Website performance is an essential aspect of web design that is often overlooked by agencies.  If your site responds and delivers content very quickly, you’ll receive many benefits – including an increase in conversions and better rankings in Google.

At Herdl, we fully appreciate the benefits that high performance can offer across multiple marketing channels and consider performance optimization an integral part of our process.

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For eCommerce sites, the holidays come around quickly. It may feel a way off, but significant changes to your site can take a while to implement and sign off.

If you want to get the most out of your holiday period, now is the time to make changes to ensure the stability of your WooCommerce site.

What’s more – you want to make sales! Now is your last chance to improve your conversion rate before the holidays hit. Finally, a lot of your annual revenue may rest on this time of year. You need to know what to do if it all goes wrong.

Here’s our advice for how to be fully prepared for the festive season.

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There’s more than one factor that determines whether or not a shopper makes a purchase from your store — product selection, pricing, shipping speed, and so much more.

But there’s one major factor that determines whether or not shoppers even make it to your product pages in the first place, and that’s site speed.

As we covered in the past, your WooCommerce store needs to be as fast as possible to gain potential customers and keep them on the site. There are a lot of ways you can optimize your site for peak performance, like choosing reliable hosting and updating your plugins. There are also tools you can use to speed things up, and Jetpack is one of them.

Today we’re going to look at a handful of Jetpack’s features that help increase site speed, and how they can specifically help WooCommerce stores retain more shoppers.

But first we’ll give you a quick introduction to Jetpack, just in case you’re not familiar with it.

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Humans want things to happen fast. We expect short waits in line, fast food, entertainment on demand — all in all, instant gratification.

It’s this mindset that leads us to anticipate websites that load and deliver content quickly. If we don’t get what we want, we can always go somewhere else and find the same thing.

This means that your WooCommerce-powered store has to be fast to gain as many paying customers as possible. If your site is sluggish or its pages take a long time to load, visitors will abandon it for your competitors, and you’ll miss out on countless sales.

To help you achieve the necessary goal of having the fastest, most efficient online store possible, we’ve compiled these first steps to speeding up WooCommerce. From image compression to up-to-date extensions, these are a few ways you can streamline your store for optimal performance.

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As any store owner knows, photos are a crucial part of every product page. On their own, product photos can convince a shopper to take the next step in the buying process — offer beautifully shot, highly detailed photos of your products, and you’re that much closer to getting a click of that “add to cart” button.

Supplying your shoppers with all these photos can come at a price, however. With each large photo or media file you add to your product page, the load time increases. And your shoppers, no matter how interested they are, aren’t willing to wait around for more than a few seconds.

The challenge for store owners is this: finding a way to supply shoppers with the high-resolution photos they desire while keeping product pages loading quickly. It might sound like an insurmountable challenge, but there are actually quite a few ways to balance fast and fantastic, from image compression to WordPress plugins.

Your customers can indeed have their cake and eat it too. Let’s have a look at how you can speed up the load times of your product photos while preserving their quality.

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