The world of retail is really demanding. Everyone wants everything to work fast and smooth, including the loading of your eCommerce store.

Fast loading stores deliver the need for speed and reap the rewards. Slow loading stores don’t.

According to Google, up to 53% of mobile visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Combine that with the fact that 8 out of 10 people won’t buy from you again after just one bad experience and the cocktail for a failed eCommerce is served.

Speeding up your WooCommerce store is really important, so let’s find out how to do it.

What Is WooCommerce Optimization?

Before moving on we need to clarify this term a little.

“Optimization” is a very broad concept that can lead to confusion.

• In this guide we are going to focus on WooCommerce speed optimization. That is, how to make your online store load faster.
• This is different from WooCommerce conversion optimization, where strategies are focused on converting more visitors into buyers.

There is a relationship between them though.

If you optimize your WooCommerce store for speed you’ll also be optimizing the conversion from visitors to customers as faster stores make people more willing to buy.

How to find out if WooCommerce is slowing down your site

To measure the speed of a WooCommerce store we recommend using a tool like GTMetrix.

By entering your domain and launching the analysis tool you’ll be able to check which elements are slowing down your website in the Waterfall tab.

You’ll probably find items related to WooCommerce there.

If you see WooCommerce-related entries slowing down your store, you’ll need to take action.

You can also use other tools such as Pagespeed Insights or Pingdom for your analysis.

To find out if WooCommerce is slowing down your site is to have an exact copy of your website, disable WooCommerce on one of them and run the analysis again.

If the speed difference is very noticeable, you can assume that WooCommerce is to blame.

How to speed up WooCommerce

WooCommerce is not usually the only cause of a slow website. It’s actually a very efficient platform that works well.

There are a number of other factors that generally make everything go much slower.

We show you what they are and how to solve them in a little while.

We found 11 ways to speed up the slow WooCommerce website:

1. Choose quality web hosting
2. Use a fast WordPress theme
3. Optimize WooCommerce settings
4. Compress and optimize all images
5. Use a caching plugin to speed up performance and increase efficiency
6. Make use of a powerful CDN
7. Increase WordPress PHP memory limit
8. Avoid excessive use of plugins and extensions
9. Optimize your code
10. Clean up the WooCommerce database
11. Keep everything up to date

Remember that these techniques are not always related to WooCommerce but to your website as a whole. A fast website will make the WooCommerce installed on it run smoothly, which is what we, and your customers, want.

1. Choose quality web hosting for better WooCommerce performance

The easiest way to improve the speed of your WooCommerce store is to use high-quality hosting.

Higher quality hosts will typically use faster servers, SSD storage, optimized networks and LiteSpeed or other technology to improve performance.

This alone can make a substantial improvement!

If you’re looking for the best WooCommerce hosting on the market, you have options:

• If the host you currently use is not on that list, consider migrating.
• If you already use one of our recommendations, then consider upgrading your plan to have more resources.

Good hosting will help you with speed and to better manage your online store. 

They will also usually include technical support to help you manage your eCommerce store too.

2. Use a fast WordPress theme for your WooCommerce store

Quality hosting needs to be accompanied by a fast WordPress theme that’s optimized for WooCommerce.

Otherwise it would be like having a car with a powerful engine (hosting), slowed down because the design you use (theme) is full of frills that diminish the aerodynamics.

Our recommendation for a fast WordPress theme couldn’t be anything other than Astra.

We work hard to make the theme super fast, especially with WooCommerce. And we’ve included many features to enhance your experience with this eCommerce platform.

You’ll find pre-built starter templates really well optimized for mobiles, a dropdown cart, off-canvas sidebar and options to speed up the default WooCommerce checkout.

Try Astra for free

3. Optimize WooCommerce settings for high performance

WooCommerce has a lot of features, some of which you may not need.

We would recommend disabling any feature you don’t need so they don’t slow down your store.

A very simple way to do this is by using the Disable Bloat for WooCommerce plugin.

The plugin can:

• Disable WooCommerce scripts and styles where not strictly necessary. Like the product, cart and checkout pages.
• Disable WooCommerce widgets if you’re not planning to use them.
• Disable AJAX cart fragments, a feature that automatically updates the customer’s shopping cart total without needing to refresh the page.
• Disable WooCommerce blocks to reduce front end CSS loading if you’re not planning to use them.

