Optimize and improve WooCommerce speed

WooCommerce is a plugin that enables us to convert our WordPress website into an online store. However, it’s common to encounter heavy, slow-loading sites that demand effort and investment to regain the agility and speed necessary for optimal performance.

In addition to general recommendations for improving WordPress loading speed, here are some specific tips to speed up your WooCommerce store.

Deactivate Geolocation

WooCommerce enables us to identify visitors’ countries to automatically display the correct country at checkout. However, if we only sell to a single country, this feature may be irrelevant. Even if we do sell to multiple countries, it’s often convenient to set the most common country as the default option and disable geolocation.

To achieve this, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings, and under the “General” tab, locate the “Default customer location” option. From there, select the country or region of your store.

Optimized databases

WooCommerce generates a significant number of MySQL queries, making it crucial to maintain a healthy database.

By utilizing the plugin we always recommend, LiteSpeed Cache, you can optimize your database through the following steps within the Database options:

• Erase all expired transient data.
• Optimize the tables.
• Convert all MyISAM tables to InnoDB from the “Database Table Engine Converter”.

These are the only three actions we recommend. The remaining options will depend on each specific case.

Enable WooCommerce HPOS

“WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS)” is a feature first introduced by WooCommerce in version 7.1 and now included by default in newer versions. HPOS enables the creation of dedicated tables optimized specifically for WooCommerce, as opposed to using the default table format that WordPress uses for articles and pages.

You can manually enable HPOS in WooCommerce by navigating to WooCommerce → Settings, then selecting the Advanced tab and locating the Features section.

It’s possible that some plugins installed may not be compatible with HPOS yet. In such cases, the incompatible plugins will be highlighted, allowing you to update them or choose replacements that are compatible with the new table format.

MySQL indexes

If you have a large number of products, articles, or users, having indexes for MySQL can significantly speed up navigation within your administrator dashboard.

Index WP MySQL for Speed is an excellent plugin that simplifies the task of indexing MySQL for improved performance. Don’t forget to create a backup before making any changes.

Thank you for reading. We invite you to share your thoughts and impressions in the comments section below.