Caching is a technique that is used to improve the performance and speed of websites and other online applications. It works by storing copies of frequently accessed data in temporary storage called cache so that it can be quickly served to users when requested. This can help reduce the amount of time and resources required to generate, improving the overall performance and user experience of a website or application.

For a more detailed definition of caching you can visit 10Web Glossary.

There are several types of cache that can be used to improve the performance of a website or application, including server cache, browser cache, and application cache. If you are experiencing a high volume of traffic or generating a large amount of data within a website or application, caching is a good option.

In this article, we will see how to clear the WordPress cache safely and efficiently. It’s important to note that clearing the cache in WordPress can have an impact on the performance of your website, as it will temporarily disable the cache and cause your website to generate new cached versions of your pages and posts. However, in most cases, the benefits of having a fresh and up-to-date cache will outweigh any temporary performance issues.

FAQ

Server Cache vs. Browser Cache

A server cache is a type of caching technique that stores the cached data on the website’s server. It works by storing copies of frequently accessed web pages and resources in a cache so that they can be quickly served to users when requested. 

The server-side cache is helpful when you are rendering web pages on the server side instead of the client browser or while fetching the data from the server with the help of GET APIs. In server-side rendering, the server takes the load of generating the HTML pages which are then cached on the server for future requests. This technique allows the browser to retrieve these generated web pages directly without putting a burden on the server to generate these pages. This speeds up the loading of web pages because it saves time on DB calls and backend script execution.

Also, while fetching the data from the server (backend) using the GET APIs we usually cache this data as well on the server. This helps in reducing the number of requests made to the database.

The above mentioned helps improve the overall performance and speed of a website by reducing the number of requests made to the database, the time required to get this data from the server, and the resources required to generate the web pages.

Browser cache, on the other hand, is a type of caching technique that stores the website’s cached data on the web browser. It uses the local computer hard drive to store the data.  It works by storing copies of frequently accessed web pages and resources so that they can be quickly served to the user when requested.

Both server cache and browser cache are useful for improving the performance and speed of a website, but they work in slightly different ways. The server cache is typically managed by the website owner or administrator, while the user’s web browser manages the browser cache.

Server cache can store a larger amount of data than browser cache. Browser cache, on the other hand, is stored inside the browser and can only be accessed by a single user.

In general, server cache is more effective for improving the overall performance of a website, as it can store a larger amount of data and is typically more efficient at serving web pages and resources to users. However, browser cache can also be useful for improving the performance of a website, particularly for users who access the same web pages and resources frequently.

Below are several key differences between server cache and browser cache that are worth noting.

Server cache and browser cache are both useful techniques for improving the performance and speed of a website and can be used together. Usually, when saying WordPress cache, we mean server cache, and not browser cache.

Why and how often should you clear the WordPress Cache?

Several reasons can determine when and how often you might want to clear server cache WordPress.

• If you make changes to your website, such as publishing a new blog post or updating an existing page, clearing the cache can help ensure that users see the most up-to-date version of your website. Good caching plugins usually clear the cache for these cases automatically. However, sometimes issues may happen that require manual cache cleaning after updating the content.
• If you are experiencing issues with your websites, such as broken links or incorrect content, clearing the cache can help resolve these issues.
• If your website is running slow or experiencing other performance issues, clearing the cache can sometimes help improve the performance of your website.

In general, it’s a good idea to clear the cache in WordPress periodically, especially if you are making frequent updates to your website or if you are experiencing issues with your website. However, the specific frequency with which you should clear the cache will depend on your specific needs and the tools and plugins you are using to manage the cache. 

Related Articles

• How to Serve Static Assets With an Efficient Cache Policy
• How to Ensure Text Remains Visible During Webfont Load
• 10 Fastest WordPress Themes Compared (Tested Results)

Usually, web servers and caching plugins allow you to set an expiration time for cached data so that the cache is automatically cleared after a certain period. This can help ensure that your website always has a fresh and up-to-date cache.

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How to clear WordPress cache with and without a plugin

At times clearing the cache manually can be intimidating. It takes time, effort, and technical knowledge to clear WordPress cache manually.

How to clear WordPress cache without a plugin

The object caching mechanism also known as WP_Object_Cache is the only built-in caching mechanism for WordPress. Although, this feature only stores data for the duration of the request in the memory. In case, if you are not using any caching plugin then this is how by default WordPress will perform the caching. Since the data is stored only for the duration of the request it is not a great way to speed up the website.

Web hostings may have page and file caches enabled, depending on subscription plans and server configuration. Usually, they cache static assets (file cache), such as Javascript, CSS files or images, and static webpages (page cache). 

There are two ways in which you can clear or purge the hosting cache in WordPress without a plugin: through the hosting provider and through the hosting plugin via the WordPress admin panel.

Purge the WordPress cache through the hosting provider

Nowadays, few hosting providers allow to purge WordPress cache settings directly from their hosting cpanel. If you are from those users whose hosting provider offers such a service then you can simply go to your hosting cpanel and clear the WordPress cache settings.

On the other side, there are various other hosting providers as well that don’t provide such convenience. In that case, you can purge the WordPress cache through the WordPress admin panel or by using a plugin. We will go through both of them in the sections below.

In the majority of cases, if hosting has a page cache, it provides some type of plugin integration, that resets the cache when you edit and update the pages from the WordPress dashboard.  Here is an example, of how to clear WordPress cache by using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin supported by the Hostinger platform. The Hostinger cache manager is based on LiteSpeed caching technology.

• From the WordPress admin panel under the “Plugins” section, you need to install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
• Download and Activate the LiteSpeed Cache plugin from the WordPress plugins page.
• After you have activated the plugin it will enable the cache option.
• In case, If you want to change cache settings then you can do it within the “Cache” section.
• When you make any new change to the site you can purge the cache generated by the LiteSpeed plugin so that the new change is reflected to all the users.

For other hostings, you need to locate the plugin responsible for caching. Usually, it is preinstalled, often as a must-use plugin. Use its settings and interface to trigger cache purge manually.

Please make a note that if you don’t properly clear your cache then it can result in a broken website.

How to clear WordPress cache with a plugin

Using caching plugins to manage the WordPress cache makes the process of clearing the cache a lot easier. You don’t need to worry about anything when you are using plugins to clear your WordPress cache. In this section, you will see how to clear the WordPress cache using various plugins.

LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is an all-in-one acceleration plugin that provides server-side caching and optimization features. It is a WordPress multisite plugin that works with plugins like WooCommerce, bbPress, Yoast SEO and ClassicPress.

Steps to clear WordPress cache with LiteSpeed Cache to auto clear cache using wordpress plugin:

• Download and Activate the LiteSpeed Cache plugin from the WordPress plugin page.
• After you have activated the plugin it will enable the cache option.
• In case, If you want to change cache settings then you can do it within the “Cache” section.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is another speed optimization and caching plugin that improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals score and overall user experience of your site. This helps in increasing website performance and reducing page load times.

To purge WordPress cache with W3 Total Cache  you can manage the cache settings from the “Page Cache” section of the plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache plugin is specifically designed to cache the content of the webpage on the server side. This plugin helps generate static HTML files so that they can be served to the user requesting the webpage instead of processing heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

To clear WordPress cache settings with WP Super Cache, go under “Settings” and then select “WP Super Cache”. Here, you have to select the “Caching On (Recommended)” option to enable caching.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is an all-in-one web performance plugin that provides various features, including the server-side caching to help enhance the speed and optimize the site. They do not provide a free version of their plugin. You need to buy a plan from their official site to download the plugin.

10Web Booster

10Web Booster is an all-in-one speed optimization plugin for improving the overall performance of the website. It has a built-in caching mechanism which makes it easier to clear the WordPress cache generated by the 10Web Booster plugin with just a click of a button. 10Web Booster performs both page caching and file cache. The caching affects the First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), and all metrics of the Core Web Vitals (CWV).

Follow the below steps to clear or purge the WordPress cache with the 10Web Booster plugin.

