The reality when it comes to your WooCommerce store is that you might notice that, over time, it is getting slower and slower. That’s not something people like to talk about, because the folks that built your site probably didn’t know it was going to happen, and they likely don’t know how to fix it.
It isn’t one single issue. There are a lot of little things that can start to slow down your store. Knowing what those items are – and having a plan to fix them – is what separates agencies who understand WooCommerce from those who don’t.
Hosting
If you are hosting your WooCommerce site on a host that doesn’t have WooCommerce-specific settings for your cache configuration, you may want to think about changing that. Cache is the technology that helps create copies of your code that browsers can access without having to hit the database supporting your store. This speeds up your store’s performance but has to be managed carefully to keep WooCommerce working well.
Code
Many developers who are comfortable setting up a WooCommerce store don’t know that the default way in which orders are stored to the database can create tons of queries. This isn’t an issue when your store is just getting started. But over time, and under high demand, these high query counts can cause performance bottlenecks. You may want to look into code changes that can help reduce the query count by up to 80%.
Search
When we talk with customers about Elasticsearch, they often think of it as a solution for pure website searches. But did you know that it can also speed up WooCommerce? It can! On top of the ElasticPress plugin, which was co-authored by our director of web engineering, there’s also an add-on for WooCommerce. Both these plugins help speed up your store because they can tackle more than search – they power WooCommerce queries (instead of MySQL) for store dynamics like the related product listing, category listing, and more.
When used on a WooCommerce site, we’ve seen loading times drop from 3-5 seconds to less than half a second. Wouldn’t that feel lightning fast on your WooCommerce store? We think so.