Daily ArchivesSeptember 7, 2021

If you’re opening an ecommerce store, chances are you are an expert on the commerce end of things. Now you need to figure out how to bring visitors to your site. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

If you’re trying to learn how to do SEO for an ecommerce website, you are not alone. You need SEO to be successful in ecommerce. It’s critical to the visibility of your store.

In this article, we’ll cover the basic SEO techniques for ecommerce websites. You’ll learn ecommerce best practices for SEO, as well as important tools and ecommerce SEO tips to try.

What Is Ecommerce SEO?

There are different techniques within ecommerce SEO — like link building, keyword optimization, and more. All of these serve  to drive traffic to your website.

9 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for Fast & Effective Sites >>

Larger companies have in-house SEO specialists or can outsource their content. Smaller businesses have to prioritize cost efficiency and often take a DIY approach. Even if you know what SEO is, you may not fully realize why SEO is important for ecommerce.

Why is SEO Important for Ecommerce?

Think about it this way: If you were walking into a mall, are there more people shopping at the big store up front or the booth near bathrooms? Think of ecommerce SEO as getting your store prime real estate in the mall.

How to Do SEO for Ecommerce Websites

Trying to figure out how to do SEO for ecommerce websites can be tricky if you aren’t familiar with the tools and techniques used to make your website friendly to search engines. Here are the key areas to focus on.

Page Structure

If your website is difficult to navigate, potential customers aren’t the only ones having a poor experience. Search engines will also have a hard time indexing your website.

Having the right structure makes a big difference when it comes to optimizing your ecommerce website. Here are some ecommerce SEO tips to keep in mind when structuring your site to ensure you are maximizing its visibility in the SERPs.

Try Silo Structure

After you make decisions on themes, you need to think about how you will organize your pages. The basic structure that works best contains a home page, subcategories, and product pages. This is known as “silo structure.” 

Similar content should be grouped together because it will be easier for visitors and search engines to find. If you are a bakery, a silo structure might have one main page and three category pages such as cakes, pies, and cookies.

From there, you’ll have more specific product pages that are grouped under the more specific categories. For cakes, this might be sheet cakes, cheesecakes, decorated cakes, etc. You should have some terminal pages like a contact page or an “About” page that tells your story too.

Focus on Navigation

You should never be more than three clicks from your home page. The harder it is to navigate back home, the more likely it is a visitor will have a poor experience. The same is true for Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Top 7 Ecommerce Website Features: What Customers Want in an Ecommerce Site >>

The larger your website and the more pages it has, the longer it takes search engines to “crawl” through. Having an optimized structure that lacks “orphans” (unlinked pages that do not redirect anywhere else on your website) is both user and search engine friendly.

Keyword Optimization

Knowing your audience and what they’re searching for is key to planning a great SEO strategy for ecommerce. Keywords are what potential customers type into search engines, so ensuring your website has the right ones is vital to how you do SEO for ecommerce.

Here are some keyword considerations for optimizing your site with SEO.

Use Keyword Research Tools

Start out by doing research on what keywords are best for your product. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Similarweb are great for finding high-volume keywords. Once you are established, you can utilize features within some of those tools to track keyword performance.

Target Keywords Across Your Site

Put keywords in your content like blogs, but don’t forget to put them in your URLs, in image file names, and in your meta tags and titles too.

Most importantly, make sure you continue generating keyword rich content full of the different types of keywords: short tail, long tail, and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. Here are some examples.

Type of Keyword	Example Keyword
Short Tail	pants
Long Tail	dressy black pants for work
Latent semantic indexing (LSI)	business attire

Content Marketing for SEO

The more content you have, the more opportunities you’re giving search engines to find you. Search engines can still find ecommerce websites that are just stores — but they have a harder time ranking well.

If you are looking for ways to do SEO for ecommerce sites, try optimizing your existing content. Here are some ecommerce SEO tips and best practices.

Utilize Blog Best Practices for SEO

Blogs and other non-commerce content should be between 1400-1700 words. Page rankings change all the time, but most recent studies show that blogs in that range get shared the most.

Infuse SEO Into Product Descriptions

Product descriptions and short form content should be significantly shorter. Depending on your needs, anywhere from 50 to 250 words may be appropriate for this type of content. Keep your tone and voice consistent.

Publish New Content Frequently

Another SEO technique for ecommerce websites: update frequently. Creating fresh, new, and consistently updated content keeps your website constantly in the sights of search engine eyes. It also gives your website visitors reasons to keep coming back.

SEO Trends in 2021: The Future of SEO, What Matters Most and Why

Staying up to date doesn’t just keep your customers engaged; regular updating with high-quality content can help build domain authority which increases your website’s ranking. Inviting guest bloggers is a great way to keep content fresh and engaging as well. Do not ignore social media either — this can be a great way to promote and share your content.

Link Building

If domain authority is a resume for your ecommerce website, think of link building as getting great references. Link building is the SEO technique of getting other websites to direct traffic back to your website through hyperlinks. It takes work, but there are many ways to get this done.

Start With Your Partners

Backlinks from partners and affiliates are an easy way to build links. Check periodically to ensure there are no broken links. Two way traffic helps both parties. This is why inviting guest bloggers is an easy way to both generate more content and build domain authority. Associations and sponsorships where your logo would go are another venue to seek backlinks.

Get Links From Social Media

Another SEO technique for ecommerce websites is to utilize social media. Sharing is important! When linked content is passed around, it points back to you. The more you can drive traffic to your site organically, the better. Another option is to research your industry and check in with bloggers or influencers to have them add you to “Top 10” lists and other listicle mentions.

Watch for Mentions

Using features like SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring Tool enables you to check where your company is mentioned but not linked back to. Reach out and ask for a backlink.

Increasing Site Speed

You can have great products in your ecommerce store, but a slow website is still a slow website. And that’s a problem. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to increase your site speed after running a basic speed test, Here are some things you can do to reduce latency and boost speed.

Strategize Your Plugins

Picking better plugins is just as important as having great code. With WordPress having thousands of plugins available, sometimes it’s hard to figure out just what to choose. If you are unsure about any, there are tools online you can use to check the quality of the plugin.

Buggy plugins don’t just slow down your site for visitors — your ranking and domain authority suffer too. If you use plugins, ensure they aren’t slowing down your site. Opt for quality, not quantity. The more you add, the more it takes to load your site — and that will hurt your SEO.

Utilize Caching Plugins

Ever notice that some sites load way faster after you’ve been to them already? That’s because of caching. Caching stores resources like your logo, images, and stylesheets to help websites load faster. The longer a webpage takes to load, the more the user experience (UX) declines. We recommend compressing images, site content, and utilizing the Cache Enabler and Jetpack plugins.

Eliminate Broken Links

Running your site through a tool like Screaming Frog or using a plugin like Broken Link Checker can help you find broken links. Not only do those slow down your site, but this lets you know where you need to create redirects. Keep in mind, you should limit your redirects. Search engines and customers alike just want to get through to your site.

PHP Performance

If you’ve ever gotten an email for a limited time sale and logged on only to see an error at checkout, that’s due to not having enough PHP workers. The single most important factor in increasing speed is always the capacity of your store to handle traffic.