1. Open the 10Web dashboard as shown in the image.
2. After you have entered the dashboard you can then click on the “Settings” tab in the 10Web Booster menu. By default, the caching will be enabled for your plugin. To clear the cache, just click on the “Clear Cache” button that will clear your website’s cache.

This is how easy it is to clear the cache via the 10Web Booster plugin.

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How to clear browser cache

It’s really easy to clear the browser cache. Follow the steps below to clear the cached data in Chrome browser which is the most popular and widely used one.

1. Open the browser for which you want to clear the cache, in this case Chrome.
2. Press “F12”or “Option-Command-I” (for Mac) on the keyboard to open the Dev tools.
3. Now long press the refresh button of the browser until you get a list of options.
4. You will get the following 3 options: Normal reload, hard reload, and empty cache, hard reload.
   
5. Out of the 3 options, click on the option that says “Empty cache and hard reload” to clear the entire cache of your browser and perform a hard reload that will reload the page.

Conclusion

Clearing the cache in WordPress is a useful technique for ensuring that users see the most up-to-date version of your website. There are several ways of clearing the cache in WordPress. To clear server-side cache you can use a plugin or use the cpanel if your hosting provides it. To clear your browser cache use the Dev tools feature in your browser. 

We discussed when to clear the cache and how to easily do it using  popular plugins and hostings. In the case of 10Web Booster, that’s a simple automated experience. Use 10Web Booster to speed up your site and avoid caching issues. 

Finally, you can test your website after clearing the cache to ensure that everything is working as expected. If you are using the 10Web Booster plugin then you can be 100% sure that it will not break your site and you can safely and efficiently clear the cache in WordPress and improve the performance and user experience of your website.

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An online store is now a crucial strategic component for every successful business, as reports suggest 79% of customers purchase online at least once a month. And WooCommerce offers the quickest way to build a robust digital shopping platform.

However, ensuring WooCommerce sites provide a high-quality user experience requires business owners to speed up the WooCommerce database. A faster database can decrease page loading speed and allow users to interact with your webpage smoothly. The result is a satisfying customer journey with higher conversions.

In this post, we’ll discuss why it’s essential to optimize the WooCommerce database, explain its specifications, and suggest valuable tips to improve WooCommerce database performance.

What are the specifications of the WooCommerce database and why should you optimize it?

The WooCommerce database structure works within the WordPress platform, and stores some data in WordPress default tables and some in custom tables. The custom tables store customer-related information. 

wp_posts and wp_postmeta

The WooCommerce orders database table is the same default wp_posts table which acts as a built-in repository storing customer data automatically once they purchase through your store. The process works for registered and non-registered users.

The wp_posts table records all orders from every customer and contains the Order ID and post_type columns. You can apply a filter in your query to search for orders with post_type equal to “shop_order.”

But the wp_posts table only tracks orders. So within the WordPress database, you must use the wp_postmeta table to find a customer’s details associated with a particular Order ID. It will provide the customer’s first and last name, shipping details, meta_key, meta_value, etc.

The wp_postmeta table also stores product attributes as a serialized key: value pair. You can also access attribute information through the WooCommerce product attributes database table called wp_ terms. It contains information such as a product’s ID, color, size, etc.

wp_users and wp_usermeta

Likewise, wp_users and wp_usersmeta tables store registered WordPress users’ data, such as shipping details, payment-related information, and email address, if you disable the “Guest checkout” option. 

The wp_users table contains a user’s general information, while the wp_usermeta table contains billing details that WordPress uses for processing checkouts quickly if a visitor buys next time. The data allows WordPress to process purchases more quickly for repeat visitors.

The meta_value column against the _customer_user meta_key column in the wp_postmeta table links it with the wp_users and wp_usersmeta tables. For example, if the meta_value is “12” against _customer_user in the meta_key column, then you can search for user information with ID “12” in the wp_users table and user_id “12” in the wp_usersmeta table.

Why optimize?

Of course, manually finding information is challenging and time-consuming. You can use plugins that streamline the search process by providing an easy-to-use interface for finding the relevant data. Also, you will likely use additional plugins and extensions to enhance your site’s functionality.

But WooCommerce creates more tables to store information related to such plugins, increasing database size and decreasing performance. And that’s why you must speed up WooCommerce database to ensure you are not burdening your site with heavy and long queries that these plugins execute behind the scenes. 

Related Articles

• 25 Fastest WooCommerce Themes to Supercharge Your Business
• 7 Tips to Speed Up WooCommerce Checkout in No Time
• 8 Advanced Tips to Speed Up WooCommerce Backend
• 29 Tips and Tricks to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store

How to identify which database queries are taking the longest to run?

Sub-optimal queries from heavy plugins and large databases can hamper your site’s performance and increase bounce rates. 

Often, queries that are optimal at present can become problematic in the future as your site grows, and the query has to retrieve extensive data. For example, the WooCommmerce product database size increases as you add more products. 

Also, queries that require joining several large tables can become incredibly slow.  Here, we mention three ways to check which queries are taking the longest execution time.

1. Using the Query Monitor plugin: You can use the Query Monitor plugin, which gives insightful information through an easy-to-understand interface regarding query performance against a specific request. You can find out which requests require the highest number of queries, which have the longest execution time, the source of such queries, etc. 
2. The Debug Bar Plugin: Debug Bar is also helpful in finding slow SQL queries. However, it has an outdated interface that doesn’t readily display sub-optimal queries by highlighting and sorting them neatly in tables as Query Monitor. But it provides a function trace that leads you to the exact source of a particular query.
3. New Relic: New Relic is a powerful site monitoring tool that gives in-depth insights into several elements, such as code execution time, heavy PHP scripts, function stats, etc. It lists the slowest components, displaying their count, duration, and percentage for better analysis while recording every background request, helping you find a slow query quickly and debug issues efficiently.

7 actionable tips to speed up WooCommerce database

After understanding the WooCommerce database tables and learning how to identify slow queries through the plugins mentioned above, it’s time to present a few helpful tips to speed up WooCommerce database.

1. Switching to a better hosting provider

Before trying any of the below techniques to speed up WooCommerce Database, you must first ensure a robust hosting service. A poor host means you can only improve WooCommerce database performance by a little.

10Web Automated WordPress hosting service provides better speed guaranteeing a 90+ PageSpeed score, elastic scaling, and a high-performance cart. It runs each online store on secure servers in Google’s twelve data centers with up to eight processing units and 32 GB of ram, giving almost 99.9% uptime.

And if you’re on another host, 10Web allows you to quickly migrate your store to its platform without going through complex technical issues. Plus, 10Web monitors all sites for security breaches, DDoS attacks, malware, and other vulnerabilities.

You can get Dedicated hosting for $250 per month. You can also talk to a 10Web specialist for a custom package that suits your needs. 

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2. Table optimization through phpMyAdmin

The easiest way to speed up WooCommerce database is through phpMyAdmin found under your host’s control panel. You can access it from your by going to Databases and selecting phpMyAdmin. Select the “Check All” option and then select “With Selected” from the drop-down menu beside the “Check All” option. Select “Optimize table.”

WordPress will automatically optimize all the tables by reducing the amount of excess memory, bandwidth, or space allocated to a particular table. It will do so without deleting anything.

3. Indexing database tables

Another way to speed up WooCommerce database is to index database columns for faster retrieval. The technique helps lower query execution times, particularly for custom tables in WooCommerce that contain customer data. You can add indexes through phpMyAdmin by selecting the “Index” option below a table.

4. Clean up trashed items 

Another way to do WooCommerce database cleanup is by emptying trashed items to free up space and reduce database size. Trashed items, such as old posts, pages, content, etc., still take up memory, and cleaning up trash will delete them permanently. 

All you have to do is go to the Posts/Pages section from the WordPress Admin section and select Trash. So, select Empty Trash to permanently delete all posts and pages.

