Wordpress and Woocomerce Optimization Guide - Actionable Tips Faster Sites and Better Ranking

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Whether you are expecting an increase in holiday traffic (otherwise known as Q4) or just want to improve your website performance, this ebook will help you improve your ecommerce site. We will cover some of the basics, we will give you tricks to achieve almost perfect performance and

tips for sites with high traffic.

First, the basics

Although simple, these tips are beneficial for running a successful ecommerce website.

Now, when we say basic, we mean really basic. These are things that we hope you have already implemented, but may have fallen to you at some point. Even if you are already a professional, use it as a checklist to make sure you are ready! Fortunately, if you have forgotten any of these steps, they are usually very easy to fix. Let's dive!

Update your hosting plan and domain name

When promoting your products at any time of the year, the last thing you need is to reduce your site (especially when selling or increasing traffic)! A silly but common mistake that happens is to forget to renew your hosting program or domain name.

Before you remove it, log in to the beginning of your domain or contact the managed WordPress server - when is your subscription renewed? Especially if you paid for one year of service during a year (I'm looking at you, Black Friday buyers), make sure you are ready to renew before the expiration date and that your credit card on file is up to date. Sure, it seems obvious, but it happens, so save the stress and check again!

Install an SSL Certificate

Very similar to the hosting program and domain names, we hope you have already succeeded. But in

If you are launching a brand new e-commerce site, you will want to install an SSL Certificate. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a protocol used tosecure and encrypt communication between computers. In other words, it helps maintain sensitive information

your site is incredibly secure (also known as the small padlock next to a site address in your browser's URL bar). This includes things like passwords, credit card information, bank credentials - basically all the information your site stores and you and your users would like to keep safe. As an e-commerce store, it is important that you have an SSL certificate installed on your website. This ensures your customers their personal information and billing information is safe and sound.

In the past, installing an SSL certificate was like juggling. You will need to purchase it from a certificate authority, tell the managed Wo rdPress server about it, share information with both parties, and then turn it on. This is not the worst system in the world, but it is not the smoothest. At Here istogrami  , we decided to eliminate the hassle Simple with our SSL feature. And the best part? It's completely free! We offer free SSL certificates toall sites with all our hosting packages. With a little help from our friends at Let's Encrypt, you do not have to go back and forth with a third party provider. You can manage world-class hosting and encryption from a nice control panel.

Check the information on your site

Examine all your products - are the prices and descriptions correct? Are there any specifications that people often ask about? And if you make or intend to make a big offer, does the discount code work (both lowercase and uppercase)? Try to do what you can to ensure that you have a smooth purchase completion process. The better the user experience and the buying process, the more sales you can expect to make!

Let's use Black Friday (the biggest shopping day of the year!) As an example. Even if you do not necessarily make a big bid, you may want to check again that there is not much traffic to your site, especially if you are working on it. If you are planning to make a significant sale, you can guarantee the increase of new visitors to your site, so make sure the information is correct and up-to-date to ensure the best user experience.

Lastly, make sure you cover your bases with things like return policies and promotion details. During huge traffic jams, you really never know who will stumble upon your site, so try to anticipate any unique cases that you will not be able to help, such as foreign buyers, if you are only shipping domestically. Make sure your site details are updated or updated manually as things begin to disappear from your inventory.

It is better to be in advance with these policies than to frustrate users by adding them to their cart or, worse, putting their credit card details. This creates a very unpleasant user experience and can lead to some negative PR.

Be ready to run out of stock
Speaking of the user experience, what happens to your site when an item runs out? Will the site inventory reflect what is actually available or update estimated shipping times? This is information that your buyers will definitely want to know before buying. Be transparent and clear with these situations and be prepared for the worst. Let's face it: people will not always remember coming back on their own. But sending them an email is like a personal, custom reminder to their inbox to see the next round of products and return them to your site. Now that we've covered the easy stuff, it's time to talk about performance. Get Perfect Performance

Optimize your WordPress site so you do not lose visitors or potential customers. For example, if an item runs out, instead of the "Add to cart" option, you could replace it with an email subscription option to let the user know when the item is available again. Then, even if they can not buy this particular item right now, you can return them to the site in the future AND have their email address for future offers. It is a win-win. to give you some information about the percentage of loading time for which each addition is responsible. Are you experiencing other add-on conflicts? See how you can solve them.