Dynamic managed hosting enables you to serve more users at the same time. In contrast to static sites like blogs, ecommerce sites have to worry about concurrent users because of the multiple processes involved like adding items to carts, checking out, and processing payments. 

This is where performance and scalability make a difference. If you have a website bogged down by buggy plugins and content taking forever to load, a boost in traffic can overload your website temporarily. A downed site costs you customers and, ultimately, lost revenue.

Bottom Line

Utilizing SEO for ecommerce websites is critical to your store’s success. However, if your site isn’t hosted on a server with top-notch performance and speed, all the work you put into SEO will still not help you.

That’s why it’s essential to power your ecommerce store with optimized hosting.

For example, with Hostdedi fully managed WooCommerce hosting, you’ll get a fast, high-performing store. With instant auto scaling, visual comparisons, plus automatic plugin and platform updates built-in, your ecommerce site will load ultra fast.

Better is Built In with fully managed hosting from Hostdedi. Try it free for 14 days. 

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Google’s latest response to online market trends is their rollout of a new set of signals called Core Web Vitals.

The keys to maintaining and improving your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) have evolved over the years. Site owners who want to rank high for relevant searches must stay up-to-date with the demands of Google’s algorithm. With its latest update, Google is further prioritizing user experience.

Good user experience matters now more than ever. COVID-19 and work from home trends have placed an even great emphasis on the digital experience. Users expect more from digital interactions and mobile continues to be a key factor in driving business.

Given this growth in online demand, core web vitals are more critical than ever.

In this guide, we’ll provide an overview of the new Google page experience indicators. Let’s start with the basics.

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

Google has placed their focus on three factors that will define a site’s CWVs. These three factors and their corresponding metrics are as follows:

• Loading – Largest Contentful Paint
• Interactivity – First Input Delay
• Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift

The complete list of Google Web Vitals was announced in May 2020. The above CWVs are the components that will apply to all web pages, the “core” signals that site owners should focus on. Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these facets of the user experience.

Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint refers to the loading speed of the largest visual element on your page. This is typically the content you keep “above the fold” or “above the scroll,” which refers to the first content that a user sees when landing on a web page. This content is often the most meaningful.

It’s common for site owners to want to make an impression with flashy videos or intricate graphics at the top of their page. However, problems can arise if that content takes too long to load—users who are left waiting for those large visual elements to load may get frustrated and end up bouncing.

Google has identified this trend as a predictor of user experience. A page’s LCP tells the site owner how these large elements load in relation to other sites on the web. LCP is also a helpful indicator as to whether your visuals need a tune-up.

It’s important to remember there are ways to configure pages with graphic and video elements above the fold that load properly. Your hosting provider will also play a part in determining your LCP, as they’ll cut down on unnecessary scripts and offer fast server response times.

First Input Delay

Out of the three Core Web Vitals, First Input Delay (FID) is the metric designed to measure a page’s interactivity. FID measures the amount of time in between a user’s first interaction and the page’s response to that action. In other words, it measures a site’s responsiveness to interaction.

For example, let’s say you’re typing in your email address to subscribe to a site’s newsletter. Once you hit submit, the amount of time it takes the site to act on your click is the page’s FID. A significant delay may hurt the page’s ranking.

Again, Google has chosen FID as a key indicator of user experience. The first interaction is a crucial moment for a user that could define their experience on your page. You got them here. You got them to interact. Don’t lose them now.

Cumulative Layout Shift

The third and final metric of Google Core Web Vitals is Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS. CLS is intended to measure the visual stability of your page. Another way to phrase this is: how stable is the layout of your page as it loads?

Let’s take the example of an online recipe. We’ve all had the experience of clicking on an enticing online recipe only to find that we have to navigate through a sea of ads, comments, and videos to get to the actual recipe. And not only that, as these elements are loading, they’re affecting the recipe’s placement on the page, forcing the user to scroll up and down to keep eyes on the recipe.

This example of the cluttered recipe page would not be a very visually stable experience for users. Cumulative Layout Shift will reward pages that are able to load seamlessly without shifting the layout of the page.

Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?

Core Web Vitals give you a holistic approach to tracking user experience and understanding your page rankings.

Of course, as savvy site owners, we want to leverage these factors to yield the highest possible ranking for our pages. But it should not be overlooked that these metrics are well intentioned, well thought out, and a genuinely effective measurement of the kind of user experience you’ve built.

In other words, there’s no need to worry. If you’re committed to providing a top-notch digital experience to your users, CWVs should prove to be yet another tool in your toolbox.

When Will Core Web Vitals Take Effect?

Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will be incorporated into their algorithm starting May 2021. CWVs is already live and available on your Google Search Console, so you’re able to prepare ahead of the update taking full effect in May 2021.

How Will This New Algorithm Update Affect My Site?

While your site itself will remain unchanged, your rankings on Google’s SERPs may or may not be affected when the CWV update takes effect. If you already have an optimal user experience, you may very well maintain your ranking or even get a boost. However, if your CWVs prove to be subpar, your page rankings might fall off.

Let’s take a look at the three benchmarks you’ll want to achieve in order to maintain or improve your rankings:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — Should take place within 2.5 seconds of the page first starting to load. Remember, LCP is the largest visual element(s) at the top of your page.
• First Input Delay (FID) — Should be less than 100 milliseconds. FID ensures proper levels of interactivity, or responsiveness.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — Should maintain a score of less than 0.1. CLS measures the visual stability of pages as they load.

As you begin to see how these metrics affect your page rankings, you’ll have a better understanding of why Core Web Vitals are important to your website and its visibility.

How Can I See Google’s CWV Scoring From My Site?

You can easily access your CWV scores on Google Search Console. Click on the “Enhancements” tab, and you’ll be able to see a breakdown of your scores for both Mobile and Desktop.

Remember, the new CWVs aren’t the only metrics you’ll want to keep an eye on. Google still ranks pages based on the following factors that have been a part of its algorithm for years:

• HTTPS serving
• Mobile-friendly optimization
• Lacking intrusive interstitial pop-ups
• Safe browsing and free of malware

How To Improve Core Web Vitals

Once you’ve determined that your Core Web Vitals need improvement, here are a few steps you may consider that will help your scores:

• Ensure that images and videos topping your page are fully optimized.
• Optimize JavaScript so only necessary code is being executed.
• Reduce simultaneous third-party coding to a minimum.
• Keep file transfer requests as small as possible.

Maintaining your rankings in the Google SERPs is an ongoing effort. And the recent CWV update only reinforces what site owners have always known: user experience is key to creating successful digital enterprises.

Is your site or store the fastest it can be? Get your website ready for CWV with managed content and commerce hosting from Hostdedi. 

Start your free trial of Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce and see the difference fully managed hosting from Hostdedi can make.

With Hostdedi, you’ll get:

• Automatic platform & plugin updates and proactive security patching.
• Improved page speeds with our built-in content delivery network.
• Image compression to reduce browser load times.
• Near-instant asset caching.
• Customizable tech stack.
• 24/7/365 access to support experts with deep knowledge of WordPress, WooCommerce, and more — we’re here when things go sideways or when you need some extra hands.  