5. Minimize the use of plugins

As mentioned earlier, adding a plugin causes WordPress to create additional tables to store information associated with the particular plugin. They cause database size to grow and result in more significant query execution times. Also, specific plugins have sub-optimal scripts that degrade WooCommerce performance.

It’s advisable to use only the necessary plugins and delete the ones slowing down your site to have a clean WooCommerce database. The Query Monitor plugin lets you identify and delete them through WordPress’s “Installed Plugins” section. 

6. Enable object caching

Through object caching, you can store query results in memory, so it takes less time to retrieve information when executing the same query the next time. Instead of sending requests to the database, the query results will directly come from the cache memory, and it will speed up WooCommerce database.

You can use the Redis Object Cache plugin to enable advanced object caching.

This will upgrade the WP default Object Cache which is not persistent. The tool uses the Redis framework, a No-SQL in-memory data structure that helps you access and process data faster than traditional SQL-based platforms.

7. WooCommerce database update

Updating the WooCommerce database is another quick way to speed up WooCommerce API and ensure queries execute in time. Regular updates are necessary to ensure the database contains the latest features, benefits from robust security fixes, and works with recent plugin versions.

But how to update the WooCommerce database? You can do it automatically by going to WooCommerce settings and choosing the “Update Automatically” option under the Database Updates section in the Advanced tab. Alternatively, you can select the “Update Manually” option for a manual update.

Conclusion

WooCommerce database optimization guarantees a smooth user experience through faster page loading and better interactivity. You can try to speed up the WooCommerce database through the techniques mentioned above. But if you only see a slight improvement, then the problem lies in the hosting service.

With 10Web AI Ecommerce Website Builder you get access to the Automated WordPress hosting which gives you optimal speed by ensuring each store runs on dedicated servers with adequate memory. 

You can sign up for a Dedicated hosting plan costing $250 monthly and build and scale your online store with ease using the power of AI. However, a custom package is suitable if your online operations are on a much larger scale. You can talk to one of our specialists to see the best fit.

Additionally, website owners that want to improve their site’s overall health and speed will receive a high-performance infrastructure to run your entire website with free SSL certificates, automated backups, an intuitive dashboard, and much more. 

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According to HTTP Archive, Images make up over 40% of the average web page weight, making them the most downloaded resource online. The math is simple, if you’re not optimizing images, it will most likely negatively impact your website performance. Unfortunately, optimizing images is not that straightforward, and it’s probably not what you want to spend your time on. That’s why we’ve put together this list to help you find the best WordPress image optimizer.

If you use lots of high-resolution images without any optimization, it can lead to the following issues:

• Slow load times, which frustrate users, increase your bounce rate and decrease your conversions.
• Google now treats web performance as a search ranking factor, which means bad performance can hurt your SEO.
• It will increase the bandwidth needed to use your website, which can make it virtually inaccessible for users with poor networks.
• It will increase your website’s hosting bandwidth consumption. Having a scalable hosting plan like what 10Web offers can help you deal with these issues.

Luckily, using the best WordPress image optimizer plugins can help you avoid these issues without much time, effort, or technical knowledge. 

How to choose the best image optimizer plugin for your WordPress website?

We don’t want you to just take our word for it. Here is how we chose the best WordPress image optimizer plugins. You can use the same checklist to find the best one for you:

1. Image format support: There are many different image formats. But, you want a tool that at least supports the most common ones in need of optimization, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF.
2. Format conversion: An JPEG can be 25-34% smaller just by converting it to WEBP. While WEBP is the most efficient and widely supported format for now, some are already starting to support the next-gen AVIF.
3. Compression: Image compression WordPress plugins can further reduce image sizes using algorithms that preserve visual quality while getting rid of unnecessary data. 
4. Responsive resizing: The majority of internet users are on mobile, but heavy images have an even larger impact on mobile users. Any good image optimizer for WordPress should also optimize images for different devices.
5. Image delivery: Your visitors can be located all over the globe. Delivering images via a CDN can get them to visitors faster by caching and serving them from nearby servers.
6. Limitations: Look for any limitations that might impact you, like the number of images, compressions, CDN bandwidth usage, etc.
7. Reports and statistics: Visual dashboards can make it easier to see whether your WordPress image optimizer is actually having an impact and where you can make further improvements.
8. Pricing: A WordPress image compression plugin usually either uses a fixed monthly rate, a pay-as-you-use rate, or a combination of both. Most prefer the stability of fixed-rate pricing, but some like the flexibility of a pay-as-you-use model.

Top 5 WordPress image optimizers

Here is a quick breakdown of our picks for the best WordPress image optimizer plugins:

10Web Image Optimizer

What makes 10Web Image Optimizer one of the best WordPress image optimizers is its ability to preserve visual quality while dramatically improving image performance. It does this not only by optimizing the images themselves but by also implementing a range of other best practices to improve your images and overall site performance.

The free version of the plugin has over 10,000 active installations and an excellent average user rating of 4.5 stars. You can install it on your own WordPress website or use it with your 10Web hosting service. 

The free plugin lets you optimize up to 50,000 images per month. Or, you can perform per-page optimization on up to 6 pages.

Via compression, WEBP conversion, and resizing, even the free 10Web Image Optimizer can reduce image file sizes by up to 80%.

To balance simplicity with control, you can choose between 3 different optimization ‘profiles’:

1. Conservative will reduce file sizes by roughly 20% (lossless compression) and keep EXIF metadata, so images will look their best while still delivering a noticeable performance improvement
2. Balanced will use lossy compression to reduce image sizes by roughly 40% and keep EXIF metadata. Quality degradation will be barely noticeable while significantly improving page loading times.
3. Extreme will reduce image file sizes by up to 90% by also stripping EXIF metadata. Visual quality will still be acceptable while dramatically boosting your overall performance. Even users with low-quality connections will be able to load your image-heavy pages with ease.

This function is so easy to use. Just select the type of optimization you want, and click “Optimize Now” in the plugin dashboard to kick off the bulk processing.

10Web’s premium WordPress performance optimizer, 10Web PageSpeed Booster, includes even more advanced image optimization capabilities. On top of automatic WEBP conversion and lossy compression, it can intelligently resize images on a container-specific basis to be fully responsive.

It will distribute and deliver your optimized images via a global CDN (CloudFlare) so that there is less delay between you and your visitors. PageSpeed Booster also comes with a ton of other WordPress website optimizations that go beyond images. If you want to holistically improve your website performance, it’s easy to see that it’s one of the best WordPress image optimizers around.

Key features

• Supports PNG, JPG, GIF, WEBP, and PDF formats
• Choose between lossless, lossy, and maximum lossy compression
• Convert PNG or JPG to WEBP
• Bulk optimization
• Per-page optimization
• Choose between different compression “modes”
• In-depth reports and statistics
• Image lazy loading

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ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel is one of the most popular names when it comes to the best WordPress image optimizers. Now, they offer three different types of image optimization packages for users with different needs. For illustration, it has 300,000+ active installs and a very high 4.5-star user rating.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer (SPIO) is a plugin that you install on your WordPress website. It only works with images hosted locally on your WordPress server by optimizing and replacing them for you (although it creates backups of the original versions). 

ShortPixel Adaptive Images (SPAI), on the other hand, downloads your images (from your website or cloud storage), optimizes them, and stores the optimized copies on the ShortPixel CDN. 

Finally, ShortPixel also offers website hosting that allows you to use either SPIO or SPAI to optimize your WordPress images.

ShortPixel works mostly with a variety of image formats as well as GIFs and PDFs. It even has some more advanced capabilities, like generating LQIPs and smart cropping, that can be enabled with just a click of a button

You can use ShortPixel for free with up to 100 credits (or 500 MB bandwidth) per month.

However, it also offers a variety of flexible pricing options for users with different needs and budgets. You can either buy once-off credit/bandwidth bundles, subscribe for monthly credit/bandwidth limits, or buy unlimited credits for a flat monthly fee depending on the number of domains you own. 