These seven tips will help you optimize your site for fast loading times.

These days, if your site does not load within a few seconds, many users will simply close the tab and never return. When they come to your site, they want information now, not several minutes from now. In addition, a site that loads slowly immediately loses its credibility. Many users will start to wonder why it is slow. Instead of thinking about the technical aspects behind managing an ecommerce site, they will assume the worst, such as hackers, malware or spam. So while there is no "perfect performance", with a few simple modifications to your site, you can get close enough and dramatically increase the number of users who insist on buying your great products!

Eliminate clunky additives

We know what you're thinking: Plugins add functionality to your WordPress site and the functionality is good, right? It is not always.

The browsing When WordPress Add- ons List , it can be easy to step away and install any add-ons under the sun, especially for e-commerce sites. While there are tons of great additions that will help your sales grow, there are some that can also bring performance issues and slow down your site.

Before you start installing things, it is important to take a look at the add-on statistics and information and ask yourself if you really need this add-on. Check when the plugin was last updated, if it works with the latest version of WordPress, and read the documentation (if any). If this sounds like a well-maintained plugin that completes exactly what you need, it is probably a good choice to install! If that's not a perfect solution, however, it's probably best to transfer it and do a little more research.

Add-ons add functionality to your site and the functionality is good, right? It is not always.

Although there is no magic number of plugins that you should keep down, it is recommended that you only install and enable plugins that are absolutely necessary for your site. Not all plugins are bad, but the more plugins you have installed, the more likely you are to have conflicts.

What about plugins that are already installed on your site? There is really an extremely easy way to tell who can cause performance losses - all you need is an add-on! (Yes, we see irony in that too.) It's called P3 Profile and it will generate a performance report for your site , which will

A good rule of thumb: Run a P3 Profiler test whenever you enable a new plugin. This will help you discover any annoying additives that slow down the performance before you get too attached to them.

Extremely popular plugin An that we propose for your site eCommerce  istogrami  is

WooCommerce. The Woo Commerce is a very popular e-commerce add-on, but it can cause performance problems if you are not careful. Do not worry, we have some helpful tips to improve performance especially for sites that run 

WooCommerce!

WooCommerce Performance Tips

Be Strategic With WooCommerce Cookies WooCommerce

may use certain cookies to track visitors, which are known to interrupt caching, slowing down your visitor experience. Ensure this Dynamic Woocommerce cookies are not placed on visitors by default can prevent this from happening.

Clear old orders

By default, WooCommerce will retain information about every order it has ever processed, adding a lot of information to the database over time. The larger the database, the slower the requests to the database will be, so removing these older orders can help ensure the stability of the site.

It is a good idea to archive orders from more than one financial year ago, extract them from the database and convert them to an external file for safekeeping. This will reduce the size of your database, which can help you quickly maintain visitor requests to your site.

Disable

Cart Fragments Cart Fragments is how WooCommerce tracks the current number of items in your site's "mini cart" that is usually located in the top corner of your site pages. Cart Fragments reaches specifically and updates the small number that appears on each page load.

We recommend that you turn off the small "count" feature, as it will hit the server with one request per page per visitor, adding a large enough number of servers just for non-critical functionality. (The cart page will still be displayed accurately.)

Learn more about how to maximize WooCommerce and your WordPress site here!

Optimize your images

Compressing images reduces their size and takes less time for the visitor to download. The result is faster visual content loading on the page, providing a better user experience.

Images are often some of the largest files on a page, which means they can be responsible
some of the biggest delays in loading time. When you compress images by reducing their size, this reduces the download time, resulting in faster loading of visual content that provides a better user experience.

As an e-commerce site, of course you will have a lot of images to display - there is not much you can do about it. But what you can do is optimize these images. By compressing file sizes instead of dropping any old image on your site, you can drastically reduce load time and keep your site performing at its best.

The best part is that image optimization is really very easy and the best resources do not harm the quality of your image! All you need is the right tools. The goal is to get your final image to the size you really need (not too big) and quality that works well. For help, we recommend these tools:

• TinyPNG: Afree browser-based tool for PNG and JPEG image compression
• ImageOptim: A free open source application for image compression
• JPEGmini: A Sucuri Firewall • FlyCache Each of these are caching plugins for your WordPress site, with the exception of FlyCache. FlyCache is the exclusive caching engine of  istogramiphoto decompression application for Mac and Windows
• SHOCK : A free Windows image optimization application

A quick note: If you upload a well-compressed image and the WordPress theme creates "duplicates" of different sizes (such as smaller versions and thumbnails), then these new images will not be compressed. (Uncomfortable, we know that.) So to help with this problem, we recommend EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud.