Start your 14-day managed WordPress or WooCommerce free trial.

Pop-ups, broken links, and auto-playing videos are just some of the things that stress your readers out on websites. Slow loading times are the primary reason users bounce from a site. 

You want your website’s visitors to have a great experience. You don’t want them to get all stressed out and leave because your site won’t load. The ultimate goal is for visitors to stay on your site, browse, and make a purchase.

How to Create a WordPress Performance Tuning Strategy >>

That’s why it’s essential to understand how to improve website performance in WordPress.

How to Improve Website Performance in WordPress

Causes of Slow Loading Speeds

Nothing will make a visitor leave your site faster than slow loading speed. If the page doesn’t load for them immediately, they’ll click off and find another option. Slow load time causes a higher bounce rate, costs you return visitors, and eliminates the potential for a sale.

The 2021 Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

Various things cause slow loading speeds on websites, including:

• Poor Hosting. Your website will load more slowly if your web hosting server isn’t properly configured.
• Page Size. Large page files cause your website to load slowly. Large pages typically are caused by images that aren’t optimized or compressed for online use.
• Bad Plugins. Poorly coded or infrequently updated plugins can slow your site down significantly.
• Browser Cache. If your site is not providing cached pages, load times will be substantially longer.
• External Scripts. External scripts such as ads and font loaders can negatively impact your site’s performance.

How to Improve Website Performance in WordPress

Now that you know some things that might cause your site to load slowly, here’s how to improve website performance in WordPress.

5 Advanced Techniques to Speed Up Your WordPress Site >>

Invest in Quality Hosting

The company that hosts your website matters. Don’t just go with the first web hosting company you find in a Google search. And price does matter. The cheapest option when it comes to hosting is probably not the best choice for performant sites. 

Do some research and ask for recommendations. Be willing to invest in a hosting company with a strong reputation that balances speed with comfort and cost.

“Get the best host you can afford; one that genuinely cares about caching and speed, etc.”

Brin Wilson of Winning WP

Update Core Technology

There is a reason there are new versions of technology like HTML, PHP, etc. They contain improvements and new features that help improve speed and performance. Therefore, you need to keep them updated. Use the latest WordPress version for the best performance.

Minimize the Theme

You want your theme to reflect your brand’s image, but you have to be careful about the theme you choose. Some of them are just bloated with unnecessary features that slow down your site. 

“Start with the barebones theme. There are a lot of bloated commercial themes that are packed with things you’ll likely never use.”

Web Designer Eric Karkovack

Do your best to find a theme that provides what you need and nothing extra. It’s best to get a minimal theme and add the functionality you need via plugins. That way, you aren’t running anything unnecessary to your site’s operations.

The 15 Most Popular WordPress Plugins in 2021 >>

Maintain the Database

Regular database maintenance is vital for keeping your database lean, clean, and operating smoothly. Items to remove from the database include uninstalled plugins and post revisions. Tools are available to help you clean your database if you aren’t sure how to do it yourself.

You also can hire an outside service to clean it for you. This is also where your hosting company plays a role. The right hosting companies do regular maintenance of the databases. 

Patrick Garman of Mindsize says he has strong opinions about the importance of maintaining your database.

“A plugin can’t solve a performance problem. It can only hide it. It’s better to instead find the root cause and solve that.”

Set Up Monitoring

It’s entirely possible that your site runs slowly for others but not for you. That’s why you need to set up monitoring to measure your site’s speed regularly. Monitoring allows you to ensure your site is running at its best and make any necessary updates.

Optimize Images

Images take up the most space on a page. They are likely to impact loading time if you don’t make them as small as possible without losing quality. There are many websites you can use to compress photos before you put them on your site. Plugins also are available to do this automatically.

How to Convert to WebP images on WordPress >>

Cache Pages

Cache for WordPress means storing commonly accessed data to speed up processing. A computer can access this information quickly while retrieving any new information related to the site. Caching is the most common way to get your website to load faster and generally perform better. You can use a plugin for caching. Your web host likely also includes this service.

Run a CDN

A content delivery network distributes the work of delivering content to your web browser. Using a CDN is more efficient because it increases the number of sources, their closeness, and caching. Services are available to do this for you, but it also may be part of your web host package.

Use Minification

Minification reduces website load time by eliminating unnecessary content in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. Plugins are available to do this. It also may be part of your package with your web host.

Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is using images in your content that you don’t host on your site. Instead of putting the image in your media library, you provide a link to a site the image loads from. People also can use images from your site in this way. 

Hotlinking takes away from your bandwidth because your server has to work to deliver the image to another site. It also adds nothing to your site’s traffic.

Improve WordPress Website Performance with Hostdedi

There’s a lot to consider about how to improve website performance in WordPress. As you can see, many factors affect loading time.

But the single greatest factor affecting website performance is your host.

A good host company, like Hostdedi, will manage your site, so you don’t have to worry about slow loading times. Contact us today to learn how we can help.

Or, try fully managed WordPress hosting from Hostdedi. Experience faster load times and accelerated site speed for yourself. Start your free two-week trial today.

WordPress powers 40% of the websites online. And WordPress plugins power these WordPress sites. WordPress plugins extend the capabilities of your website. There are thousands to choose from — but that can be overwhelming for site owners.

The Events Calendar + iThemes, who like Hostdedi, are members of the Liquid Web family of brands, recently conducted a survey of over 1400 WordPress users to see which plugins are most used and loved in the community.

Keep reading to learn the most popular WordPress plugins across five categories: commerce, security, page builders, forms, and search engine optimization. 

The Most Popular WordPress Plugins Chosen By You

Did you know that there are nearly 60,000 available plugins to choose from?

Top Commerce Plugins

Many WordPress users rely on plugins to make their site function as an online business. In fact, a significant portion of survey respondents utilize commerce-driven plugins. Commerce plugins help with payment processing, the checkout process, and managing paywalls. Here are the top commerce plugins WordPress users love.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce is a great option for beginners because it’s easy to understand and flexible for customizing. You can easily add WooCommerce to WordPress — it’s simply to install and is free.

2021 WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Set Up Your WooCommerce Store in 5 Steps >>

Event Tickets

Event Tickets is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies the process of selling and managing tickets for events — whether in person or virtual. Users can plug and play with simple setup or customize their features for a more personalized experience.

MemberPress

MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that’s dedicated to creating and managing membership subscriptions. Complete with robust reporting, integrations for payment gateways, and built-in security, MemberPress can help you build out and manage your membership site.

How to Improve Website Performance in WordPress >>

Top Security Plugins

We live in a world where any website can be vulnerable to security threats. Fortunately, there are plenty of WordPress plugins to help protect your site. These plugins offer functions including brute force protection, file change detection, site and database backups, and more. Here are the top security plugins WordPress users rely on.

iThemes Security

iThemes Security is a WordPress plugin that offers built-in malware scanning, password protection, file change protection, and database backups.

Akismet

Akismet is a WordPress plugin that protects your site from spam. This plugin is dedicated to stopping spam comments and contact form submissions.