The plugin allows you to modify and disable many more things in WooCommerce. But those 4 are some of the most important and relevant for speed.

4. Compress and optimize your product images 

If there is one thing that all the online stores have in common, it’s the intensive use of images.

People need to see what they are buying.

Stores need to provide quality images, with different angles and details and for each product variation.

It’s not enough to say that the T-shirt is also available in red. You have to show it.

Images are heavy elements that take time to load. The larger or more detailed the image, the larger the file that needs to be loaded.

There is balance required though. You need to optimize your images as much as you can without compromising their quality.

First, save images in the required sizes and format and use an image editor to shrink the file size as much as possible.

We then recommend using an image optimization plugin for WordPress to automate this process and achieve the results you’re looking for.

5. Use a caching plugin to speed up performance and increase efficiency

Displaying a simple product page in your online store involves a number of time-consuming background processes.

WordPress has to find the name of the product, its price, its images or its variations and use those puzzle pieces to display them in the browser.

And it will do this for every visitor who looks at every product.

All that takes time.

Unless you use a caching plugin.

Caching plugins store a full copy of each page in a special place called the cache.

That way each page only needs to be built once. The next time someone lands on the page, the server will send the copy saved in the cache.

This makes the process much faster.

This is efficient at the server level, and will also give a better user experience to your shoppers.

To achieve this you just need to install one of our recommended caching plugins.

6. Make use of a powerful CDN (content delivery network)

Using a CDN is the best way to speed up your WooCommerce store for visitors who are geographically far from your server.

It doesn’t matter if you have fast hosting, the information will still need to travel from your host to your buyer’s browser. 

That takes time.

A CDN stores static copies of your website in different locations around the world.

This way your website will be served from the most efficient location for each visitor, saving valuable time.

It may sound complicated, but all you need is a CDN provider who will take care of everything for you.

7. Increase WordPress PHP memory limit

WooCommerce adds a lot of features. In order for all of them to work properly, you’ll need some resources.

PHP memory is one of those resources.

A server uses memory to hold data while it runs your store.

As WordPress and WooCommerce are built using PHP, it needs its own memory allocation to complete essential tasks.

The more memory you have, the faster your store can work.

At the very least we recommend increasing the PHP memory limit to 64mb.

You can do it yourself by modifying the wp-config.php file in WordPress.

Open the file and add the following piece of code right before the “Happy Blogging/publishing” line.

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

Then save the file.

If that doesn’t work, you may need to contact your hosting provider. They will often increase PHP memory for you quickly and free of charge.

8. Avoid excessive use of plugins and extensions

WooCommerce currently has over 800 extensions to enhance the capabilities of your online store.

Best case scenario is that you’ll be using a couple of extensions, but this number may rise to several dozen.

Extensions are installed as plugins on your WordPress site. This can result in a slowdown in performance as each plugin will have to load its own code in order to work.

This happens with all plugins, not just WooCommerce ones, so you should reduce the use of plugins overall.

We recommend only using the plugins or extensions you really need and making sure they use quality code to minimize performance penalties.

9. Optimize your code

Your website and your store is built from code. There are usually thousands of lines of code, all with a specific purpose.

Optimizing your code means using as little as possible and making files as small as possible without breaking anything.

Optimizing code can include:

• File optimization: Minifying and combining the CSS, HTML and JS files of your store so they are lighter and easier to deliver.
• File compression using Gzip.
• Lazy load JS.

All this will help your WordPress to work faster and so will your WooCommerce store.

Many caching plugins will also perform these functions for you. Experiment with the options to see how they improve loading speed.

10. Clean up the WooCommerce database

All the information you include in your WordPress and WooCommerce installation will be stored in a database.

With time this database will grow. This can cause the server to take more time to search for and retrieve information from it. 

Optimizing the database can improve the performance of your online store, as well as reduce server load.

A plugin like WP-Optimize can help optimize your database tables, including those for WooCommerce.

It may be a modest performance gain but every little helps!

11. Keep everything up to date

Software is typically updated regularly to add new features, fix bugs and improve performance. 

WordPress has undergone quite a few updates that have significantly improved the user experience and page load times. WooCommerce and your themes and plugins will be similar.

Keeping them up to date ensures you benefit from every improvement in your apps.

Besides keeping everything up to date on the WordPress backend, don’t forget to enable the latest PHP version or HTTP2 on your hosting provider.