For SPIO, credit is only consumed when an image variant is created that’s optimized by more than 5%. For SPAI, a credit equals 5MB of CDN bandwidth usage.

Key features

• Can compress JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, PNG, GIF, and PDF
• Allows conversion to WEBP and AVIF or PNG to JPG
• Lossy, glossy, and lossless compression options
• Compatible with WP Retina
• CMYK to RGB conversion
• Remove EXIF data
• Supports progressive JPEG
• No file size limit
• Compatible with NextGEN gallery
• Generate LQIPs

WP Smush Image Optimizer

WP Smush is the leading image optimization plugin by WPMU DEV in WordPress, with more than 1 million active installations and a 4.8 user review score. So, what makes it one of the best WordPress image optimizers?

One reason WP Smush is very popular is because of its simplicity. Installing this plugin, you’ll get a new one-page dashboard in your media tab, where you can completely control your image optimization.

The free version of WP Smush has limited functionality, offering only lossless compression, which compresses images by around 5 to 10%, depending on image size. It’s a very generous free plan with an image size limit of 5MB. But, you’ll miss out on some advanced optimization tools.

It will let you resize your full-size images, setting a maximum width and height options.

You should also be able to bulk-optimize your images. However, the bulk optimization is limited to a maximum of 50 images at once in the free version.

You can try out the premium version with the 7-day free trial before purchasing it. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, you can’t purchase the Pro plugin by itself. The only option is to subscribe to the WPMU DEV membership, which includes all their plugins and add-ons.

With the paid version, you will be able to “Super-Smush” your images, which stands for maximum lossy compression and achieves image size reduction from 35 to 70%, depending on the original image size (up to 2x more compression than free).

With the paid version, you can bulk-optimize an unlimited number of images. You’ll also be able to make a copy of your original images as well as convert your PNG images to Lossy JPEG.

The pricing of WMPU DEV memberships is quite straightforward but pretty high compared to competitors. It starts at $7.50/month and goes up to $82.50/month for between 5 to 50 GB CDN bandwidth (overages are $5 per 50 GB).

Key features

• Lossy and lossless compression
• Automatic lazy loading
• Bulk image processing
• Scale down large images
• Detect slow-loading images
• Automatically optimize on upload
• Convert to WEBP (Pro only)
• Process PNG, JPEG, and GIF files

EWWW Image Optimizer

With more than 1 million active installations, EWWW image optimizer is on par with WP Smush in terms of popularity. With a user review score of 4.7, it’s easy to see why it’s one of our picks for the best WordPress image optimizers.

After installation, the plugin will automatically optimize any new image uploaded. You’ll have to run bulk optimization for all the images that you already had in your media library before installing the plugin.

There are several sub-pages for fully setting up the plugin, but the main settings are set on the basic settings page. In the media library tab, you’ll have another page that will allow you to bulk-optimize your images.

Generously, the free version of the plugin offers an unlimited number of compressions but only for lossless compressions that reduce image size by 5 to 10%.

The free version can only optimize images directly on your server. This means that your web host has to allow local compression for all features to work. With the free version, you’ll also be able to resize your images as well as convert from one media type to another.

The premium version of the plugin processes all optimizations in the cloud. In addition to lossless compression, you’ll be able to use Maximum Lossless, Lossy, and Maximum Lossy compression options as well, which may reach up to 80% image size reduction.

You can also try out the premium version for free for 30 days, with up to 1,000 API image compressions, without having to provide a credit card.

There are three options to purchase the paid version of the plugin. EWWW has made its pricing plans more straightforward, with three tiers that all have the same optimization features but different site and bandwidth limits. The pricing ranges from $7/month for 1 domain and 200 GB bandwidth to $25/month for unlimited domains and 800 GB bandwidth.

Key features

• Automatically scale images to be responsive
• Automatically compress images
• Works with JPG, PNG, GIF, and SVG
• Automatically convert to WEBP
• Includes JavaScript and CSS compression
• Includes web page caching
• Remove metadata
• Lazy load images
• Up to 30-day image backups
• Watermark images

TinyPNG

Also known as Compress JPEG & PNG, TinyPNG has 200,000+ installations. While it’s not the most popular on this list, it’s still one of the best WordPress image optimizers around, with a healthy 4.4-star user rating.

This plugin will automatically compress any image on upload once it’s installed. Unlike EWWW Image Optimizer, it has to upload images to the TinyPNG service to optimize before downloading them again. While it’s not as fast as processing images locally, it does do it in the background optimization to speed up your workflow.

The plugin settings can be found in the media settings and the media library. It’s not as customizable as other options but lets you easily bulk-process images. 

The free version of the plugins can be used to access the full functionality of the plugin, but only for 500 compressions. According to TinyPNG themselves, this should be around 100 images on acreage. But, for us, it was roughly 83, assuming that each media gallery image has six sizes.

Maximum Lossy compression is only available for JPEG & PNG images, which can reach up to an 84% image size reduction. The maximum image size in the free version is 5 MB, while the paid version allows a maximum file size of 25 MB.

TinyPNG’s pricing scheme is quite simple: they give 500 compressions per month for free, $0.009 for the next 9500 compressions, and $0.002 after 10,000 compressions per month. You’ll be charged at the end of the month based on your monthly number of compressions.

On the bulk optimization page, you’ll be able to see the estimated cost, calculated for your entire media library. So, the tradeoff that you have to make is that you’ll only pay for what you use, but it may be hard to predict the cost beforehand. 

Although it’s not the most advanced of the best WordPress image optimizers, TinyPNG’s charm is in its simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Key features

• Automatically optimize new images on upload
• Optimize existing images individually or in bulk
• Automatically resize large images
• Progressive JPEG encoding
• Strip or preserve metadata
• Supports PNG, JPEG, and WEBP
• Can compress animated PNGs
• WP Retina compatible
• CMYK to RGB conversion

Conclusion

The good news is that there are many image compression WordPress plugins that can make your life a whole lot easier. The bad news is that this makes it harder to find the best WordPress image optimizer.

While it hasn’t been around as long as the competition, 10Web Image Optimizer is quickly making a name for itself. Not only does it boast some of the most advanced image optimization capabilities, but it provides the most intuitive controls for balancing your images’ visual quality with performance.

If you ever decide to invest in your website’s performance with a paid service, 10Web’s Speed Booster also offers the most comprehensive toolkit to holistically boost your site’s speed.

Want to speed up your website instantly?

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FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

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Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

Try For Free

The post 5 Best WordPress Image Optimizers in 2023 [Comparison] appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.

With more access to mobile devices and the internet, consumers are increasingly moving toward online shopping, making e-commerce the new norm. Reports suggest online retail sales will likely surpass $7 trillion by 2025, with an estimated 218.8 million consumers in the US only going for digital purchases in 2023. 

Businesses must step up their e-commerce game to beat the competition. The WooCommerce plugin is a popular option, with over 5 million installations to date used for quickly setting up an e-commerce site on WordPress. 

However, despite WooCommerce’s scalability and flexibility, site owners often struggle with a slow-running admin panel, especially if the site has many product listings. So, they must find ways to speed up WooCommerce backend to operate the plugin efficiently and resolve issues quickly.

This article will discuss some common causes of a slow WooCommerce backend and provide easy tips to speed it up. We’ll also explain a few advanced techniques to help you boost WooCommerce backend performance. 

6 common reasons why your WooCommerce backend is slow

Let’s start by understanding why the WooCommerce backend slows down. Usually, a sub-optimal PHP codebase, lengthy and inefficient database queries, and large files that take time to load cause a sluggish WooCommerce backend. 

But other reasons exist, such as heavy and unused plugins, object caches, database queries, content delivery networks (CDNs), and hosting service quality.

1. Old PHP versions

WordPress backend can slow down on PHP versions older than PHP 7. In fact, 53.6 % of WordPress sites today run on PHP 7.4. That’s because PHP 7 and above can process requests faster using less number of servers while catering to many visitors. 