WordFence

WordFence is another security WordPress plugin option that caters to enterprises. This plugin provides you with an endpoint firewall and malware scanner to keep your site safe.

Updraft

Updraft is a WordPress backup plugin. You can manually backup your WordPress site or schedule regular, automated backups with this plugin.

Top Page Builder Plugins

Many WordPress users rely on page builder plugins to customize their website without the need to code. These plugins empower users to control the look of their sites by simply dragging, dropping, or selecting elements. Here are the top page builder plugins from the survey.

Elementor

Elementor is a page builder plugin that comes with built-in widgets, which make it easy to put together your WordPress site.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is another page builder plugin option for WordPress users. This is a free plugin that offers visual, drag-and-drop functions to build your WordPress pages.

What is Beaver Builder Page Builder? A Feature-Rich WordPress Page Builder >>

Divi

Divi is a WordPress theme and page builder plugin. Divi also offers drag and drop functions for building and real-time visual editing.

Form Plugins

Collecting form responses from users was a top priority among survey respondents. Most come with basic settings that let you choose the type of input (i.e. text fields, dropdown menus). Others are more complex. Here are the top plugins to streamline form creation. 

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that helps you build forms for your website. The plugin comes with built in form fields and conditional logic.

Contact Forms 7

Contact Forms 7 is another form plugin option for your WordPress site. This free plugin allows you to manage multiple contact forms. Customization is available and it also features spam filtering built in.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is another free plugin option for WordPress users. This is a code-free plugin that makes creating forms easy for everyone.

WP Forms

WP Forms is another drag and drop form plugin for WordPress. Choose from their selection of templates to create your form, or customize it to your needs.

SEO Plugins

SEO is important for driving traffic to your website. Utilizing an SEO plugin can help you stay optimized and visible.

Yoast

Yoast is the top SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin helps users identify fruitful keywords and optimize their content to drive organic traffic from search engines. Survey respondents named Yoast as their go-to plugin for SEO.

Get the Full WordPress Plugins Guide

We’re just scratching the surface of the most popular WordPress plugins.

Learn more about the WordPress plugins survey and see the results in our eBook, The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins. The guide also offers steps to create your own plugin strategy, complete with a plugin strategy checklist.

Read this eBook to get:

• The most widely-used WordPress plugins in the world.
• Key considerations for selecting plugins for your site.
• Five steps to create your own plugin strategy for a faster, optimized site.

With Fully Managed WordPress from Hostdedi, Better is Built In

Get optimized hosting for more secure, scalable, better WordPress.

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Offering multiple shipping options is a great way to keep your customers happy and reduce your abandoned cart rates. Simply using the built-in options in WooCommerce, you can create a variety of shipping options for your customers, and you can do even more with a few premium extensions. 

In previous posts, we’ve covered the basics of what WooCommerce is. Now, in the following guide, we’ll explain the different shipping options available, their associated plugins, and how to set up shipping in WooCommerce.

Overview of WooCommerce Shipping Options

The WooCommerce shipping setup integrates smoothly with your WordPress website. When you add the plugin and activate it, you can immediately configure a variety of basic shipping options and create combinations to suit your business. 

There are three steps to follow when setting up basic WooCommerce shipping: 

1. Set up shipping zones.
2. Add shipping methods and rates.
3. Assign a shipping class (optional).

First, set up your shipping zones to specify areas of the world where you ship goods. You can also list countries or geographic areas where you do not offer shipping. 

Once you’ve set up your shipping zones, the next step is to add standard shipping methods and rate options within zones for a flat rate, free shipping, and/or local pickup. There are ways to expand these options, and we’ll cover them later. 

The last step is to assign a WooCommerce shipping class to each item in your product range. This helps you to customize the shipping method and rate for individual items. Let’s look at these steps in more detail. 

Shipping Zones

These zones let you define specific areas around the world where you will ship goods, and the shipping methods and rates you will offer within that zone.

Zones can be wide-ranging areas such as countries or continents, or they can be specific zip codes or states.  

For example, you could set up three general zones e.g., U.S. Domestic, Europe, and other. Then within each zone, specify the method of shipping available.  

When you’re setting up your shipping zones, you will notice there’s a default zone installed called Locations not covered by your other zones: 

This option will capture customers who don’t fit into any of the specified shipping zones. You’ll want to make sure you have at least one option in this default zone. Otherwise customers will get the message: No shipping methods offered to this zone and they won’t be able to checkout.

Before diving into WooCommerce shipping classes, let’s look at the different methods and rates for shipping.

Shipping Methods

The core plugin offers three basic shipping methods: flat rate, free shipping, and local pickup. You can add various options within these three methods.  

The flat rate option is a fixed cost you can offer using product shipping classes or per order or by individual product items. 

Free shipping can be offered across your entire product range, or only if certain rules are met. 

For example, free shipping can become an option with a coupon code entered, or when the customer reaches a minimum total cart value. 

However, if you want to offer local pickup, you need to be more specific and identify the regions or zip codes that qualify for this option. One example would be a Los Angeles-based business offering local pickup within the southern California area.

Options could be even more specific and list zip codes within a 40-mile radius of L.A. where local pickup options would be available. 

With WooCommerce’s shipping setup, you can create as many shipping zone and method combinations as you need for your business and customize each zone. By offering customers a variety of shipping methods, they’re more likely to find an option that works for them — and this reduces WooCommerce cart abandonment.

Shipping Rates

The flat rate, free shipping, and local pickup options come with the basic WooCommerce plugin. They’re quick and easy to set up and could be all you need when you start selling online. 

However, if you want to offer your customers a wider range of options, the WooCommerce table rate shipping extension lets you do this. For example, you can create a shipping rule based on an item’s weight by defining the minimum and maximum weight range or number of items per package. 

You can be even more specific by listing the shipping classes for which this rule applies, or add rules based on destination and price. You pay a monthly or annual subscription fee for shipping rates, but many feel it’s worth it for the additional flexibility it adds to your WooCommerce shipping options. 

Assign WooCommerce Shipping Classes

If all of your products cost the same amount to ship, or you’re going to use some of the premium extensions for getting rates from providers, then you don’t have to set up shipping classes. WooCommerce stores aren’t always this uniform though.

If you have products with very different shipping costs such as T-shirts and framed wall posters, you can set up a shipping class for each product type. And you can use these classes to affect how much shipping costs in the checkout process.

Each time you add new products to your store, you can assign a unique class, or group them with other product lines under shipping classes you’ve already set up.

Now that we’ve got an understanding of the options available to you, let’s take a look at how to set up shipping in WooCommerce using extensions and plugins.

WooCommerce Extensions and Plugins for Premium Shipping

Using third party plugins lets you expand your range of WooCommerce shipping options and offer real time shipping methods from main carriers like FedEx, UPS, or the United States Postal Service (USPS). Much like WooCommerce sales plugins are meant to drive revenue, shipping plugins help to optimize logistics.

The WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin enables you to set up unique shipping options using a range of variables e.g., product class, shipping zones, weight, or the number of items being shipped. It can be used for domestic and international deliveries. 