That way your online store will benefit from all the speed improvements included in the latest versions of your tools.

The importance of WooCommerce optimization (why speed matters for online stores)

Having a fast online store is very important.

• You’ll get better search rankings as speed is an important ranking factor for Google and other search engines.
• You’ll improve your user’s experience as everything runs smoothly.
• Happy visitors mean a better conversion rate and more profit for your business.
• You’ll reduce your resource consumption. That will allow you to lower your server costs.

The benefits are many and the work to get them is relatively low:

• Use a good technical foundation such as good hosting, a fast theme, few and quality extensions and a high PHP memory limit.
• Optimize all your content like the images and the code.
• Use caching and CDNs to distribute your content efficiently.
• Optimize the WooCommerce database.
• Disable all the WooCommerce features you’re not going to use.
• Keep everything up to date!

They are not difficult tasks. And most of them you’ll only have to do them once and enjoy them over time.

Why Does It Matter? Benefits of Online Store Optimization

It matters because you can only make a first impression once. And if that impression isn’t good, our chances for the second date will drop dramatically.

The same thing happens when it comes to a fresh, not-yet-stable relationship between visitors and your online store. If they don’t like what you’re offering from the moment they click, the chances for turning them into customers will decrease significantly.

Let’s take a quick look at optimization benefits. We already mentioned some of them, but it’s worth saying twice:

• Higher revenue
• Better website traffic
• Improved conversion rate
• Better Google ranking
• Faster website load time
• Lower overall cost (e.g. lower server costs)

How Lack of Optimization Can Harm Your Business?

Imagine that the newly-built commercial center is being opened. To promote it, it’s owners have already:

• Spent big bucks on TV and radio campaigns
• Invited superstar singer
• Placed billboards all over the city
• Signed contracts with the most popular brands in the world

Sounds like a success recipe, right? But what if…

• The moving stairs don’t work?
• The lighting system constantly turns off?
• The card devices haven’t arrived on time?
• The crowd is so big it’s even hard to move?

Does it encourage people to spend money there? Well, some of them may be attracted by discounts and stay there anyway, but what about the rest?

A similar thing may happen with your online store.

Sure, you can spend big bucks on Facebook and Instagram ads, send free stuff to influencers, produce tons of valuable content for your blog and do a plethora of other things to attract potential customers to your store. But it won’t matter if your store isn’t optimized to accommodate all these people in a proper way.

The Conversion Rate Optimization and Its Importance

First of all, you could ask: what is the conversion rate?

Let’s say that 500 users visited your online store last week and five of them actually bought something. It would mean that the conversion rate is 1%. The goal of the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is to make that number as big as possible.

The CRO is directly linked with the overall WooCommerce store optimization. For example, we can expect a growth of the conversion rate after the load time optimization. If you love numbers, you’ll definitely love these provided by Cloudflare in their blog post about how website performance affects conversion rates.

To sum it up in one sentence: after optimizing your WooCommerce website, you will start earning more money even if the number of website visitors or advertising budget won’t change a bit (they even don’t have to).

Reasons Your WooCommerce Store Isn’t Optimized

Nothing happens without a reason and while it sounds trivial, it’s just plain true. If you’re reading this blog post, the chances are that your online store isn’t performing as you would like it to. You may ask yourself: “What happened with my store? Why is it so slow?”

The answer may be simple. Below you may find it but it’s up for you to decide.

Installed Plugins, Themes and Other Things

Both WordPress and WooCommerce offer a myriad of possibilities but what is a blessing may as well turn into a curse. The amount of plugins, themes, page builders and frameworks is constantly growing, and because of that it’s hard to decide which ones to choose. Unfortunately, that overwhelm often leads us to bad choices.

Using new, unverified plugins, themes, page builders or frameworks is not necessarily the best possible solution. It entails a risk of making our website or online store slower and more vulnerable.

Also, the amount of installed additions matters when it comes to WooCommerce optimization. Sure, we may need other functionalities that aren’t provided with our theme. But every additional plugin may extend the time our browser needs to load the entire website.

So before installing another plugin, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is it really necessary to install this plugin?
2. Is it the best plugin out there to help me with this?
3. Is there any other option to make it work without installing another plugin?

Yet remember more plugins doesn’t necessarily mean a slower website or WooCommerce store. A plugin developed to the WordPress coding standards and well-optimized should have a minimal impact on your site.

