Troubleshooting a slow site

The first step for troubleshooting a slow WooCommerce site is to determine the root cause.

Using a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache is a good way to optimize site performance. You can also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare, or Jetpack’s site accelerator to speed your site up further.

Be careful, though — caching plugins have the potential to cause your site to load incorrectly (or not at all) if incorrectly configured. Make sure to double-check and confirm settings after implementation.

Contact your hosting provider to discuss the impact your hosting plan has on site performance. We recommend high-quality, dedicated hosting over cheap hosting plans on shared servers. See our recommended WooCommerce hosting solutions.

A common cause of slow site performance on the front end is image size. The file size of your product/blog images directly impacts the speed at which your site loads. A tool like Smush can help optimize images within WordPress.

View our guide for fixing blurry images in WooCommerce.

Minification is a process that improves your site’s loading speed by reducing the size of its code files. It works by removing unnecessary characters like spaces, line breaks, and comments from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files without affecting their functionality. This reduction in file size results in faster download and execution times, enhancing overall website performance and user experience.

To minify files on your site, you can use a plugin.

It may also be necessary for you to increase your site’s WordPress memory limit.

A site’s sluggishness can sometimes be related to extension/plugin load.

To test this, deactivate all plugins, reactivating them one by one until you find a potential cause. You could also use Plugin Organizer to control the order of activation, toggling plugins on or off on a per-page/post basis.

To test your theme, temporarily switch to a default WordPress theme (such as Twenty Twenty-Five) and navigate through the site. If you notice a performance improvement, the problem is likely related to your theme.

Site analysis

• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• Google Pagespeed Tools

Tips

• Offload all unnecessary functions from your web server to another server or third-party service, such as sending email via a dedicated Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) provider.

Resources

• WordPress Performance Optimization (New Relic)

Do you still have questions and need assistance? 

• If you’re looking to extend the core functionality shown here, we recommend reviewing available extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace.
• Need ongoing advanced support or a customization built for WooCommerce? Hire a Woo Agency Partner.
• Are you a developer building your own WooCommerce integration or extension? Check our Developer Resources.

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