Any eCommerce store is bound to grow. The fact is further endorsed with the stats. For example, if you lack WooCommerce optimization, page loading time exceeds three seconds, 53%, and with five seconds delay, 90% of the mobile users are most likely to abandon the website. Even Amazon has suffered severe damage when it couldn’t handle the boost in prime day web traffic. The website redirected the customers to finalize their purchase to the homepage, leaving them unable to check out. Only one hour of the error resulted in $1,000,000/ minute. Hence, if you must care about something, it should be how you can scale your eCommerce store.

If Amazon has suffered a lack of scalability of the eCommerce store, you are prone to such issues as the online sales are expected to reach 18% of the sales worldwide, which will go up to a quarter of the global sales in 2023. Furthermore, eCommerce growth powered by the pandemic has set a fiercely competitive environment in the online business market. This again calls for the scalability of your store. Furthermore, the pandemic has offered a trial period for various eCommerce websites to test their capacity to deal with the heavy traffic. Notably, you can experience heavy traffic influx anytime depending upon the circumstances, such as black Friday sales, product launch, and pandemic. Therefore, the only solution to avoid heavy loss on revenue is preparedness that emphasizes scaling your eCommerce store. Therefore, mainly the strategies devised for WooCommerce optimization are wound around optimization of two main points.

  • Increased organic traffic
  • Increased order volume

Focusing on these two points, it is vital to acknowledge the link between the two, that is, the conversion rate. Undoubtedly, without increasing conversion rates, there is no growth.

Scalability of WooCommerce

If you plan for WooCommerce speed optimization, the first question that comes to mind will be whether it is difficult to scale your website. Well, you must always know that nothing is difficult to the level of impossibility. Furthermore, WooCommerce is very flexible in its framework that allows optimization for heavy volumes of traffic. However, it would be very wrong if we didn’t mention that growth comes at a price. Therefore, as your traffic increases and your eCommerce store grows, you must experience pain points.

Undoubtedly, the traffic volume is more related to the hosting environment of your website rather than its configuration. Despite this, speed optimization still plays a vital role in scaling your eCommerce store. Hence, making the scalability simpler and easier, we have it all broken down into the following.

Extensions and plugins

Woocommerce is popular among retailers because it provides you with well-woven fragments to integrate into your eCommerce website for better and extended functionality. However, added functionality brings along some drawbacks.

Undoubtedly, functionality makes your website attractive, and it is vital to your website. However, integrating and activating excessive plugins will slow down your website performance. Furthermore, it adds to the risk of plugin conflicts. Hence, for WooCommerce Speed Optimization, reducing the number of your plugins to the minimum is the first thing you must do.

Caching 

Most of the WooCommerce users avoid using cache at all costs. However, caching will prove to be one of the most efficient ways to scale your eCommerce store. It is vital to have knowledge of the right strategy to set up the cache. Otherwise, it may prove to be damaging. You must try employing cache for your product categories, catalog pages, browsing history of customers for abandoned carts.

Importantly, you better avoid using caches for other elements of the website.

WooCommerce bloat

You may also try to disable WooCommerce bloatware to speed up the front end of the website and its admin panel. Front-end elements that you may disable include cart fragments, styles, and scripts, as you don’t need them on every page. Further, you can disable unnecessary features in the admin panel to make it faster and cleaner.

Load tests

A successful business always requires a proactive approach, and if you aim for rapid growth, load tests are what you need to prepare for upcoming traffic peaks. Loading test helps you analyze your website performance by sending increasing traffic to the website under controlled variables. Hence, you will know your website capacity well before time and devise strategies to speed up WooCommerce. 

The test helps you identify the website performance bottlenecks that you may have to fix. Fixing would require additional coding and consequently more loading tests. However, the best time to conduct a loading test is when the customer journey is completed.

Furthermore, before conducting the test, you must intimate your host provider. Otherwise, they may recognize the heavy traffic influx as a DDoS attack. Notably, various hosting providers consider the test a violation of their terms of services. Lastly, load testing is critical to surpass the expected revenue loss at peak traffic times.

Integrated CDN

To scale your eCommerce store, you can ask your host provider for an integrated CDN. The CDN allows storing supplicate copied of your website on various servers at different locations around the globe. When someone lands on your webpage, he will be served via the physically closest server available.

Consequently, the traffic load divides across various servers. Hence, the risk of damage to site performance due to increased traffic reduces to the minimum.

Manage the traffic inflow

Other than keeping the reducing the plugins and caches, you can simply manage the increased traffic inflow. For this, you will allow only a certain share of users to get to your website straight away. However, the rest of the users redirect to a virtual waiting room or add to the online queue. In this way, the excess traffic doesn’t strain your website performance.

With the online queue, you can easily keep the traffic inflow to the extent where your website performs the best. Hence, you can circumvent the infrastructure bottlenecks of your eCommerce store. Hence, if you attempt to scale your eCommerce store by managing the traffic, you can easily boost your sales with increased conversion rates.

Dedicated WooCommerce hosting 

Last but not least, for better performance, better loading speeds, and other elements to scale your eCommerce store, using a dedicated hosting service is an easy way out. It helps you Speed Up WooCommerce website, which may cater to heavy traffic inflow easily.