But there are still some sites with versions as old as 5.2. You should check which version you’re running to see if you need an upgrade. And updating to PHP 8 or above would be ideal as it’s much faster than PHP 7, with simpler syntax and robust security features.

2. Less memory

PHP memory limit can also be a significant cause of a slow backend. A lower limit means a hosting server doesn’t allocate enough RAM and processing power to execute specific PHP scripts. 

While a memory limit protects against malicious attacks and faulty programs running in an infinite loop or with memory leaks, it can still hinder plugins that legitimately require more computing power. 

3. Heavy admin interfaces

Your WordPress admin pages can have many hidden scripts and files running behind the scenes. You can view such files from Chrome’s developer tools and check for Coverage. 

You will see a list of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files that the page loads. It will also display the size in bytes allowing you to assess which files use the most memory. 

WooCommerce admin pages will be slow if many Javascripts run and the overall interface is heavy and has many events, listeners, and DOM modifiers.

4. Plugins and cache

WordPress users depend on several plugins to optimize websites and add more page functionality. However, such plugins can slow down the WooCommerce backend as they may have flawed code and other inconsistencies that can interrupt normal operations.

Also, caching plugins can harm WooCommerce’s backend speed if you don’t configure them correctly. Developers often use object caching plugins to store database query results and retrieve them quickly when re-executing queries. But they can backfire and, instead of offering faster speed, can slow down WooCommerce pages due to misconfigurations.

Related Articles

• WordPress SEO Without Plugins: The 11 Essential Tasks You Can Do Manually
• WordPress Optimization Plugins: The Best for 2023

In addition, unused, heavy theme plugins can take up database storage space to store specific files, leading to a slow WooCommerce backend. Furthermore, WordPress constantly checks for updates for such plugins, generating many unwanted HTTP requests and reducing backend speed. 

Translation plugins are also a common cause of a slow WooCommerce backend, as they use much processing power. Admins use such plugins to display pages in multiple languages if they have a customer base in various locations speaking different languages. 

Plugins creating additional interfaces, parameters, and metaboxes can also make WordPress admin heavy and slow.

5. Slow database queries

Longer query execution times are a significant cause of a slow backend. In particular, WooCommerce involves working with product lists, orders, posts, table joins, metadata, etc. As an admin, you can view and edit these elements on your screen. For example, a typical Orders page looks as follows:

Image Source: WooCommerce

As you can see, the page displays several elements, such as the Order number, Date, Status, Total bill amount, etc. Loading so many objects together causes WordPress to execute a time-consuming long query that leads to a sluggish backend.

In addition, queries can take longer to execute due to a lot of clutter accumulating in your database through spam, objects in the trash, post revisions, etc., resulting in a slow WooCommerce backend. 

Moreover, transients can develop in your database as WooCommerce temporarily stores time-sensitive items like customer sessions to help improve front-end performance. They can grow if you don’t configure their expiration times properly. Transients with long expirations will also cause longer query execution times and slow down WooCommerce’s backend, causing admins much inconvenience.

7. Content delivery network and hosting

A CDN consists of servers in multiple physical locations. Using a CDN, hosting services can duplicate your website’s content on these servers. Once a user requests a page on your website, the server closest to the user’s location will deliver the content accordingly. The technique speeds up response time and improves user experience.

Although a CDN improves front-end performance, it can harm backend dynamics if the CDN delivers your backend pages as well. While some hosting services automatically exclude backend pages from CDN, others don’t. 

Likewise, a poor hosting service can also slow down WooCommerce’s backend. The factor is critical because a poor hosting service significantly limits how much you can speed up WooCommerce backend. With a poor host, your backend will be slow even if you implement all the other fixes mentioned below.

7 easy tips to speed up WooCommerce admin

The above list of causes for a slow WooCommerce backend should indicate easy fixes that you can implement to speed up WooCommerce backend quickly. Let’s discuss them below before moving on to more advanced solutions.

1. A better hosting provider

The first thing you should do is switch to a high-quality hosting service. A poor host can limit your ability to improve backend performance, even if you implement all the possible fixes. 

Of course, several providers exist, but we recommend the 10Web Automated WordPress Hosting, which leverages the Google Cloud infrastructure to deliver superior performance.  The tool has state-of-the-art AI-powered optimization features that guarantee an automated 90+ PageSpeed score, highly elastic scalability, and a high-performance cart.

It offers up to 8 CPUs and 32 GB RAM, ensuring 100% uptime using servers in one of Google’s 12 data centers.

2. Removing redundant plugins

In the previous section, we discussed how unused plugins slow down WooCommerce’s backend. So a quick and easy fix would be to remove unwanted plugins. A practical way of doing this is to delete plugins you don’t use one by one and see performance improvement after each removal.

Further, plugins that perform frequent scans and real-time processes in the background can also reduce WooCommerce backend speed. Usually, plugins for generating sitemaps, graphs, building pages, etc., are common culprits.

You can also check for plugins that use the highest computing power. As mentioned, heavy translation plugins fall under this category. You can use lightweight alternatives, such as Polylang if you feel a translation plugin is necessary for your store.

3. Update the plugins you use and everything else

Another solution is updating the plugins you frequently use to ensure they have the latest bug fixes and optimizations to speed up WooCommerce backend. It’s good practice to check for such updates and test new versions on a staging site before installing them in production.

You should also update everything else before start-up to ensure optimal speed. For instance, upgrade to the latest WooCommerce store and WordPress versions, use the latest theme version, and install the most recent extensions to take advantage of all improvements and bug fixes. 

Only after this step should you move on to the following fixes for boosting WooCommerce backend speed.

4. Object caching

We mentioned how object caching could slow down the WooCommerce backend if you don’t configure it correctly. Object caching can be a great help as it lets you quickly retrieve database results and speed up WooCommerce database queries. But the feature works by using the server’s memory to execute tasks, and wrong configurations can unnecessarily burden your server.

To do object caching, you must use the right tools, such as WP Redis or other Redis-based plugins, to perform object caching. The Redis platform is a NoSQL in-memory database that lets you store and access data faster than traditional SQL databases.

Also, you can choose a host that offers an out-of-the-box cache solution. In this case, you don’t have to configure object caching manually, so there are fewer chances of error.

However, it’s best to temporarily disable object and database caching until you find a suitable caching plugin or a better host.  It will help increase backend speed by putting less load on the server and prevent issues due to incorrect manual configurations. 

Related Article

• Find the Best WordPress Caching Plugin with Our Top 5 Picks

5. Minimize dashboard functionality

WordPress and WooCommerce dashboards have several elements and features you don’t need. For example, you can remove the order count if it doesn’t give valuable insights regarding your store, helping WooCommerce speed up admin orders search.

You can also disable unnecessary widgets in WooCommerce and WordPress and disable image regeneration that happens in the background. 

6. Fast WooCommerce theme

Using heavy themes can slow down WooCommerce’s backend. So it’s wise to choose a lightweight theme with all the necessary visuals and interactive elements to ensure an optimal user experience.

But choosing such a theme is challenging as thousands of intuitive and visually appealing designs are available on the market, and each can have a particular feature you want. This, however, doesn’t mean you should choose the fanciest or an all-in-one option, as it can significantly compromise front-end and backend speed.

You can select free themes like Shoptimizer, Divi, Neve, etc., and other popular options with all the necessary e-commerce features your site needs. Of course, you can always upgrade to the paid version to get more functionalities as your business develops. 

The reason for using a free theme at the start is to allow you to experiment and see its results.

A pro tip is to enlist all the functions you require for your e-commerce store. You can then search for an appropriate free theme that meets most of your requirements if not all.

7. Removing bloat

Deleting unused plugins only sometimes solves the problem. That’s because there can be other elements on your WooCommerce admin panel that are slowing it down. For example, long scripts, heavy and dynamic styles, cart fragments, extensions, etc., can all cause the site to bloat.

The quickest way of removing them is to use plugins like Disable WooCommerce Bloat, which disables several elements such as the password strength meter, status meta box, marketing hup, the Elementor dashboard widget, and much more. 