Several shipping carriers offer their own dedicated plugins (USPS and FedEx are two examples). Setting up shipping in WooCommerce stores using these extensions lets you offer real-time shipping quotes from your regular suppliers. 

If your business ships internationally or has distribution centers overseas, there are plugins that let you access local postal services in specific countries — like SAPO International Parcel Service. This gives you real time shipping rates within the South African postal service, and lets you offer shipping options by air or ground. 

ShipStation

ShipStation is another powerful WooCommerce plugin that connects smoothly with your WooCommerce store and helps you automate order fulfillment and sales processes. Although you still need to install shipping plugins (e.g., FedEx or USPS) to get up-to-date costs, ShipStation lets you monitor your business for order processing, invoicing, and inventory levels, and gives real-time analytics.  

If ShipStation is more than you need, WooCommerce shipping plugin Print Invoices & Packing Lists lets you easily manage invoices, packing lists, and customer emails within your store, and you can customize documents to mirror your business brand. Customers can also check their order status and invoices any time with the My Account option. 

If you run a dropshipping business, the WooCommerce Dropshipping plugin helps you manage your customer orders and dropshippers.

Shipping Extensions for WooCommerce

This list offers a few WooCommerce shipping setup plugins and premium extensions you can use with your online store. Explore their different features to find the WooCommerce plugin that’s ideal for your business.

How Does WooCommerce Calculate Shipping?

When a customer adds items to their cart, WooCommerce calculates shipping charges based on the products selected, shipping class, size, and weight. Once the customer enters their delivery address, the WooCommerce shipping calculator works out a cost based on their location and the shipping methods available. The customer can see this information on the cart page. 

You can also manually adjust your shipping rates and add additional charges for multiples of an item, discounts for purchasing specific products, handling fees, or taxes.

Let’s set up WooCommerce shipping for our T-shirt business and create options for shipping using the ready-to-use features already loaded into WooCommerce. 

How to Set up Basic Shipping in WooCommerce

When you build your site, the best themes for WooCommerce are already included in the basic plugin, no third parties required. Shipping isn’t too different. If your shipping needs aren’t too complex, you already have everything you need in WooCommerce.

Here are the basic steps for setting up shipping in WooCommerce. This guide to WooCommerce shipping from Fit Small Business has additional details if you need them.

1. Create Your Shipping Zones

On your WooCommerce dashboard, select WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping

Next, select Add shipping zone.

Give your new zone a name, add the zone region, and set up as many as you need. 

When you’ve set up your zones, you can leave them as general regions, or edit them to list as regions or zip codes. 

To edit a zone, Go to the Shipping zones screen. Move the cursor over the zone name to see the Edit and Delete options.

Select Edit and add regions or zip codes on the next screen. 

Save your changes. 

2. Add Shipping Methods

For each zone, select Add shipping method and highlight one option from the drop-down list. 

Select Add shipping method to save. 

By repeating these steps, you can offer multiple zone / shipping method options within your store. 

Edit Shipping Methods 

To edit shipping methods, hover the cursor over the zone name, select Edit then hover over the method you want to edit, and select Settings.  

In Flat rate Settings, you have the option to set the Tax status to None or Taxable. Your choice will be applied to all flat rate costs for this zone, and tax rates are calculated using the business address you entered when setting up your store.

If you want to add extra charges within your flat rate shipping option, add them using the Cost field and the formats below.  

Flat Rate charge per order – to add a charge to every order, enter a number (e.g., 4).  You don’t need to add currency symbols as WooCommerce uses the currency you chose during the store setup. 

Flat Rate charge per item – to add a charge to every item placed in the cart, enter the formula, [qty]*1.50. For our T-shirt business, it means $1.50 is added to every shirt purchased. If a customer buys five items, then $7.50 will be added to the total cart value. 

Flat Rate percentage charge – to add a fee based on a percentage of the customer’s cart value, enter the formula [cost]*12.In this case, an extra charge of 12% will be calculated and added to the cart total. 

3. Add Shipping Classes

Use this option to group specific products together or create shipping methods for individual items. For example, our framed artwork will have its own unique class as it’s oversized and heavy. But our T-shirts could be grouped with other items in an existing WooCommerce shipping class. 

Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping Classes  

At the bottom corner of the screen, select Add shipping class.

Enter the name of your class. Leave the slug field blank as it fills automatically and use the Description field for notes.

Select Save shipping classes. The new class will appear. 

The number 45 on the T-shirt line is the number of products grouped under that class.  

By completing all these steps, you have set up basic shipping options in your WooCommerce store, and can offer your customers flat rate, free shipping, and local pickup.

Stand Up an Online Store That Stands Out

Built on a platform trusted by experts, StoreBuilder by Hostdedi allows you to reap all the benefits of our Managed WordPress and WooCommerce without the complexity. You’re guaranteed fast, reliable, and safe managed hosting services that provide optimal security for WooCommerce stores.

No coding experience? No problem. 

There’s no reason to start from scratch or feel overwhelmed by a blank screen. Just answer a few questions, and in minutes, you’ll have your own online store with an intuitive, easy-to-navigate homepage that’s optimized to convert your visitors to customers. Check it out!

Start building your online storefront today — your first month is free.

This blog was originally published in May 2020. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Review Signal recently conducted a test to determine WooCommerce hosting performance benchmarks for 2021. They tested 11 leading web hosts, including Hostdedi.

And?

Hostdedi blew the competition out of the water on WP queries and PHP performance — two critical factors that affect site speed.

Keep reading to understand why these metrics are important to site owners like yourself.

How the Test Was Administered

With core values of transparency and honesty, Review Signal curates reviews of web hosting companies to provide useful information and insights for the public. They publish their algorithms and methodology if you’re curious about how they go about their testing.

In this experiment, Review Signal determined performance on:

• Peak performance — measured how well hosting responded to large numbers of users visiting a website.
• Consistency — measured using uptime monitoring to ensure servers could remain available over an extended period.

For consistency, the tests for all hosts were performed on a WooCommerce dummy site with the same plugins. The same theme was used for each, as were sample products.

To test peak performance, they went from 10 to 1000 users, then stayed at 1000 users for an extended period.

WP Queries and PHP Performance Results

You can see the results below for PHP performance and WP queries. In this chart, being low in blue and high in red is key — that represents fast PHP processing and large amounts of WP queries.

As you can see, Hostdedi led the pack with the best performance in this test.

Why Does This Matter?

It’s great to do well in a performance test. But what does that mean for site owners?

Well, today’s WordPress sites are pretty dynamic and interactive. They’re often ecommerce stores, online learning sites, membership sites, and more. These sites go beyond a basic blog — and they require more than just caching to perform well.

To be successful, these sites need to be able to handle a lot of PHP processing and WordPress queries. A host that can take on these demands will provide you with fast site speed.

If you want to speed up WordPress sites, look for a host with fast PHP processing, and large amounts of WP queries.

Improve Performance With the Right Host

At Hostdedi, we’ve seen sites double their performance and speed, just by switching to Hostdedi fully managed hosting.

Learn more about optimized hosting with Hostdedi. Or, see for yourself the difference Hostdedi can make for you.

