How to Speed Up Your eCommerce Site (and increase conversions)

07/12/21 • 39 min

Key Takeaways

Simplicity is the name of the game. You probably only need 1⁄3 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?

07/12/21 • 39 min

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