8 advanced tips to speed up WooCommerce admin

The following will explain a few advanced techniques to speed up WooCommerce backend. However, you must only try these if all the above tips and tricks fail.

1. Enable OPCache

OPCache guarantees to speed up WooCommerce backend without the risks attached to object-based caching.

It works by checking whether the server cache memory contains the PHP script. If the script is missing from the cache, the server parses it and compiles it into OPCode. 

OPCache then stores the OPCode in the server’s cache, so the next time you load the same PHP script, the server doesn’t have to analyze the entire code, leading to faster loading.

You can enable OPCache through the WordPress OPCache plugin or cPanel in the PHP Extensions menu. But you must check if your host allows you to do this, as not all providers let you change cache configures easily. 10Web WordPress Hosting, however, lets you control these settings with ease.

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2. Database cleaning

WooCommerce database optimization can significantly speed up WooCommerce backend by removing unwanted data. WooCommerce databases accumulate several data elements, such as product pages, tags, reviews, data from plugins, orders, payments, inventory, etc. 

So, you can start by removing old revisions. Revisions occur whenever you save a draft, update, or publish a page on WooCommerce. They help by keeping a backup of older versions so you can revert to the original content in case of unexpected issues. Also, WordPress creates a new copy every 60 seconds by default.

With time, the number of revision items can increase and create database clutter leading to a slow WooCommerce backend. wp_post is the table where WordPress adds a row for every new revision. 

You can avoid revisions hampering your backend performance by deleting them through various plugins. WP-Sweep is one option that helps you improve WooCommerce database speed by cleaning up revisions, auto drafts, deleted, unapproved, or spammed comments, duplicate meta, etc.

Alternatively, you can restrict the number of revisions you want to keep in the database. You can quickly reduce the revisions limit through the wp_config.php file, where you can specify the number in the following code snippet:

define(‘WP_POST_Revisions’, 10)

In this case, the number of revisions is 10. You can also set it to “false” to disable revisions altogether. 

Similarly, transients also pose a problem to WooCommerce’s backend speed, as discussed earlier. You can remove them through the Delete Expired Transients plugin, which deletes old transients instantly and removes orphaned records.

Also, in the latest WooCommerce versions, you can clear all customer sessions under the Tools menu.

Image Source: UsersInsights

3. Check for plugins that result in sub-optimal queries

Heavy themes, extensions, and plugins can significantly burden the database by generating lengthy queries to fetch relevant results. It is particularly problematic with sites that have an extensive product list. Removing them helps speed up WooCommerce database queries.

Also, avoid using plugins that include a counter on your pages. For instance, counter plugins show the number of comments, reviews, posts, etc., which takes up a lot of processing power, especially if your site is large with a lot of user activity.

You can use monitoring plugins such as Query Monitor to check which extensions or themes are causing trouble. They will let you view all the scripts, styles, and HTTP requests associated with a specific plugin or extension and calculate the loading time to see which consumes the most compute resources.

4. Switching off debugging

WordPress has standardized debugging options that track PHP errors, warnings, and notices, and enabling debug mode slows down WooCommerce’s backend. So it’s best practice to disable the setting through the wp-config.php file. The code snippet below shows where the setting is present,

define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true)

You can set it to false and disable debug mode.

6. WordPress Heartbeat API

The WordPress Heartbeat API allows your site to maintain a connection with the server and receive updates in near-real-time. The API is useful for front-end features, such as autosaving posts and generating login expiration notifications.

However, the API works by setting up a time interval – usually 15 – 120 seconds – after which it sends a request from your site to the server for processing. The server returns a response in JSON format, and the site resends a confirmation signal.

Though the API is great for front-end processes, it can slow down the admin’s page if it keeps sending and receiving requests in the background. You can avoid the problem by increasing the time interval through the functions.php files for your active theme or disabling the API using the Perfmatters plugin.

7. Refreshed Fragments AJAX request

WooCommerce uses the wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments to update user carts and speed up WooCommerce orders without requiring them to refresh the page. The functionality improves user experience as visitors can see their carts dynamically update whenever they change it without reloading the page.

However, the feature can slow down the WooCommerce backend, especially if your site is on shared servers. The remedy is disabling the function through Disable Cart Fragments – an easy-to-use custom plugin on WordPress.org. 

Although the technique may compromise the personalization of the dynamic cart update feature, it still improves user experience by making the site run faster and smoother.

Plus, you can enable the “Redirect to the Cart page” option under the Product option in WooCommerce Settings. Doing so will redirect the customer to the Carts page once they make any updates. With this, the user experience remains intact, as buyers can quickly see the updates they make to their cart on a new page.

8. WooCommerce screen options

You can use WooCommerce’s built-in screen options to let WooCommerce speed up the admin orders index. They let you control how many Orders appear on a single page. You can use the option to decrease the number of orders per page, reducing the query size and leading to less loading time.

You can also specify which columns to display depending on your requirements, as shown below:

Image Source: WooCommerce

Reducing the number of items per page and the columns to display will help WooCommerce speed up the admin orders page and boost backend speed.

Conclusion

WooCommerce backend can be challenging to manage, especially if you have an extensive product range with high consumer traffic. Having a robust hosting provider can help speed up WooCommerce backend significantly.

With 10Web AI Ecommerce Website Builder you not only can create your Ecommerce store in minutes using the power of AI but also get access to automated WordPress hosting, offering a 90+ PageSpeed score with elastic scalability and a high-performance cart. With fast and secure servers in one of Google’s 12 data centers, the hosting service uses up to 8 CPUs and 32 GB of RAM to operate each store, guaranteeing 99.99% uptime.

So boost your eCommerce sales by trying 10Web AI Ecommerce Website Builder now!

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When it comes to e-commerce, you want nothing to stand in the way of making a conversion. As the final step in the customer journey, that means you want to make the checkout experience as smooth as possible.

Unfortunately, for online entrepreneurs or retailers, roughly 70% of all carts are abandoned. The good news is that you can reduce a large number of these lost sales if you simply speed up WooCommerce checkout.

Why is WooCommerce checkout slow? (5 common reasons)

Before you can speed up WooCommerce checkout, you need to understand what could cause it to slow down in the first place. Otherwise, you might only waste your time trying to solve non-existent issues. Here are the most common causes of slow checkouts to look for:

1. Too many fields: Probably the most common reason for slow checkouts is that there are too many forms with too many unnecessary fields that users must fill in.
2. Slow hosting performance: A sub-standard hosting server will lead to slow server response times, which will delay the time it takes to deliver pages to users.
3. Too many plugins or themes: If you have too many plugins or themes installed on your WordPress site, it can affect all your pages’ performance, including your WooCommerce checkout.
4. Errors: There may also be JavaScript, PHP, or other coding errors in your WordPress, WooCommerce, or other plugin files that cause slow-downs or crashes.
5. Traffic spikes: If you get an unusually large amount of visitors at the same time, it can cause your website to slow down or even crash.

Related Articles

• 25 Fastest WooCommerce Themes to Supercharge Your Business
• 29 Tips and Tricks to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store

7 tips to speed up WooCommerce checkout

1. Speed up your page loading times

You can apply many of the same principles of web performance to speed up WooCommerce checkouts. While we can write an entire article just on web page performance, here are some key tips:

• Test your website performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTMetrix, or a WordPress plugin. This will show you how good your current performance is and where you can improve.

• Make sure your pages are mobile responsive and mobile-friendly. This means that your WooCommerce shop pages and checkout pages will adapt to mobile screens and will serve smaller versions of images and videos to speed up loading times. To help with this, 10Web PageSpeed Booster checks and optimizes your WooCommerce site for both desktop and mobile performance.
• Delete any unnecessary plugins or themes. You should occasionally go through all the plugins and themes you’ve installed and remove the ones you no longer use. WooCommerce offers many extensions to add e-commerce capabilities, but these can also slow down your site if you install them unnecessarily.
• Optimize images and videos. Images and videos add a lot of weight to your WooCommerce shop pages, delaying loading times. There are many things you can do to optimize images, but you can also find WooCommerce-compatible plugins to do it for you. 10Web’s Speed Booster has built-in image optimization tools, including responsive resizing, lazy loading, and WebP conversion. For the checkout pages specifically, there is a simple rule of thumb: do not load any large images or videos there.

