How to Speed Up Your eCommerce Site (and increase conversions)
Key Takeaways
- Simplicity is the name of the game. You probably only need ⅓ of the features you want.
- You don’t need complex faceting and search. Customers aren’t going to use those.
- Hosting doesn’t matter most of the time when it comes to performance. Yes - shared hosting is less secure, but throwing hardware at a performance problem is a band-aid, not a solution.
- Good hosting still can’t account for slow internet connections, and bloated sites will always load slowly there.
- Stop relying on a caching plugin. It doesn’t make your site faster - it makes it look faster. You can’t just cache everything, especially on an ecommerce site.
- Check performance with Query Monitor. It’s a great, free plugin for WordPress. Look for colors. Red is bad, Green is good! Look for numbers and make them lower.
- Database hits are usually the culprit when it comes to ecommerce performance. Optimize your database calls (or hire someone to).
- Post Meta is another thing that’s really detrimental to WordPress sites — there are a lot of database hits and complex queries associated with them.
- As you evaluate features, try to cut away as much as possible. Ask yourself:
- How does this feature/plugin/add-on make me money?
- Are website visitors actually using this feature/plugin/add-on?