Performance Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Preparing Your Site for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are just around the corner. Is your WooCommerce site prepared? I hope so!

While time is running out, there are a number of things you can do to get ready. In this post, we’ll cover eight of the most important ones.

The potential of a Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal shouldn’t be underestimated. Indeed, many eCommerce sites report that a significant percentage of their annual revenue comes from sales during this brief period of time.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that nearly all businesses run a BFCM sale, which means that anyone who doesn’t have an offer is missing out.

Before we jump into the eight important things you can do, a final note: failing to prepare may cost you a serious amount of missed revenue. Amazon, for example, stands to lose $13.22 million per hour of downtime! While that’s an extreme example, it is a reminder that downtime should be avoided as much as possible during once-a-year sales events.

WooCommerce: 11 Performance, Security, and Scalability Tips

WooCommerce websites need to be operational at all times: they must load quickly, be secure, and handle large traffic spikes.

Achieving this can be a daunting task without the right strategy and expertise, particularly when dealing with a high number of visitors, as a single problem can result in hours of downtime and lost sales.

In this article, our special guest Martin Ronfort, founder of Dr Tech, will share an overview of the strategies and processes that you can apply to your WooCommerce store and grow with ease

At Dr Tech, in fact, they manage thousands of WooCommerce stores – ranging from small businesses that are just starting out to stores with millions of requests and significant marketing campaigns – and deal with all the technical aspects such as hosting, loading speed, security, updates, backups, uptime, and scalability.

Let’s go, Martin!

WooCommerce: Shoptimizer Theme Review

When building a WooCommerce store, one important factor to keep in mind is offering your customers seamless page navigation and design experience while ensuring faster page speed and performance. It helps boost customer satisfaction and improve business sales.

According to Akamai’s research, even a 1-second delay affects the websites’ conversion rates by 7%, as your store’s page loading speed is one of the important determining Google’s SEO factors.

Thus, to avoid delays and create a beautiful and appealing website, you must choose an excellent WooCommerce theme for your store.

However, considering the wide range of options – selecting a multipurpose, user-friendly, and attractive WooCommerce theme can get challenging and overwhelming. Hence, today, in this article, we review one of the fastest WooCommerce themes – Shoptimizer.

In this article, we’ll review the theme’s overview, interface, important features, and pricing to see if it’s the right fit for your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today.

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation.

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions.

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability.

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: What Are The Fastest Themes?

Speed is an essential factor that directly impacts the conversion rates, business revenue, sales, and customer experience.

Akamai’s research suggests that even a 100-millisecond delay in the page speed impacts conversion rates by 7%, while a 2-second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. Thus, even a few milliseconds of delay can cost your store thousands of dollars – let alone dissatisfied customers, poor SEO ranking, and bad online reputation.

Hence, page loading speed is the essence of an excellent customer experience and building a successful online presence.

Where possible, you want to eliminate unnecessary page loads, especially when it comes to the checkout process. Otherwise, you risk cart abandonment. That is the main reason you should use a checkout window, accessible straight from product and cart pages.

While the speed of your WooCommerce store depends on multiple facets – such as your web host, image, media files, and the code of your store, the theme you choose also plays a significant role in ensuring faster store speed.

Calculating your store’s page speed and making sure you choose the right WooCommerce theme that checks all the boxes can get frustrating and overwhelming considering the plethora of options you can choose from – especially 1300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest.

So, in this article, we share the top WooCommerce themes you can use, along with a few factors to look for when picking a suitable theme for your store. But first, let’s understand what makes a WooCommerce theme slow or fast and how to calculate the speed.

WooCommerce: How to Safely Update Via Staging

When a new version of the WooCommerce plugin is released, and the WordPress dashboard starts sending you notifications that it’s time to update, this question comes always to mind: “Should I update WooCommerce right now, wait a little longer, or stay on the same version unless something breaks?“

Well, updating WooCommerce is ALWAYS a big risk – potentially you can break your live website and miss out on traffic and sales. This can happen every time a significant update is released – many store owners don’t update their stores because they feel the hassle is not worth the effort.