Optimize your CSS and JavaScript

CSS and JavaScript files are created with lots of new lines, spaces, tabs, and comments to help the developer read what they see, and like images, CSS and JavaScript can really slow down your site if they are not optimized.

If your site has a custom theme, you will definitely want to make sure the code behind it is almost flawless. But even if you use a preliminary WordPress theme, you may want to look under the hood to see how clear everything looks or ask the managed WordPress host. First, let's start with CSS.

CSS

The most important thing to do with your CSS is to compress it and remove any unused selectors. It's all about reducing the redundancy and reducing the amount of code that needs to be executed when loading the page. Getting a good development workflow is key, especially if you use a pre-processor like Sass. To help you, we recommend Gryllismo, a JavaScript task manager that performs tasks for you as you develop your website . There is even an add-on for this called grunt-contrib-sass that simply brings all the Sass files together, minimizes and compresses it. Throw the add-on grunt-contrib-watch over it and it will perform the Sass job whenever you save a file. Easy!

If you are not a big developer, do not lose sleep if you do not use the latest and greatest CSS methodology. Just try to follow a template while working with CSS to avoid duplication or huge file sizes. If in doubt, consult a WordPress developer or host!

DEMOCRACY

The golden rules of JavaScript optimization are simple: View as few JavaScript files as possible, minimize and merge. Ideally, they would batch ALL JavaScript files into one, and then minimize the problem, but sometimes this is not possible. If you are a theme developer, we recommend that you minimize CSS and JavaScript as part of your development workflow. There are many great options, depending on your tools or creation tool.

Some add-ons may block JavaScript files. So do not stress that the process is perfect, just try to get closer. And for specific files, you can always use the "async" and "defer" HTML attributes to load JavaScript files asynchronously or when the rest of the page is loading. Again, do not lose sleep if you are not ready enough to take a dip in the JavaScript behind your site. And regardless of your level of experience, always make changes to a career site or local environment so that you do not accidentally download the live site!

Cache for your site Have a trusted host

Every time a buyer visits a page or post on your WordPress site, your site is created from scratch. To do this, WordPress must perform a process to find the information, collect it, and then display it to your buyer. This process can be one of the causes of a slow loading site. That's why we suggest you install a temporary storage solution!

To get you started, here are some solutions we suggest:

• WP Rocket
• Total W3 Cache





, specially designed to make WordPress sites fly. It is particularly powerful because it works alongside the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide temporary content storage from POPs.

Use a theme optimized for speed Learn more about how to maintain your ecommerce site fast here! High traffic tips If your site has a lot of traffic (like millions of visitors), these tips will keep you running faster than ever! PAGE 14 THE FINANCIAL TERMINATION PLANNING GUIDE

When shopping for a WordPress theme for your site, it is important to pay close attention to speed optimization. Some of the best, most beautiful and impressive themes that are actually have poor coding and can slow down your site. Although they may seem nice to the user, none of them matter if your site loads slowly while shopping.

It is usually better to follow a simple theme than a theme with complex layouts, fancy animations and other unnecessary features. Remember: The most important part of your website is your user experience, so go with a simple theme and get ready with some WordPress plugins later! The stress is not worth it, especially when you have the option of choosing a managed WordPress server (such as 



No matter what you do on your site to increase performance, there is another aspect to consider - your hosting company! As traffic reaches your site, it pulls requests from your servers. If they are not equipped to handle the number of people trying to load your site, loading time will be severely reduced or, worse, stopped altogether. This is the last thing you want when you try to bid. Although the price of shared hosting always makes it seem like a deal, it has different costs: slow site speed, erratic performance and frequent downtime.

istogrami !) That will take care of a huge chunk of WordPress performance issues. It does not matter when you have problems, day or night, our 24/7 support team will be there for a while.

When it comes to hosting your e-commerce site,  istogrami provides servers and services that are specifically tailored to WordPress. (Hence the name, "managed WordPress server")! This means that your sites will have the highest quality of performance and security, because each server is optimized for a single CMS.