With Hostdedi, you get:

• A built-in content delivery network (CDN) with 22 locations.
• Image compression for fast sites.
• 24/7/365 support.
• No traffic limits.

Get started with a free two-week trial of fully managed WordPress or WooCommerce. No credit card required.

Consider all the time and effort it takes to gather content, design your website, and attract visitors. If they come to your website but leave before they find what they want, it’s a tragic waste. 

Your content could be completely relevant to your visitors, but they won’t stick around to wait for that page to load. That’s one of the reasons why page speed matters.

Speed is crucial to improving website performance — but it’s only one factor. We’re going to explain precisely why website performance matters, and how a subpar website can undermine your digital marketing efforts.

Why Page Speed Matters in Improving Website Performance

A speedy website is critical to online businesses. The days of dial-up are long gone — if your user experience involves impatient toe-tapping, it will also involve a disheartening bounce rate. 

A positive user experience and ecommerce success go hand in hand. Your website’s users need to be happy whether they visit on a desktop or their smartphone. 

According to Perficent, 61% of website traffic came from mobile devices in 2021 — but those connections are typically slower. 

If you want to stay competitive in the fast-changing ecommerce world, then improving your website performance on all platforms is key.

Here are more reasons why page speed matters to your website performance.

How to Create a WordPress Performance Tuning Strategy >>

Page Speed Impacts Your Google Ranking

Google wants to give its users the best solution to their queries. People want the quickest answers to their questions. So, a faster web page with the right information will rank better than a slower page with similar content. 

In its 2018 Speed Update, Google confirmed it would continue to use page speed as a key ranking factor in its algorithms. This is part of its effort to make the internet ultra-fast, functional, and highly accessible. You’re rewarded with a higher position on the search engine results pages (SERPs) if your website has faster load times.  

A Quick Website Enhances Your Brand’s Credibility

In addition to an improved user experience, measuring your website speed and optimizing it can make your business seem more legitimate.

According to Statista, from 2014 to 2021, the amount of digital buyers has only increased. At the same time, more sketchy website owners have popped up to scam those consumers. 

But you’re a responsible business owner — you want a credible ecommerce storefront to communicate that to potential customers. Improve website performance to present your brand as reliable and professional.

Website Speed Influences Shopping Behaviour 

You should be measuring website speed like you track your sales — because, in ecommerce businesses, a mere fraction of a second can equal a significant increase in revenue. 

According to 2020 research from Google, a 0.1-second improvement in mobile website speed resulted in an 8.4% increase in conversion rates for retail businesses. 

If your website is slow, you’re leaving money on the table.

A Faster Website Reduces Bounce Rates

Website bounce rates indicate the percentage of visitors who leave after they view only one page. 

Poor website performance can instantly repel potential customers. And the attention span of internet users is only getting shorter. A 2017 report from Akamal Technologies found a two-second delay in page load time could increase a website’s bounce rate by 103%.

If you want to speed up your website, start by assessing your hosting service. Hostdedi offers managed WordPress hosting with features designed to make your website ultra-fast. 

Key Metrics to Help Improve Website Performance

Now you know why page speed matters to your website’s performance. 

But how do you diagnose the factors that slow down your website? 

There is a multitude of factors that can contribute to a slow loading time, including: 

Here’s the good news:

Improving your website performance doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s dive into a few key metrics to help you assess your ecommerce website — and where you can make your store faster.

Website Performance Metrics 

1. Website speed
2. Bounce rate
3. Number of page visitors
4. Session duration
5. Traffic sources
6. Exit page

Google Analytics: The Website-Improvement Power Tool

There are many performance analytic tools that can help, but Google Analytics leads the charge. For WordPress websites, it’s the single most helpful performance tool. By measuring your website speed, Google Analytics gives you the data you need to increase search engine optimization (SEO).

Web performance metrics provide useful information that give you actionable options for optimizing your website. We’re going to dig into some of the most important metrics to check and improve your website’s performance.

1. Website Speed

We’ve covered why page speed matters to improving your website’s performance.

• It gives you a higher search ranking in search engines.
• It improves your website’s credibility.
• It boosts your conversion rates.
• It reduces your bounce rate.

There are several measurements that determine your average website speed, including time to first byte (TTFB), DNS lookup time, and server response time. GTMetrics and WebPage Test are free analytics tools for measuring website speed. They also provide useful suggestions on how to improve scores and make your website faster.

Improving your website speed starts with good quality hosting. Even if you don’t use WordPress, Fully Managed Magento Hosting from Hostdedi can optimize your ecommerce website for speed, security, and scale. 

2. Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website without taking any important action on a particular page. High bounce rates might indicate visitors can’t find what they want on your website. 

Statistics indicate that as page load time increases from 1-5 seconds, the bounce rate might increase by as much as 90%. This further explains why page speed matters for your visitors. 

3. Number of Page Visitors

Screenshot – ALT: Screenshot of Live Traffic Feed 

While the number of visitors who view your website may not tell you a lot about your website’s technical performance, it can tell you if your content is a bigger problem than a slow website. 

The number of visitors allows you to gauge how engaging or appealing your website is. Low numbers mean less traffic, and so you need to take action. To see who is visiting your website, use real-time visitor tracking tools, such as the live traffic view inside Google Analytics.

4. Session Duration

This metric calculates the time a visitor actively interacts on your website. Session duration is an especially good metric to measure performance for an online store. If visitors spend a lot of time exploring the links and pages for your products and services, you can surmise they’re interested in what you offer.

You can also surmise a slow website isn’t frustrating users and preventing them from happily clicking around on your website for as long as they want.

5. Traffic Sources

You need to find out which traffic sources are bringing visitors to your website. The most probable traffic sources include organic search, banner ads, and referrals. 

This metric compares each of these sources and can be an indication of how your website is performing. A large volume of referral traffic, for example, can indicate that your business is becoming popular on other websites or on social media.

6. Exit Page

Like most websites, your online store might have various steps in the conversion process. When visitors leave before completing a purchase, you need to ask why. 

A person might have simply changed their mind — but they might have also been turned off by a complex process. When you know when most users leave, you can optimize your website to increase conversions. 

Final Thoughts: Why Website Performance Matters + How to Improve Performance

You should now have a good sense of why website performance matters to your online business. This knowledge and the right metric analysis can empower you to assess whether you’re doing everything possible to optimize your company’s bottom line.

Google Analytics is a free tool to help you measure website speed. It also measures the metrics that are most relevant to your business and lets you know if your website is operating at peak performance. 

If you just created a new website, measuring your website speed should be top of the list. It allows you to optimize your pages for speed.

Improve Your Website Performance With Hostdedi

Improving your website’s performance starts with high-quality hosting. 

Hostdedi’s experts understand why website performance matters, and we can help you choose the best product for optimal performance. We have products that can optimize established websites, or give new entrepreneurs the ability to hit the internet running (fast!) with StoreBuilder from Hostdedi. 

If your online business has the need for speed, check out what Hostdedi has to offer today. 

Ecommerce optimization is critical to having a speedy and successful online store. Keep reading for actionable recommendations you can apply to your ecommerce business to increase site performance and conversions.