Related Articles

• How to Serve Images in Next-Gen Formats on WordPress
• WordPress Optimization Plugins: The Best for 2023

2. Upgrade your hosting

Once you’ve optimized your website’s frontend performance, the next thing you should do to speed up WooCommerce checkouts is to upgrade your hosting. Having fast hosting is particularly important for WooCommerce checkout because pages like checkout pages are dynamic, and their performance cannot be optimized using front-end techniques only.

Better yet, look for hosting services that specialize in WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. They will offer infrastructure and features to maximize the performance of a WooCommerce website. For example, 10Web’s automated hosting uses elastic scaling so that your website can perform under abnormal visitor spikes, like during the holiday season.

For many popular hosting providers, you can find unbiased reviews that test their speed and uptime. You should also look for features like:

• The type of hosting (shared is the slowest, VPS or dedicated servers are faster) and its architecture.
• Network infrastructure bandwidth (Gbps / Mbps)
• Caching capabilities
• CDN services
• Performance tracking or diagnostic tools
• Database optimization tools

3. Optimize store performance for international customers

The internet offers a global platform for your business, so don’t limit yourself by not catering to a global audience. Even if you have a fast hosting provider and have optimized performance, your pages will load faster for visitors near the server where you host your website.

You can change this by using a CDN (content distribution network) for your website. A CDN caches your web pages on servers across the world. When someone tries to visit your website, the CDN will send a copy of the page to them from the nearest server so it loads faster. In the same way, a CDN can speed up WooCommerce checkout pages.

Your 10Web Booster Pro subscription will come with access to Cloudflare’s Enterprise plan. It can easily be enabled in your dashboard, automatically accelerating your web pages with a global delivery network.

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4. Create localized experiences

Understandably, people feel more comfortable shopping online in their home language. 76% of shoppers prefer to buy products in their home language. Up to 60% rarely or never buy a product from an English-only website.

Source: Edgard and Cooper

One way you can speed up WooCommerce checkout and prevent customers from hesitating to buy your products is to provide multi-language support. WooCommerce already features support for a number of languages, but you can add more using WordPress translation plugins.

5. Allow guest checkout

Getting customers to signup is a powerful tool to create repeat buyers and foster loyalty. But, it can also be a frustrating experience for first-time buyers who are in a hurry. Also, some visitors don’t feel comfortable handing out their personal information to create an account or are afraid of spam.

Plus, from a performance perspective, creating an account is usually slower because you need to send and fetch information from a database.

Either way, allowing guest checkout can help you speed up WooCommerce checkout and convert more one-off sales. 

6. Optimize your forms

Filling out a large number of forms is often one of the most annoying things about buying online. The problem is even worse for mobile users, with 39% abandoning their carts because they found it difficult to enter personal information.

You can speed up WooCommerce checkout by making sure that you only ask for the most necessary information. Also, try to combine forms where possible. For example, just have a “Full Name” field instead of separate “Name” and “Surname” fields. Or, automatically use the same address for Shipping and Billing.

You can also make forms less confusing by using exterior labels instead of inline labels. Like this checkout page from Flo Living:

If you do use in-line labels, make sure that the label stays visible as in the example from Allbirds below:

It’s also a good idea to enable autofill wherever possible so the user doesn’t have to manually fill in every single field.

Finally, make sure that you use inline error validation. We all know how frustrating it is to type in all your information and hit “Next” only to have the page refresh with an error message, leaving you to scroll through everything to find the mistake. Instead, warn users as they type so that they can fix it on the spot.

7. Use a performance optimization service/plugin

As you can see, there’s a lot you need to consider to speed up WooCommerce checkout. Luckily, you don’t have to do everything yourself. There are many WooCommerce checkout plugins, some that help you optimize checkout page performance, like 10Web PageSpeed Booster, and others that help you streamline checkout experiences, like FunnelKit and CheckoutWC.

Or, you can get an all-in-one WordPress performance solution that uses the power of AI to optimize every facet of your website performance. For example, 10Web PageSpeed Booster automatically optimizes the frontend speed of any WordPress site for 90+ PageSpeed scores, which will also improve your WooCommerce checkout:

• CSS, HTML, and JS minification and compression. Checkout pages are dynamic, and many use client-side JavaScript, which means there is room for improvement.
• Advanced optimization techniques like Critical CSS generation, JS delay, and font optimizations. 10Web Booster will make loading a checkout page a seamless experience.
• Full website, page, and resource caching. Shoppers often get distracted before checkout and go look at other store products before returning to their cart. Caching can help prevent slow loading times in return visits, which will improve the user experience.
• DDoS protection and web application firewall. Bots or malicious attacks can flood your pages with requests, dramatically slowing down critical, dynamic pages like your checkout. These security measures will help prevent these threats from interfering with your regular customer traffic.
• High-performance infrastructure. With guaranteed resources, from 4 CPU cores and 16 GB RAM to custom setups, you’ll be assured that your WooCommerce site has the capacity to deal with high traffic volumes.

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Why do you need a fast checkout experience?

According to the Baymard Institute, 22% of online shoppers simply abandon their cart because the page took too long to load. Many others abandon because of other factors that delay the checkout process, like having to create an account (24%), a long or complicated process (17%), or website errors (13%).

Image source

If you don’t have a fast and seamless checkout experience, it could cost you even more sales than if customers think you’re overpriced.

This is on top of the fact that 53% of visitors will simply abandon your site if it takes a long to load (before they even get to the checkout). That’s why, if you really want to maximize sales, you should first optimize your website performance. This will also inevitably speed up WooCommerce checkout.

Conclusion

By following these tips, you’ll be able to spot where you can speed up WooCommerce checkout to keep customers coming and boost your sales.

10Web AI Ecommerce Website Builder provides you with powerful, scalable, and optimized infrastructure to build and scale your e-commerce business. With dedicated instances and a high-performance cart, your customers will breeze through checkouts, leaving them satisfied and boosting your conversions.

Looking to sell online?

Create your custom online store in minutes with 10Web AI Ecommerce Website Builder and take your business online.

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Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

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Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
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Did you know that up to 82% of online shoppers say that website performance influences whether or not they make a purchase? If you plan on building an online store with WordPress and WooCommerce, it’s crucial that you ensure it loads fast, reliably, and offers a great user experience. Else, all your sales and marketing strategies may be for nothing!

As the foundation for your website, that means that finding the fastest WooCommerce themes for your website is a must.

There are a number of reasons why having a fast-loading website is important for your business:

• User experience: Slow-loading websites frustrate users and lead to bad user experiences. Internet users’ attention spans are shrinking, and they will abandon any site that takes too long to load.
• Conversions: Sites that load in 1 second typically get 3x as many sales as slower sites. They are also nearly double as effective at generating leads as sites that take 5 seconds or more to load.
• SEO: Google uses various performance-related metrics to help calculate a web page’s search engine rankings.

Below, we’ve gathered some of the fastest WooCommerce themes today to power your online venture. We’ll also break down what makes a WooCommerce theme fast and provide helpful tips to improve your theme’s performance.