With a managed WordPress server, you get extra features beyond optimized and dedicated servers. Backups Night, managed WordPress upgrades and so many other features that help you manage your websites, or rather, help  istogrami  manage them for you!









Use a content delivery network (CDN)

Suppose you have customers around the world who buy your products. If your site is hosted on a server in New York and someone from Australia is going to upload it, it will take a little longer for the site to load just because of the physical distance between the user and the server. That's where a content delivery network (CDN) comes in to speed things up.

CDN is a network of servers that serve your site and its assets from different locations around the world based on where the user is located. The idea is that users will hit the nearest server, reducing the physical distance between them and your site content, and in turn, loading time is reduced. So instead of waiting on a server halfway around the world, your users will be able to quickly load your site and buy your products!

To create a CDN, some popular options include:

• The CDN is powered by Fastly
• Amazon Web Services
CloudFlare •

In  istogrami , offer free CDN powered by Fastly to keep your site (and its contents) extremely fast. With the Fastly-powered CDN, you know you get faster page loads, which means your customers can spend more time shopping and less time waiting for a page to load.

Cache What You

Can Do Not Exaggerate This Title - Taking advantage of caching on both the server and client side can lead to significant performance gains. Basically, when a user first loads your site, the browser may save (or cache) the contents of your site. This includes HTML files, CSS style sheets, images, and other elements that your site may contain. This is beneficial because the next time the same user visits your site, the browser will be able to load the content without having to retrieve everything from the server, keeping loading time extremely fast!

Server caching is basically the same idea, but cache is done at the server level instead of in the browser. This can save a lot of content loading time because the server does not need to use PHP to communicate with the database each time a page is loaded. This is where you really start to save time.

To set caching server-side on your site in real form WordPress, you only need Zeta e t is an addition: TOTALcache W3. Of course, there are other add-ons that would work as well, but this is one of the most common options out there. Add-ons like this will allow you to control server-side caching on your site, which will help you deliver content to your users very quickly.

One thing to note , we have smart cache settings that handle this process for all our customers. If you are a guest on  istogrami

While using plugins like W3 Total Cache to improve server-side caching can be effective, it can take a lot of configuration and is not the fastest server-side solution out there. Because WordPress plugins are PHP-based, it still takes time for the server to execute PHP-based caching code.

When setting up caching for an ecommerce site, you just have to be careful about what you set up. Some pages (such as shopping cart pages) need cookies to work, and they cannot be cached. Because of this, some add-ons, including WooCommerce, will automatically disable server-side caching. It is not always very obvious when add-ons or themes disable caching, but you can always contact your hosting provider and ask them to crawl the site cache (minus those pages that need cookies). At  istogrami

, you do not need to worry about the temporary storage of add-ons! We automatically take care of server-side caching for you using custom varnish settings, the WordPress team of experts has perfected and perfected over the years. This means that your site will be equipped with one of the fastest caching techniques available and you do not even have to worry about setting it up! In addition, the servers  istogrami, we love working with our customers to ensure that their sites are prepared for their biggest sales, to ensure that everything stays on the Internet and works fast! In fact, we have a whole team dedicated to working with clients one-on-one when these situations arise.  are set to automatically clear the cache each time files are changed and a post or page is updated. That way, you never have to worry about your users viewing old content.

And that brings us to our last point ...

Work with your hosting company to ensure success

If you still have any questions, concerns or just want some advice, the WordPress hosting company should be able to help you. Here at  istogrami/a>This holiday season, we want your site to be successful and we would love to be a part of it. Contact  istogrami  today to find out how we can help you escalate your business.

Are you preparing your site for sale? Do you expect an increase in traffic? Looking for tips on how to improve your performance? We are here to work with you, help you and share some of our knowledge to make sure your ecommerce site is ready for anything!



Flywheel for e-commerce websites

The  istogrami  is a fun platform that enables website owners and creatives to focus on what they do best - creating beautiful, functional websites for themselves or their customers. We make it a breeze to create and develop WordPress websites, hosting management, project management and, finally, the escalation of the e-commerce business. Stop wasting time on server management, security add-ons, caching, and all the other tedious, repetitive tasks that take your focus away from growing your business and jeopardize your customer relationship. Get the flywheel and

get back to doing what you love.

Migrate your website today and see how it could perform on  istogrami

DO YOU HAVE QUESTIONS? Talk to a specialist!


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