What Is Ecommerce Optimization?

Ecommerce Optimization Recommendations & Best Practices

1. Try Lazy Loading

If you want to optimize your ecommerce website, consider implementing lazy loading, otherwise known as asynchronous loading.

Lazy loading first pulls low-resolution images and then replaces them with higher-resolution images. This happens once the page’s other content has been loaded. It is a great method for easing server load and optimizing content delivery.

The use of this has steadily increased over the past few years as more ecommerce developers have become aware of it. Consider implementing in your site build to improve site speed and user experience.

2. Remove Hero Image Carousels from Your Site

Hero image carousels are image slideshows that alternate between multiple images. They have long been the bane of site speed for two reasons.

• One, they require multiple high-resolution images.
• Two, they are usually situated at the top of the home page. 

These two factors can combine to make home page loads take a lot longer than they should.

3. Optimize Ecommerce Images for Faster Loading

Product images are critical on ecommerce websites. But large image files can hurt your site’s performance.

Therefore, it is recommended you compress images strategically on your site. Utilize an image compression tool to reduce the file size without compromising image quality.

You may also want to consider utilizing a different image format. While most images tend to be GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs, there’s a newer option called WebP. You may want to consider using WebP images on your site, as they are 30% smaller than JPGs.

How to Convert to WebP Images on WordPress >>

4. Utilize a Content Delivery Network

You may also want a content delivery network (CDN) to optimize your ecommerce site. The network of servers that comprise a CDN can really speed up your site. That’s because the CDN uses the server closest to a user to deliver content, such as an image.

CDNs are available as a standalone service, or are provided within a hosting service. Hostdedi provides a built-in CDN in its hosting services.

5. Have a Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Site

Responsive sites are the norm. Over the last several years, site owners have continued to optimize their site designs for mobile users, and in several cases even offered offline apps.

Headless applications provide the ability to make content and websites available offline. Instead of adding an app to multiple app stores, users can now save a website to their desktop for access at a later date (when they don’t have an internet connection).

6. Add a Search Function to Your Site

Site search is an important ecommerce store addition. Searchers are more likely to convert. 

In the past, search has often remained unoptimized and more of an afterthought. However, with search offerings such as Elasticsearch making it more powerful than ever before, it may be time to start implementing search in both mobile and desktop views.

7. Simplify Checkout to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Anything you can do to make checkout easier will help reduce shopping cart abandonment on your ecommerce site. One way to do that is through simplified checkout — either through a short, multi-step process or single step checkout.

Top 7 Ecommerce Website Features: What Customers Want in an Ecommerce Site >>

Multi-step checkout processes are where the checkout process is divided between several pages. Despite having multiple pages, the process is usually kept short so consumers are not turned away by a lengthy checkout. 

However, the one-step checkout has increased in popularity. More stores are offering consumers the ability to make instant purchases with just a few clicks. A single-step checkout could be a differentiator for your store.

8. Apply SEO Best Practices to Drive Visibility

SEO is critical to ecommerce optimization. Ecommerce search engine optimization makes your site more effective. By being more visible to Google, you’ll bring in more visitors, which leads to more sales.

For an effective digital content strategy, use keyword research tools to find high-volume search queries from your target audience. Infuse these keywords strategically across your site in headers, product pages, product descriptions, blogs, URLs, image file names, and meta tags and titles too.

How to Do SEO for Ecommerce Websites: Techniques, Tools, & Best Practices >>

9. Optimize for Google’s Top Metrics

If you’re looking for a way to get ahead of the competition on the results page, optimizing your site’s speed may be how you do it. Google has now made site speed a key ranking factor. 

In fact, site speed is one of Google’s recently introduced Core Web Vitals. These are Google’s newest page experience metrics.

Core Web Vitals include:

• Largest Contentful Paint, or the loading speed of the largest visual element on your page. 
• First Input Delay, or the time in between a user’s first interaction and the page’s response to that action.
• Cumulative Layout Shift, or the visual stability of your page as it loads.

By having a site that loads and responds quickly, with visual stability, you’ll position yourself to be viewed favorably by Google. And this will help your site rank better. Higher rankings lead to more visibility, more site traffic, and as a result more sales.

Ecommerce Optimization Starts With Your Hosting Provider

You can do all the ecommerce optimizations you want, but if you have the wrong hosting service, it won’t make any difference.

Why?

The single biggest factor affecting store performance is the hosting configuration that comes from the host you’ve chosen. 

That being said, the simplest thing you can do for ecommerce optimization and performance gains is to change your hosting provider.

That’s where fully managed hosting from Hostdedi comes in.

With a dedicated solution for WooCommerce hosting, you get:

• Automated scaling to keep your site fast during traffic surges.
• Automatically optimized images for fast loading times.
• Lightning fast load times thanks for our built-in CDN.
• And more!

See why users gave us a 4.6 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot. Experience optimized hosting for your store. Start your free two-week trial today.

Related Content

This blog was originally published in March 2019. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

You already know the basics about how to speed up your WordPress site. Now, take your site to the next level with these advanced WordPress optimization techniques. In this blog, you’ll learn the three key components of web performance and get five actionable techniques to speed up WordPress.

Keep reading to learn how to speed up your WordPress site with these advanced techniques.

Importance of WordPress Site Speed

Before getting into the techniques, let’s reiterate the importance of site speed. It’s not just a “nice to have.” Site speed is important for both SEO and conversion rates. It’s also critical to providing a good user experience.

Site visitors have high expectations for page loading time. About two thirds of mobile visitors expect pages to load under 4 seconds. However, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile webpage is 15.3 seconds.

When that happens, your site visitors will likely leave and find another site. In fact, 79% of customers would take their business to a competitor when encountering a site load time of 7 seconds or more.

How to Create a WordPress Performance Tuning Strategy >>

As for SEO, site speed is one of the top factors that influence rankings. Simply put, slow sites hurt your visibility and organic traffic.

Sites should load under 3 seconds. Anything above 4 seconds can impact the web rankings and core web vitals. These are the key metrics Google uses to rank your site. Sites loaded in 300-400 ms experience 36% higher keyword rankings. They also saw a 10% increase in clickthrough rate.

Slow WordPress sites also hurt conversion rates. In fact, conversion rates drop 4.42% with each growing second of load time between 0-5 seconds.

This context emphasises the importance of speeding up your WordPress site.

Understanding the 3 Components of Web Performance

When we talk about web performance, it can be broken down into three main categories:

• Resource management — includes things such as:
  • Static asset distribution (CDN)
  • Fonts
  • Tracking scripts
  • Asset compression
  • Image optimization
  • Full page cache
• Code — This includes:
  • Core WordPress
  • Plugins
  • Themes
  • .htaccess
  • wp-config.php
• Hosting — These are the things affecting site speed related to your host and can include:
  • Time to first byte
  • Disk speed
  • Database performance
  • Server configuration
  • Object and/or micro-caching
  • PHP workers
  • Security

5 Advanced WordPress Optimization Techniques

Before you begin optimizing your WordPress site, set a baseline. Baselining is important because it shows how things have improved over time. Set your baseline before you begin to optimize your WordPress site so you can accurately measure the impact of any adjustments you make.

