How to improve the speed of my Wordpress and E-Commerce
As we all know Search Engine Optimization it’s the key to a successfully on-line business. Giving the large hints list available on the internet this become easier than ever, this is not an abstract area as before.
Wordpress E-Commerce it’s the best plugin available ans it’s starting to successfully compete with others platforms specially due to the latest wp e-commerce improvments. The roadmap for further releases looks great, the wp e-commerce will definitely become one of the best available solutions for a cheap, easy to set-up and manage e-commerce. Giving the fact it’s free to use and use the wordpress as framework, which it’s the best CMS on these days, there is no impediment on it’s way to go the very top.
But how to make my wordpress e-commerce run faster?
It’s known that Google love wordpress, if your theme it’s well coded, definitely you will get a high ratting for your domain and your keywords will perform better that your competitors. An important factor which most of the users omit and became very important for Google when crawl and index a site, it’s the loading speed. The faster is the code execution and loading speed the greater points your site will receive when google use it’s algorithms to calculate your site position.
Chose the webhosting company wisely for your wp e-commerce install
One of the easiest way to deal with the speed is to chose a reliable, fast and secure hosting. Of course the dedicated servers are the best but they are not always accessible due to the high price. So far I’ve tested lot’s of server but there’s one which i never had issues and look’s to be the fastest, my recommendation, Hostgator Web Hosting. They provide a very good hosting for incredible low prices, starts at $3.96/month. And that’s not all, check this article to see how to Get Free Hostgator Coupons and get up to 30% discount from the prices.
Cache your site using one of the free/paid plugins existing on the market.
Another way to improve the site speed, which in fact should be combined with a good hosting to get the best results, is to cache your wordpress e-commerce site. The best solution out there it’s the W3 Total Cache wordpress plugin. It’s easy to configure and bring the best results.
Here is a short list of features:
- Excelet improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
- Reduced dramatically page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
- Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
- Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic)
- Compatible with Shared Hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
- Great Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
- Caching of database objects in memory
- Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds, combine and remove comments / white space
- Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
- JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
Only the checkout pages needs to be excluded from the cache.
The
Can i still use the sliding cart for the cached content?
Since all pages will be cached, then sliding cart will remain the same for all users. Obliviously this is not a good thing, this need to use javascript/AJAX to retrieve the cart dynamically. Here is a plugin which help with this matter Wordpress E-Commerce Sliding Cart Cache Control
Thanks guys!! These details saved my day..
I suppose to use GoDaddy hosting in the past but their servers are so limited, i encounter so many issues with word-press. Got couple clients on Hostgator, indeed their server works faster.
Hi Guys,
I am tempted to use W3 cache, but I am given to understand that your site needs to be fairly static, although I am not sure what is meant by this. I am still making small changes om my site, occassional adding plug-ins and putting up lots of posts and special pages. Should I avoid using W3 because of this?
I would appreciate your comments.
Regards,
Les
Hey Les,
You can always add new plugins and put new content, so you just need to clear the cache so allow users to see the last update, it will still be much faster than not use it.
On the other hand there is a way to use dynamic code in certain areas, but this will reduce the speed, sometimes to much to keep the cache active.
I tried W3 Total Cache but, like expected, it didn’t work with the cart function. Using the Sliding Cart Cache Control didn’t seem to improve things. Any insight you can lend on this?
You need first to make the W3 Total Cache to work correctly with your site before using the Sliding Cart Cache Control plugin. This will help you to keep the cart data dynamic and show the user products, instead a cached data from a previous buyers.
If you can’t make the W3 Cache to work with your server, i suggest using another plugin of this kind like Super Cache. The Sliding Cart Cache Control plugin will work with any of those.