We’ve seen websites with in excess of 50 plugins that run faster than those that have four plugins.

Uploaded Media

What’s the most common reason why some websites are loading so slowly? Images and their weight. It’s never a good idea to upload high-resolution photos without any optimization. Especially in the eCommerce stores where there may be many, many of them.

And let’s not forget about videos, given that they weigh much more than images and their popularity is steadily increasing basically day after day.

Bad Choice of Hosting Provider

Choosing the hosting provider for an online store is like choosing the car engine — it’s about using its full potential instead of accepting the mediocrity. Because neither interior design nor fancy color will make up for poor components under the mask. Just like neither eye-catching layout nor brand-new logo will make up for poor hosting choice.

WooCommerce Website Optimization in Practice

All right, let’s be more practical. Luckily, you mustn’t be a tech-savvy WordPress and WooCommerce user to implement at least some changes. Sometimes all you have to do is to either install and configure some plugins (which we will recommend in a while) or hire someone who will do these optimization things for you.

But before we will deliver what we have just promised, let’s briefly describe elements of WooCommerce optimization.

Image Optimization

It’s needless to say that the eCommerce market is highly competitive and every possibility to win over customers should be taken.

One of them is images because most of us buy things with the eyes. And in a contrary to traditional shops, we can’t touch, smell or feel what we see on the shelves. Because of that, the better the images you have in your store, the bigger the chance that customers will buy from you.

But there’s a catch. High-resolution images weigh and they weigh a lot. So what you are looking for here is a balance between image quality and image size. And you can find that balance by using a plugin or by optimizing images yourself.

Video Optimization

Let us go one step further: images — even these of the high resolution — aren’t enough nowadays. As we agreed before, the level of competitiveness is getting higher and higher. It’s necessary to do something more than top quality images which can be taken using almost every cell phone.

And that’s when videos enter the stage.

They are not only outstanding additions to any online store but can also be very helpful for its customers. They can do what images can’t, e.g. if we want to show step-by-step how to use a product.

But the problem is — you guessed it! — its negative influence on website’s performance. Especially, if you embed the video above the fold (it’s so-called hero section, visible right after entering a website). Sure, you can host it on YouTube or Vimeo or with other video hosts, but it still must be optimized.

In particular, you have three solutions, because you can:

• Remove the videos
• Implement lazy loading and insert a preview image
• Start self-hosting videos

Using Content Delivery Network (CDN)

If you want to sell globally (or even if you don’t), you must be aware that the distance between hosting server and users determines what the load time will be. So if your server is based in Brazil and you have visitors from Europe, they will have to wait longer than visitors from South America.

To solve that issue, you should use the Content Delivery Network (aka CDN). It’s main task is to store copies of your WooCommerce store all around the world, and then redirect visitors to the nearest copy. Thanks to that, the website load time will get shorter.

You should expect to pay for such a service a monthly price. If you are interested in implementing CDN (and you should be!), you can check, e.g. Cloudflare that we already mentioned before or Cloud CDN.

Caching

Remember those whiteboards used, for example, for making some calculations? Yes, people still use them! But that’s not the point.

Clearing that whiteboard is like clearing a website’s cache. If you clear the whiteboard, you have to make calculations again. If you clear cache, your browser has to load the entire website again.

And that’s because caching means storing the website so it’s quicker to retrieve it in the future.

But caching is tricky. It’s because caching plugins improve your online store’s performance only if configured properly. For example, caching cart pages or checkout pages would mean that users won’t be able to add products to the cart of pay for their order.

If you want to find out more about caching, take a look at our Ultimate Guide to WordPress Caching.

Resolving Database Issues

Your database will grow together with your store over time, and it will store more and more data: history of purchases, user accounts, product descriptions, etc. If you are just starting out, it won’t be a problem. At least for now.

But after a few months, a year or maybe two, it may start negatively affecting your website’s load time. The solution? Good old cleanup from time to time.

There are two ways to do that: manually (which may take forever and break the entire website in the process) or by installing a plugin (which will make everything so much easier).

Yet remember to backup all your files and database, before using such a plugin (or making any serious changes to your WooCommerce store).

When you are prepared to clean up your database and you don’t want to do that manually, consider using a plugin which will do that dirty work for you. For example, you can choose WP Optimize or WP Sweep, our favourite caching plugin WP Rocket also includes a database optimization option.

