategic with WooCommerce cookies
WooCommerce can leverage certain cookies for visitor tracking which are known to break caching, slowing down your visitor’s experience. Ensuring that Woocommerce’s dynamic cookies are not being placed on visitors by default can help prevent this from happening.
Clean up old orders
By default WooCommerce will keep the information of every order it has ever processed, adding a lot of information to the database over time. The larger a database is, the slower requests will be to the database, so removing these older orders can help ensure site stability.
It’s a good idea to archive orders from more than a fiscal year ago, exporting them from the database and turning them into an external file for safekeeping. Doing so will reduce the size of your database, which can help keep visitor requests to your website loading quickly.
Disable cart fragments
Cart Fragments is how WooCommerce tracks the current number of items inside of your site’s “mini cart” usually located in the top corner of your website’s pages. Cart Fragments specifically reaches out and updates the small number that appears on each page load.
We recommend disabling the small “counting” feature since it will hit the server with a request per page, per per-visitor, adding a fair amount of server strain simply for non-critical functionality. (The cart page will still display accurately.)
Optimize your images
Compressing images is essential for faster page loading and improved user experience. Here’s how to optimize your images effectively:
- Why Compress Images:
- Faster Load Times: Large image files can significantly slow down your site. Compressing them reduces their size, which speeds up download times and enhances the user experience.
- Optimizing Images:
- WordPress eCommerce Sites: With numerous images, optimizing file sizes is crucial to maintaining site performance. Avoid using unnecessarily large images; compress them to the smallest size needed without compromising quality.
- Tools for Compression:
- TinyPNG: Free tool for compressing PNG and JPEG images online.
- ImageOptim: Free open-source app for compressing images on macOS.
- JPEGmini: Recompresses photos to reduce file size on Mac and Windows.
- RIOT: Free Windows app for image optimization.
- Handling Theme-Specific Issues:
- Image Duplicates: WordPress themes often create multiple sizes of each image (like thumbnails). Compressed originals may not affect these generated sizes.
- Solution: Use EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud to optimize these additional image sizes automatically.
By using these tools and techniques, you can ensure that your images load quickly and your site runs smoothly, providing a better experience for your visitors.
Optimize your CSS and JavaScript
CSS and JavaScript files are written with lots of new lines, spaces, tabs, and comments to help the developer read what they are looking at, and like images, your CSS and JavaScript can slow your site down if they aren’t optimized.
If your site has a custom theme, you’ll want to make sure the code behind it is close to flawless. But even if you’re using a premade WordPress theme, you may still want to look under the hood to see how clean everything looks or ask your managed WordPress host. First, let’s start with CSS.
CSS
To optimize your CSS and improve site performance, focus on compressing your CSS files and removing unused selectors. Here’s a streamlined approach:
- Compress and Clean Up CSS:
- Minification: Reduce the size of your CSS files by removing unnecessary spaces, comments, and line breaks. This makes the file smaller and faster to load.
- Remove Unused Selectors: Eliminate any CSS rules that aren’t being used on your site. This reduces file size and improves loading times.
- Development Workflow:
- Use Pre-processors: If you’re using tools like Sass, streamline your workflow with task runners.
- Grunt: This JavaScript task runner automates tasks like CSS compilation and minification.
- grunt-contrib-sass: Compiles Sass files into minified CSS.
- grunt-contrib-watch: Monitors changes in your files and automatically runs tasks when you save changes.
- For Non-Developers:
- Follow Best Practices: Stick to a consistent CSS methodology to avoid duplication and bloated file sizes.
- Seek Help: If you’re unsure about CSS optimization, consult a developer or your WordPress host for assistance.
By implementing these practices, you can keep your CSS lean and efficient, contributing to faster page load times and a better user experience.
JAVASCRIPT
Optimizing JavaScript is crucial for site performance. Here’s a straightforward approach:
- Minimize and Optimize:
- Minify: Reduce JavaScript file sizes by removing unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments.
- Concatenate: Combine multiple JavaScript files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests. If combining all files isn’t feasible, aim to consolidate as many as possible.
- Development Workflow:
- Automate: For theme developers, incorporate minification and concatenation into your development workflow. Tools and plugins can help automate these processes.
- Consider Tools: Use build tools like Grunt, Gulp, or Webpack to handle minification and concatenation.
- Handle JavaScript Load:
- Async and Defer: Use the
asyncanddeferattributes to load JavaScript files asynchronously or only after the page has fully loaded, preventing render-blocking.
- Async and Defer: Use the
- Be Practical:
- Accept Imperfection: Some plugins may block JavaScript files from being optimized perfectly. Focus on getting as close to optimal as possible.
