In today’s world, user experience is everything for an ecommerce website. WooCommerce is one of the most favored and used ecommerce platforms today. A good shopping experience in a WooCommerce store directly translates to a better user experience, which means higher WooCommerce conversion rates and thus, higher revenues.
Nowadays, Google is placing heavy weightage on page load speed and mobile optimization. By optimizing the site for a smoothly flowing buying experience, we can turn online shoppers’ short attention span to our advantage and increase sales.
Here are 6 ways you can optimize your site for higher sales:
1. Hosting: The host you use matters a lot. Depending on your store, its built, its traffic and its product library, a good host provider should be one with a higher uptime, faster speed, 24/7 security, and live, or at least, priority support.
Some hosting companies have an exclusive range of speed enhancing tools; some provide free access to their CDN for better service and protection from DDoS attacks. The point being, a great web hosting company can be a strong base for optimizing your WooCommerce site from the start.
2. Web Image Optimization: Image SEO can bring in huge traffic for online shops by boosting your ranking in Google’s image search. Images usually take up a much larger space than anything in a site. Optimizing the images to deliver high quality images while keeping the size as small as possible can reduce your site loading speed. There are some plugins like Jetpack’s free Content Delivery Network that automatically resizes, compresses, and serves accelerated images.
3. Reduce site plugins: Installing scores of plugins will not help in improving your WooCommerce site, rather will do the opposite. Some plugins can cause performance issues due to inefficient coding. Some plugins might clash with other plugins. Therefore, use only those plugins which are suitable and appropriate for your hosting environment. Even
better is using WooCommerce extensions, which works like plugins and are available for free or at a premium.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Using a WooCommerce CDN combination will increase your site’s speed a great deal. CDNs allow for much faster delivery of content. Considering the number of products and images a WooCommerce site adds every month, CDNs can reduce site loading speed, resulting in higher traffic.
5. Implementing Caching: Caching WooCommerce to speed it up is the easiest way to speed up your store. Caching reduces the workload of loading a page, thus improving the speed. Beware, some pages in WooCommerce sites are not be cached – like Cart, Checkout, My Account. Caching might be one of the most important steps you can do to increase your website traffic.
6. Updating your plugins frequently: Keeping your WooCommerce plugins and extensions updated will increase your website loading speed. Whether it is an extension, plugin or theme, keeping it updated frequently will minimize your hassles and provide a smooth user experience.
Thus, here are 6 ways you can increase your WooCommerce store’s speed and increase traffic, thereby increasing revenue. Remember, more than 51% of customers leave the cart without checking out because of a slowly loading page. That’s how important it is to optimize your store.
Happy earnings!
- Vaishali Patwa