Code Optimization

We have come a long way already but it’s not enough — let’s focus on your website’s code this time. You can optimize it using different techniques, but for now we want to show you three most popular among them: minification, concatenation and GZIP compression.

But before talking about each one of them, let’s answer one question: what code optimization is? Well, it’s goal is to:

• Make sure that no unnecessary resources are being downloaded
• Minimize download sizes
• Optimize and compress HTML, CSS and JavaScript files

It can be done through files compression or by deleting data that is no longer necessary.

Minification

Minification is all about reducing the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Such a reduction is possible through eliminating such things as whitespace characters, developer’s comments or any other extra characters.

Sure, it will make the source code much uglier, but it also makes files lighter and won’t affect how your WooCommerce store works or functions.

However, be aware that the code minification does not necessarily mean a much faster site but it depends on the theme you chose and the plugins you are using.

If the code needed to load the entire website is mainly in CSS and JS files then, after the minification, a difference in page load time will be distinctive.

Concatenation

The next thing you can do is concatenation. It basically means combining files of one type (CSS or JS files) into one, large file.

GZIP Compression

The ultimate way of optimizing code is compressing it, which is possible because nowadays browsers are able to read compressed files. We can take advantage of that by using GZIP compression.

How does it work? It’s about compressing files into zip files and sending them in smaller packages.

Plugins Review

Installing and testing plugins is probably the fastest and the easiest way to slow down any WordPress website, but especially those using WooCommerce. Of course, our goal is to make our websites and stores more functional and faster, but it can turn the other way. Fortunately, you can avoid that by applying below rules:

1. Keep all plugins you are using updated to the newest version.
2. Uninstall all plugins that you are not using anymore.
3. Try to keep the number of installed and active plugins as low as possible.
4. Always check who developed the plugin and if it’s being regularly updated.

Choosing the Right Theme

If you have thought that choosing the right plugin is difficult, what would you say about choosing the right theme? Well, ThemeForest has over 48,000 WordPress themes and website templates. That’s quite a number, huh?

Unfortunately, many of them are bloated with never-ending lines of code to achieve certain effects. So how can you choose the one that is not only good-looking but also well-coded?

If you already have an online store, you can perform a quick check yourself. After making a backup of your current site, switch your theme to the default theme or, for example, Storefront (which is recommended by WooCommerce itself).

Does your site load faster now? If yes, you have a problem with your theme and you should consider changing it.

If you don’t have an online store yet, scroll down a bit to see recommended themes.

And of course we’d recommend our own theme, Astra which is blazingly fast and is built to make your WooCommerce run like a dream.

Choosing Reliable and Fast Hosting

Everyone wants to spend as little as possible for as much value as possible, especially if you’re just starting out. However, we strongly advise against looking for savings when it comes to choosing the hosting provider.

Sure, at the beginning it won’t make much difference for your website’s performance. But growing web traffic, more and more images, bigger databases and many other things will start slowing your store.

Don’t choose the cheap solution. Choose the one that’s reliable and fast like SiteGround, Kinsta, Hostinger or WPEngine.

One more tip: if a majority of your visitors and customers live in one country, choose a server located there. And where possible use a CDN to help.

PHP Version of Your Hosting

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that was built using PHP language. Do you know what your PHP version is? If not, ask your hosting provider or if you haven’t chosen one yet, make sure it allows for PHP 7. It’s the latest version of PHP, which performs 2-3 times much faster than PHP 5.6, it’s predecessor.

For safety purposes, test in on a local environment before upgrading it for good.

Recommendations

Now is the time to keep our promise! Below you will find a list of recommended themes, page builders, plugins, hosting providers and other resources to make your WooCommerce store as optimized and fast as possible.

Free and Premium WordPress Themes and Page Builders

You have a crucial decision to make because no caching plugin (or any other) will make up for choosing a badly coded theme. To save you some time, we made a list of reliable themes you can use.

• WP Astra — it’s a fast, lightweight, easily customizable theme, integrated with popular tools and which contains many pre-built websites to help you accelerate website design and development. And hey, it’s ours!
• Storefront — as we can read on its official website, “WooCommerce Storefront is an intuitive and flexible, free WordPress theme offering deep integration with WooCommerce”. It’s easy to modify, perfectly optimized and can be a perfect base theme for further development

If you need more detailed information, you can always check our blog post about free and premium WooCommerce themes.