But updating WooCommerce is definitely a good idea for the long-term. The main cause of WordPress hacking is because of out-of-date plugins and themes. And this is where staging environments come in.

A staging website is a clone of your existing live store. It’s completely separate and it doesn’t affect your live store in any way. Staging is also called “testing environment” or “sandbox”, while your live site is usually called “production environment”.

Staging gives you the benefit of 1-click-cloning in a few minutes, updating and testing WooCommerce without worrying about breaking your actual live website, and finally “pushing” the changes to the live website (a.k.a. overwriting the live environment), so the functioning is 100% guaranteed.

WooCommerce: Why & How to Disable Ajax Cart Fragments

If you’re here it’s because your WooCommerce website is slow and you’re wondering why the “/?wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments” URL generates delays and server loads (spikes).

Besides, there is too much online literature about WooCommerce Ajax Cart Fragments (including specific plugins and performance plugin options), and you want to learn quickly what they are before understanding if and how you should disable them.

Performance optimization tools like Pingdom and GTMetrix often put the blame on this little WooCommerce functionality. And disabling it carefully can give you a boost in speed, page load and ultimately sales conversion rate.

So here’s all you need to know.

Table Of Contents

What are WooCommerce Ajax Cart Fragments?
Why disabling WooCommerce Ajax Cart Fragments?
How to Disable WooCommerce Ajax Cart Fragments?
Final Thoughts: WooCommerce Ajax Cart Fragments Yes or No?

WooCommerce: How to Improve the Speed of my Store?

This is a guest post by Simon Tomkins of CommerceGurus – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

The speed of your WooCommerce store is incredibly important when it comes to converting visitors into customers. Research has shown that even a one second delay can result in 7% of lost orders.

If your WooCommerce site is making $1,000 per day, that one second delay in load time could potentially cost you $25,000 in annual lost sales – not small change! If you are the lucky owner of Amazon, a one second delay in 2017 could have meant a $178 billions * 0,07 = $12.5 billions loss in net revenue…

Once again, a slow WooCommerce website is costing you money.

I spent a great deal of time researching website speed and performance optimization before creating our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme. Some of the statistics are staggering:

73% of mobile users have abandoned a site due to it taking too long
47% of people expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less
79% of people who encounter a performance issue won’t return again to buy

So, a slow WooCommerce site means unhappy visitors and the loss of potential revenue to competitors.

And today we’ll briefly see what you can do to speed up your WooCommerce website – these are proven performance optimization tricks that can have an immediate impact on your sales conversion rate 🙂

WooCommerce: Remove Mini-Cart Widget Dropdown

Less is more (sometimes). On this same website, I’m already forcing max 1 product in the Cart and automatically redirecting users to Checkout upon add to Cart. On top of that, I’ve disabled WooCommerce cart fragments for performance reasons.

As a result, I definitely don’t need the whole “Mini-Cart Widget Dropdown Content”. To test, try to “hover” onto the shopping cart icon on the top right, and you’ll notice there is no cart dropdown.

Well, this is how it’s done – I love when a complex thing is fixed with one simple line of PHP!

WooCommerce: How Many Products Can It Handle?

One of the most frequently asked questions by a mile, the exact upper limit of product handling by WooCommerce is always a major worry. Continue reading WooCommerce: How Many Products Can It Handle?

WooCommerce: Disable Zoom, Slider & Lightbox @ Single Product

Sometimes, cool things don’t apply to certain businesses. Also, keeping the default WooCommerce behaviour might slow down your website, should you not need to use a specific functionality.

For example, I’m talking about the new “Featured Image Zoom”, introduced by WooCommerce a while ago. What if your customers don’t need this? How can you disable it?

Well, as usual, this can be done with a few PHP lines! Now go and disable all the stuff you don’t need 🙂