11 Must-Know Tips to Improve your WooCommerce Website

• Mary Cuver

• 04 Jun 2021

11 Must-Know Tips to Improve your WooCommerce Website

If you own an eCommerce store, you must know how crucial it is to maintain a good website loading speed to achieve the optimum sales goals.

According to research, if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, most visitors won’t wait longer than 3 seconds and leave for other sites.

Eventually, you’ll face a decrease in Google SERPs ranking, less conversion, and a high bounce rate.

Keeping in view the significance of website loading speed, we have collected all possible tips and techniques to make it fast and consistent.

Also, we’ll give you tips to make your site more secure and what changes and customization you should make on the administration level to improve the overall structure of your WooCommerce site.

You’ll learn which factors cause your Website to slow down and the solution to avoid them.

But the most critical factor is speed optimization; let’s discuss it

Why is speed optimization crucial for your eCommerce site?

Speed optimization is crucial for any website, but it is more significant for an eCommerce site because you’ll be offering plenty of products that would have, explanatory videos, and, and These excessive amounts of product images or videos, if not optimized subsequently, might result in slowing down your Website, which will eventually affect your conversion rate and decrease sales as well.

So, what are some other factors which make it vital to optimize your eCommerce site? Check out below;

• Google ranking factors include the Website’s speed as a ranking factor, and if any website loads less than 3 seconds, it will get a higher rank in Google SERPs.
• Leading stores had noticed a steady increase in sales when they optimized their sites to load in less than 3 seconds. A leading online store, “Ali Express,” revealed a 27% increase in their sales when they optimized their page loading speed to less than 36%.
• Another critical factor is mobile optimization of your site; according to research, more than 5 billion users access websites through their mobile phones. So, if your online store’s layout is not mobile-friendly, you’ll face a drop in mobile user’s conversion.

How to check your Website’s loading speed?

You can check your site’s speed using different online tools. But before checking your site’s overall speed, you must know which are the factors that contribute to speed analysis;

• The page’s content, whether it’s static or dynamic
• The page size
• If the page is cached out or not
• How many times on average the page gets requested

There are authentic speed testing tools which webmasters widely use to check their Website’s speed

1. Pagespeed insight
2. pingdom.org
3. org

Mostly when checking the overall performance of your Website, the standard test is to check the homepage of your site for the overall loading speed of your site.

Optimization tips and techniques for your eCommerce store

 

There are multiple factors that should be considered when selecting an eCommerce site’s hosting. The most important factors are;

• An SSL certificates
• Datacenter locations
• Site’s security measurement
• Uptime
• Backup

Most reliable hosting providers have dedicated hosting solutions for eCommerce sites and provide features most relevant to the eCommerce site. So, always go for those hosting which provide specific solutions to cater eCommerce needs.

We recommend using Bluehost, Siteground, or Cloudways as some of the most reliable and affordable hosting solutions.

 

Choose the right Theme

There are multiple choices when choosing a theme, and most of the time, these are overlooked. Sometimes we go for a theme that is far beyond our needs just because they are popular. So, don’t rush for a theme which is not suitable to your online store’s need. There is a wide range of free and paid themes, and you must go with theTheme that’s compatible with other plugins or tools you’ll be using in your Website. Astra and Divi are mainly used for eCommerce sites, and these themes are easily customizable.

The most important factors for selecting an eCommerce theme are;

• SEO friendly features
• Lightweight and fully responsive layouts
• Fast and professional-looking designs
• Integrates well with other browsers, plugins, and extensions
• Affordable price

Reduce the image sizes to an optimal level

Ecommerce sites are mostly populated with the product images, and if these images are not optimized effectively, this might result in reducing page loading speed, and users will run from your Website when frustrated with slow speed.

You can easily optimize your site’s images using image optimizing plugins such as

• WPSmush
• Optimal
• EWW Image optimizer

 

Install an SEO plugin to analyze your content

Having a theme that’s SEO-friendly won’t be enough, and you need to take care of your site’s content. For content analysis, you can install an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO plugin. These plugins are pretty good at analyzing your content’s SEO quality; also, they can give you suggestions to improve the site’s SEO along with technical things.

Hide Ads on specific Posts

Some eCommerce stores display Google ads on their sites to monetize their store. This advertisement appears on all of the pages that might piss off some online visitors, especially when they view something that they want to focus on. So, it would be great if you set your ads only on a few of your site’s pages to avoid distraction. You can do it easily by adding code in a single post PHP file.

Insert Alt text to help readers what’s loading

Images help understand the content of your site. Bui, if your images are not loading or having any trouble loading the images, the Alt text will help your readers understand what’s the image is all about. So, always put in the Alt text or title text of your images to provide information about the image.

Use precise site’s navigation to provide a better customer experience

Often when we land on a website, it’s filled with distracting information, and we could not find what we were looking for. Finding it difficult to navigate through the Website might result in a bad customer experience and leads to a higher bounce rate.

To overcome and improve site navigation, you’ll have to follow these rules of thumb;

• Create categories and subcategories clearly
• Place some of your hottest selling products on display
• Use a brand plugin to organize products according to the brands
• Make it easy to navigate through one section to other
• Display mega menu to organize complex menu on your site

Customization and security tips for your eCommerce store

Use a caching plugin to remove cache

A caching plugin will help you in removing cache from your site; it will monitor unwanted cache from your system and remove it before pilling up in your database to get better loading speed. Sometimes an excellent hosting service includes the caching feature in the hosting plans; however, if you do not have any, then use the W3 total cache plugin to do the job for you.

Edit permalinks for better SEO

Permalink is the link address that appears automatically when you publish a new post. If these are automatically created, they won’t look appealing and not SEO optimized fully. Try to change the post permalinks to “URL/ Post-name” if not edited before.

mobile app for your online store

Mobile responsive websites play a vital role in user engagement. However, you can take one step further by creating a mobile app for your online store to make it more appealing, and also, it’ll help in better conversion.

Customize checkout pages and add conditional logic fields

Try to keep your checkout page more precise and shorter because if you include too many unnecessary fields in your checkout form, visitors might get distracted and abandon their purchase .so, make the checkout page precise and use conditional logic to help you in adding only valuable fields.

Backup your Website data regularly

Backing up your data will help you in saving your Website’s data if something goes wrong. You can do it manually from cPanel or use a backup plugin to do the task. Most of the Webhosting services provide this feature in the hosting plans and keep your website data in their data centres, or you can ask them to activate this feature in your package plan if not using any plugin.

Wrapping up

Most of these tips and techniques are easily applicable, and even a novice can use these tips without using any coding. We have simplified the process for your convenience and divided into three sections like optimization, security, and customizations. You can achieve both long-term and short-term goals using these techniques. Apply these techniques and let us know which one worked for you?