For example, waterfall from GTMetrix coupled with page load speed and first contentful draw is a great indication of performance.

1. Find Poor Performing Plugins and Themes

Unfortunately, there are many poorly performing WordPress plugins and themes available. These can slow down the performance of your WordPress site. Fortunately, you don’t have to remove a plugin’s capability if it performs poorly. Instead, find a better performing plugin or theme.

Find performance offenders and replace them with alternatives. This works for both frontend and backend performance tuning.

When examining your plugins and themes, look at:

• Inefficient queries.
• Double loading of resources and libraries.
• Calls to external scripts.
• Calls to nonexistent resources.

If you don’t want to replace a plugin or theme on your site, there’s another option. You can go through support channels to contact the plugin developer and ask them to adjust it accordingly. 

That way, you don’t need to remove and replace that plugin on your site. It’s also great for the WordPress community, as it benefits all users of that plugin or theme.

2. Optimize Your Fonts

Optimizing delivery of fonts can dramatically change performance on your WordPress site.

To speed up your WordPress site, don’t load fonts that aren’t being used. You should also load Google or Type Fit fonts locally. Preload fonts when it’s appropriate. This helps ensure fonts are available and that they are being concurrently delivered

You can use the plugin OMGF (Optimize My Google Fonts) which enables you to host Google fonts locally.

3. Load GA Locally

Loading GA scripts locally can shave time off total page load time and can make concurrent loading easier. You can use the CAOS WordPress plugin to do this. This enables loading from your CDN locally.

4. Fine Tune Full Page Cache

Caching for WordPress is important for improving loading time. Go beyond standard caching and optimize your full page cache for performance and site speed.

For full page cache:

• Be specific about page exceptions.
• Always remember browser caching.
• Set cache expiry, which can reduce stress on the server and accelerate page load times.
• Don’t forget cookies.

5. Utilize a CDN to Serve Static Assets

A CDN is the finishing touch to speeding up your WordPress site. Think of your CDN as a cache delivery network. A CDN can deliver cached assets quicker by delivering them closer to your visitor, thanks to different geographic server locations. Because of this, you can leverage CDN super powers to reduce the overall server load and speed up load time.

Bottom Line

It’s important to speed up WordPress if you want your site to rank well on Google, convert, and provide an excellent user experience. Utilize these advanced WordPress optimization techniques to speed up your site and boost performance. 

If your WordPress host is not providing you with the speed you need, consider fully managed WordPress hosting from Hostdedi.

Hostdedi can make your WordPress site faster with:

• A built-in CDN with 22 locations.
• Advanced caching for ultra-fast loading.
• Image compression to lower browser load times.
• And much more.

Get started with managed WordPress for free. Start your free two-week trial today.

A pricing strategy involves determining the ideal price of a product or service based on the market factors — market condition, customers’ purchasing power, market demand, and competitor pricing.

Why is it important?

Price mistakes can bring down your business.

Setting low prices to attract customers may work initially, but it makes it hard to raise prices down the road. Conversely, high prices give you more profit margins on items but could reduce sales.

What’s the solution?

You need to strike a balance between sales and profitability. To do so, you need to choose the right pricing strategy for your business.

Let’s look at some popular pricing methods you should consider for your price decisions.

Pricing Methods

Penetration Pricing

In a penetration pricing strategy, companies set the product price point significantly lower than their competitors. It enables new businesses — or new product lines of established businesses — to enter a market and quickly attract many customers.

The price rises once the promotion ends or after the company achieves its desired objectives.

A penetration pricing strategy will help you gain a significant market share with the low selling prices. You can then retain your customers while increasing prices with marketing strategies like occasional product offers.

This method of pricing suits new companies that are looking to break into competitive markets. Once they acquire customers’ trust, they can raise the prices.

Price Skimming

Price skimming means setting significantly high prices at the product launch and lowering the price gradually as the product demand decreases and new competitors enter the market.

Price skimming caters to early adopters willing to pay a premium price for the latest product or service. The initial high price helps cover the product development costs, while the later lower costs protect your market position against new competitors.

It complements new products in fashion and technology businesses where the latest products are highly sought after.

Economy Pricing

Economy pricing targets the price-sensitive buyer.

You provide products and services at lower prices than the competition, but you also require lower costs of production to attain a reasonable profit margin.

The success of this pricing model depends upon attracting buyers by providing a better offer than they find in the market. Still, it can be risky if you don’t get the large sales volumes, and it ends up hurting your profits as a retailer.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing, also known as demand pricing, is a flexible pricing method that sets prices based on market and customer demand.

It is commonly used by utility businesses, airlines, and hotels.

Companies vary prices depending on what the customer is willing to pay at that time. For example, the demand and price for event venues are high during festivities, and customers are willing to pay that high price.

Freemium Pricing

In a freemium pricing method, a company offers a basic form of a product or service for free, hoping that the customer will be willing to upgrade for more features in the future.

This model suits a SaaS or software business.

You can offer customers limited memberships or free trials so they see value in your product and trust you as the provider before committing to an extended partnership.

Also, in exchange for the limited offer, you can get their contact information, including their email address, and use email marketing to nurture prospects into loyal customers.

Premium Pricing

Premium pricing is a strategy that tactically sets higher prices on your products than your close competitors. By this, you give customers the notion that your product is of higher quality — higher perceived value — than others in the market.

If it succeeds, premium pricing secures more profit, improves brand value, and builds your business’s general perception.

Cost-Plus Pricing

In a cost-plus pricing strategy, you base your retail price on the cost of production of the product or service.

Ideally, you’re setting prices depending on the profit you want to make.You can add a profit margin in percentages — markup percentage — to your production cost for that.

The cost-plus model will only be effective if your closest competitors are also using the same model. If your competitors use a pricing tactic to acquire customers, their prices might be lower, and customers might turn to them.

Bundle Pricing

Bundle pricing is a strategy where you put together more than one product or service and sell them under one package.

Bundling helps your customers buy more products at a reduced price than if they bought them separately.

For the businesses, it attracts more customers and sells products that usually don’t move fast.

Psychological Pricing

Psychological pricing is an effective pricing strategy that targets human psychology to get more customers.

The most common psychology pricing tactic is the nine-ending price effect, as a product sells better at $599 than at $600.

You also see psychological pricing in action when businesses place a more expensive item next to the one the customer is willing to buy. ‘Buy one, get one free’ tactic is also another example.

When using this growth hacking strategy, you need to understand your audience. It works best if your customers are typical savers who love discounts and offers.

Final Thoughts: 9 Pricing Strategies To Boost Your Ecommerce Sales

A pricing strategy is a crucial aspect of your ecommerce business marketing plan. It helps you set the right prices and determine your business profit margin.

You can use any of the 9 pricing strategies we have discussed to boost your ecommerce sales and scale your business.

Still, remember that an ecommerce pricing strategy that works for one business might not work for you. Understand your target audience, gauge the market demand, and research your competitor’s pricing to see which pricing strategy fits your needs.

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