And for more advanced WordPress users, we can recommend trying our two favourite page builders that are fully compatible with WP Astra:

• Elementor — its main advantage is that you don’t have to write a single line of code to create a fully functioning website or online store from scratch. You can also make the entire process shorter by using our theme, pre-built Elementor demo sites or any other compatible theme
• Beaver Builder — it’s a more advanced and more demanding page builder than the first one, and while we personally prefer Elementor, BB is worth recommending, too! You can even switch the theme and you won’t lose your content

Speed Tests

Now, after choosing the right (or at least it seems so) theme and before choosing the right plugins, it’s a good practice to run some speed tests. It’s helpful for two main reasons:

1. You will check the actual state of your website’s performance
2. You will learn where there is a room for improvement and if it’s better to change the theme or if it’s enough to use some plugins

There are many websites where you can run such tests, but we would like to recommend three of them:

• PageSpeed Insights by Google — it analyzes a website (both desktop and mobile versions), gives a PageSpeed score and recommends what should be improved. That score is of much importance because, well, it’s Google, and that score affects website’s Google rankings
• GTmetrix — thanks to that tool, you can “see how your site performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization techniques”
• Pingdom Website Speed Test — operating principle is almost the same as above; it’s another tool that identifies areas for improvement but also shows what’s good

It’s up to you which one of them you will choose. What’s important is if you will implement suggestions on your website.

Free and Premium WordPress Plugins

Now, after you found out what you have to improve on your WooCommerce website, you can start choosing the plugins which will help you do that. But be reasonable — it’s not an attempt to beat Guinness’ world record for the biggest number of installed WordPress plugins. And sometimes it’s possible to use just one plugin instead of two.

Image Optimization

• Smush Pro (premium) — it’s a plugin created by WPMU DEV that compresses images automatically after they are uploaded to a WordPress media library. Also, you can use it for the images already uploaded and not one by one, but all of them. It also backups original images and optimizes heavy photos (up to 32 MB)
• TINY PNG (free) — it doesn’t offer as many options as other plugins out there, but it works well when it comes to reducing the image size and preserving the image quality at the same time

Caching Plugins

• WP Super Cache (free) — it’s a plugin created by Automattic (a company behind WordPress and WooCommerce), which is free yet powerful solution that’s constantly being mentioned as one of the best caching plugins out there
• WP Rocket (premium) — it’s a plugin that only offers a premium version and there is no free trial. Nevertheless, it’s our favorite caching plugin, and if your budget allows for purchasing it, don’t think twice. Check our WP Rocket review to learn more.

If you need more detailed information about caching plugins or caching in general, check our ultimate guide to WordPress caching.

Code Optimization

• WP Rocket (premium) — if you are looking for all-in-one solution and paying for plugin is not a problem for you, we strongly recommend choosing the WP Rocket plugin. It not only will help with website’s code optimization, but it also works like a caching plugin
• Autoptimize (free) — it aggregates and minimizes all the JavaScript and CSS files. It’s a good choice if you are on a budget, but you have to set it up yourself. And if it won’t help you or configuration will be more difficult than expect, you can always choose premium plugin with provided support

Other Plugins

• WP Optimize — a free plugins that will help you with cleaning up and optimizing database
• UpdraftPlus — free backup, restore and clone plugin. It’s always a good idea to use it before making any serious changes to WordPress or WooCommerce website
• Lazy Load by WP Rocket — another free plugin. It displays images and embedded iframes only when they are visible to the visitor. Thanks to that the number of HTTP requests is reduced and the website will load faster

Hosting Providers

There are many hosting providers out there — some of them cheaper, some of them more expensive. But in that case, price shouldn’t be the most important criterion of choice. Always choose quality over few more bucks in your pocket.

All right, but what server should you choose? As always, the WooCommerce team wants to help online store owners. They have selected a few hosts and put them on their website. You can check these recommendations here.

Don’t overthink it and just trust the WooCommerce team. They know what they are doing.

Summary

That was one hell of a ride, wasn’t it? It’s a lot of information to process and a lot of optimization tips to implement, but we hope that you found them useful.

You don’t have to (and even you shouldn’t have to) implement all these tips at once. Before taking any action, diagnose your online store by switching theme or using one of the speed tests. It’s a small step but it’s also a good start of a process of optimizing any WooCommerce website.

Let us know in the comments what optimization techniques have you already tried, and if it helped and how much. If you haven’t tried, why is that?