- Test Changes: Always test changes on a staging site or in a local environment before applying them to your live site to avoid potential issues.
By following these practices, you can enhance your site’s performance and ensure a better experience for your users.
Cache your site
Every time a shopper visits a page or a post on your WordPress site, your site is built from the ground up. To do this, WordPress has to run a process to find the information, put it all together, and then display it to your shopper. This process can be one of the causes of a slow-loading site. That’s why we recommend installing a caching solution!
To get you started, here are some solutions we recommend:
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
- Sucuri Firewall
Use a theme optimized for speed
When you’re shopping around for a WordPress theme for your website, it’s important to pay special attention to speed optimization. Some of the best, most beautiful, and most impressive-looking themes are poorly coded and can slow your site down. While it may look pretty to the user, none of that matters if your site is loading slowly while they’re shopping.
It’s typically better to go with a simple theme than a theme with complex layouts, flashy animations, and other unnecessary features. Don’t forget: The most important part of your website is your user’s experience so go with a simple theme and spruce it up with some WordPress plugins later!
Have a reliable hosting company.
When optimizing your site, don’t overlook the importance of your hosting provider. Here’s why hosting plays a crucial role:
- Impact of Hosting:
- Traffic Handling: Your hosting server handles all requests from visitors. If your hosting isn’t equipped to manage high traffic, your site may experience slow load times or crashes.
- Performance and Reliability: Shared hosting often comes with drawbacks like slower speeds, inconsistent performance, and frequent downtime.
- Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting:
- Optimized Servers: Managed WordPress hosts provide servers specifically tuned for WordPress, ensuring better performance and security.
- Additional Features: Look for features like nightly backups, automatic updates, and dedicated support to enhance your site management.
- Support and Maintenance:
- 24/7 Support: Managed hosts offer around-the-clock support to address any issues promptly, minimizing downtime and stress.
Investing in a quality-managed WordPress host can significantly improve your site’s performance and stability, especially during high-traffic events like promotions.
These tips will help you boost performance on your site and keep it running blazing fast! But, if you’re running a WordPress eCommerce site that gets a lot of traffic (like millions of visitors) or is crazy busy during the holiday season, sometimes you need some extra boosts. If you’re expecting some record numbers of traffic, keep reading for our more advanced high-traffic techniques!
High-traffic tips
If your site gets lots of traffic (like millions of visitors), these tips will keep it running faster than ever!
If you’ve followed all of the tips up until this point, you probably have a pretty speedy site already. But if you’re looking for a few extra ways to ensure that it’s always speedy for your shoppers, try these tricks!
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If your customers are spread across the globe, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can significantly improve your site’s load times. Here’s how a CDN helps:
- How a CDN Works:
- Global Servers: A CDN distributes your site’s content across multiple servers worldwide.
- Proximity-Based Delivery: When a user requests your site, the CDN serves the content from the server closest to their location. This reduces the physical distance between the user and the server, speeding up load times.
- Benefits:
- Faster Load Times: Users experience quicker access to your site, improving their shopping experience and reducing bounce rates.
- Improved Performance: A CDN helps handle high traffic and decreases server load, ensuring your site remains responsive.
- Popular CDN Options:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Cloudflare
By integrating a CDN, you can provide a faster and more reliable browsing experience for your global audience, making it easier for them to shop and interact with your site.
Cache everything you can
Caching, both on the server side and client side, is crucial for boosting site performance. Here’s a breakdown of how it works and its benefits:
- Client-Side Caching:
- What It Does: When a user first visits your site, their browser stores (or caches) the site’s HTML, CSS, images, and other assets.
- Benefit: On subsequent visits, the browser can load these elements from the cache instead of requesting them from the server again, leading to faster load times.
- Server-Side Caching:
- What It Does: This caching occurs on the server level. Instead of generating content dynamically with each request, the server stores a static version of the page.
- Benefit: This reduces the need for server-side processing and database queries, speeding up page delivery.
- Setting Up Server-Side Caching:
- Common Tools: For WordPress, a popular plugin for server-side caching is W3 Total Cache. It helps manage how caching is handled on your server.
- Considerations: Server-side caching plugins can be complex to configure and might still involve some PHP processing time.
- Important Notes:
- Dynamic Pages: Pages like cart and checkout that require cookies should not be cached, as this can interfere with their functionality.
- Configuration: If you’re using a caching plugin, check your settings or consult with your hosting provider to ensure essential pages are excluded from caching.
For those using managed WordPress hosting, caching is often handled automatically, including configuration and updates. This means you benefit from optimized caching without needing to manage it yourself…
