Have a slow WooCommerce site?
I’ll show you how to make it faster by fixing items in GTmetrix/Pingdom (the same tips I used to get 100% GTmetrix scores). I’ll also show you how to optimize WooCommerce cart fragments, styles, scripts, product images, databases, CDNs, and other tips shown in the table of contents.
Is my site WooCommerce? No. But my developer and I have made multiple WooCommerce sites to typically load 3x faster. And if you need help, you can hire him on freelancer.com for $40/hour. He has a perfect 5 star review, an extensive portfolio of websites he’s optimized. I’ve been working with him since 2011 (his name is Pronaya) and can’t recommend him enough.
Otherwise, follow this guide and feel free to post questions (or your results) in the comments.
1. Disable Cart Fragments
The easiest way to disable WooCommerce cart fragments, scripts, and styles, is with Kinsta’s perfmatters plugin. It also lets you disable unused widgets (including WooCommerce widgets) to make the admin load faster and has other features like disabling the WooCommerce status metabox, disabling scripts on a page/post basis, limiting post revisions, autosaves, heartbeat control, and other things that can reduce CPU and make your WooCommerce site load faster. If you don’t want to pay $25/year, I listed alternative methods below (using code from Github).
By default, WooCommerce uses cart fragments which is used to update the shopping cart without refreshing the page. But this isn’t needed on your homepage (or other pages) and can be disabled for better performance. Otherwise, cart fragments will load on every single page.
What cart fragments will usually do to your GTmetrix/Pingdom report:
To disable cart fragments, add the code to your funtions.php file:
2. Disable WooCommerce Styles
WooCommerce loads 3 stylesheets on every page of your website. Since you probably don’t want these loading on every single page, you should disable them on non-eCommerce content.
- woocommerce-layout.css
- woocommerce-smallscreen.css
- woocommerce.css
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This article was written by Tom Dupuis and originally published on Tom Dupuis.