The criteria for selecting the fastest WooCommerce themes

It can be difficult to separate fast WooCommere themes from the rest because website performance depends on more factors than just what theme you use. That being said, we developed the following criteria that you can use to help you find the fastest WooCommerce themes:

1. Theme size and page weight: Typically, themes with a lightweight and minimalist design will have a smaller size and load faster. This is a tradeoff you have to make depending on your needs but always try to choose a theme with the minimum features you need.
2. Frequent updates and support: Look for a theme that has a track record of frequent updates and a helpful support team. Good theme developers will continuously try to improve their themes. You might also run into technical issues that are impacting your site’s performance.
3. Number of HTTP requests: The number of HTTP requests indicates how many assets a web page needs to retrieve from the server to load. Too many HTTP requests can significantly delay the loading process. HTTP requests should also be prioritized so that the essential elements on a page load first.
4. Mobile optimization: The mobile internet now accounts for the majority of internet users and traffic. That means that it’s even more important that sites perform well on mobile, especially because bad performance tends to affect mobile users more. You should always look for a responsive WooCommerce theme that can adapt to different screen sizes.
5. Other optimizations: There are many improvements a theme developer can make to optimize performance, such as lazy loading, CSS/JS minification, caching (or plugin support), etc. We’ll cover this in more depth below, but look for these types of features when choosing a theme.
6. Google core web vitals: These are Google’s own performance metrics that it uses to help calculate a web page’s search engine ranking. Google calls them “user-centric metrics” because they impact the user experience when loading a web page. 
   • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): The load time of the largest element in the visible area of a web page. A perfect score is below 2.5 seconds.
   • FID (First Input Delay): The delay until interactive elements (buttons, e.g.) on a page becomes usable. A perfect score is under 100 milliseconds.
   • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): A measure of how visually stable a page is while loading. A perfect score is under 0.1.
   • There are other important metrics, like FCP (First Contentful Paint) and SI (Speed Index), but you’ll want to focus on the above three for the best results.

The fastest WooCommerce themes [Summary chart]

For this comparison, we tested the theme demos out of the box without any performance plugins, optimizations, or replacing the demo content. These examples have undoubtedly been optimized by the developers to showcase their full performance potential. But, it should give you an idea of what you can expect if you also optimize the theme for your website.

Here is a quick breakdown of the fastest WooCommerce themes:

The fastest premium WooCommerce themes

For the most advanced WooCommerce features and capabilities, as well as the best selection of pre-made designs, you’ll want to consider investing in a premium WordPress theme. These are undoubtedly the best WooCommerce themes overall that will be able to support and grow with any online business.

Divi

Divi is one of the fastest WooCommerce themes thanks to its clean and optimized codebase, as well as its built-in performance-related features. These include the minification of CSS and JavaScript files and straightforward template designs.

Key features:

• Comes with the powerful Divi page builder
• Comes with all demo content and fully-built pages
• Built-in minified CSS
• Offers a large variety of pre-designed e-commerce templates
• Ships with plenty of useful interactive modules for marketing
• Many Divi WooCommerce themes to choose from

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 97 (desktop) and 66 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 70
• Requests: 72
• Page size: 1.6 MB
• Load time: 564ms

WoonderShop

WoonderShop by Proteusthemes is a conversion-focused WooCommerce theme. It offers three different skins as a starting point for your online store. However, it’s best used to create an Amazon-like online marketplace.

Key features:

• Distraction-free checkout
• Built-in cross-selling tools for related products
• Advanced product search and filter tools
• Add-to-cart and cart dropdown functionality
• Fully mobile responsive and optimized

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 74 (desktop) and 46 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 67
• Requests: 83
• Page size: 1.1 MB
• Load time: 1.38s

KadenceWP (Premium)

Balancing lightning-fast performance with all the features you need to create a functional, modern website is KadenceWPs strong point. The theme offers a huge collection of online store templates and many e-commerce packages with advanced tools to help make your business successful.

Key features:

• WooCommerce email designer
• Drop-in e-commerce FOMOs, pop-ups, forms, and more
• Automatic triggers to help engage customers on their journey
• Advanced product page builder tools
• Highly accessible out of the box
• Customizable AJAX cart and banners

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 99 (desktop) and 91 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 79
• Requests: 71
• Page size: 806.7 KB
• Load time: 509ms

WoodMart

With 70+ pre-built demo sites, you can create just about any kind of WooCommerce site using WoodMart, including electronics, accessories, craft, and hardware stores. It’s one of those themes that has tonnes of features but doesn’t let it get in the way of performance.

Key features:

• Full AJAX shop, pagination, filters by size & color
• Full-screen search & search by SKU
• A quick shop for any kind of products
• Built-in mega menu builder
• Elementor support
• Over 70 pre-built Woocommerce themes

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 97(desktop) and 70(mobile)
• Pingdom: 88
• Requests: 64
• Page size: 1.4 MB
• Load time: 1.99s

PressMart

PressMart is a modern WooCommerce Elementor theme, designed specifically to be used with this fantastic page builder. The great thing about this theme is that the designs are well-thought-out but still generic enough so that you can easily customize them for your brand and business needs.

Key features:

• Works perfectly with the Elementor page builder
• Optimized for mobile performance and responsiveness
• Extensive product filters
• Functional AJAX cart
• 6 shop demos to choose from
• Easy-to-use customization tools

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 93 (desktop) and 83 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 81
• Requests: 85
• Page size: 1.6 MB
• Load time: 2.28s

Astra

Next on our list of the fastest WooCommerce themes is Astra, which also happens to be one of the most powerful multipurpose WordPress themes around. It’s one of the themes on this list that takes its support for WooCommerce the most seriously, with tonnes of WooCommerce-specific features, including a large collection of e-commerce themes.

Key features:

• WooCommerce controls with all plans
• Many WooCommerce pre-built starter templates
• Built-in checkout and cart abandonment
• Sales bubbles, dropdown carts, and advanced product galleries
• Support for various page builders, including Elementor
• Product grid layouts and infinite scrolling
• No JQuery
• Theme size is under 50kB

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 94 (desktop) and 67 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 69
• Requests: 110
• Page size: 2 MB
• Load time: 1.39s

Flatsome

As a multi-purpose WooCommerce theme, Flatsome can form the basis for any type of e-commerce website. It has a wide range of demos for online shops, marketplaces, or business websites that want to include an e-commerce element.

Key features:

• Comes with its own live page builder
• Handy live theme options to customize appearance and branding
• Add custom top products to store pages
• Off-canvas filtering for mobile users
• Create your own fashion catalog

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 97 (desktop) and 64 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 76
• Requests: 67
• Page size: 1.9 MB
• Load time: 1.13s

OceanWP

With over 6 million downloads, OceanWP is one of the best WooCommerce themes around. WooCommerce users can look forward to a huge selection of colorful and modern WooCommerce templates that are fully compatible with WooCommerce.

Key features:

• Built to a high standard of accessibility, SEO, and usability
• Choose from a large number of e-commerce themes
• eCom Treasure Box add-on provides a professional-looking store management dashboard
• Superb Elementor support with unique elements
• Plans aimed specifically at entrepreneurs and online store owners

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 93 (desktop) and 55 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 74
• Requests: 104
• Page size: 5.3 MB
• Load time: 582ms

Avada

Avada is easily one of the most powerful and flexible WooCommerce themes in existence, so it’s amazing that it still manages to be so fast. It also has one of the best selections of pre-built sites, with options for butchers, online courses, car dealers, handmade goods, and more.

Key features:

• Pre-built websites for virtually any type of online business
• Custom builders for headers, footers, popups, forms, and more
• World-class support, tutorials, and documentation
• Custom shop pages builder
• Built-in performance optimizer

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 91 (desktop) and 79 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 86
• Requests: 40
• Page size: 4.3 MB
• Load time: 1.09s

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a powerful multi-purpose WordPress theme that focuses on “speed, usability, & accessibility above all else.” It offers a number of starter sites specifically for different online stores, all of which fully support WooCommerce. The entire main stylesheet for the theme is only 5.2kB, and it generates very few unnecessary requests, which are the main reasons why it’s one of the fastest WooCommerce themes.

Key features:

• Compatible with Elementor page builder
• Comes with all demo content and fully-built pages
• Fantastic user experience easy-to-use designs
• Can enable automatic dynamic CSS caching
• Very light codebase and CSS
• Variety of online store themes
• Built-in WooCommerce controls
• Optimized for SEO
• Use on up to 500 websites

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 93 (desktop) and 88 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 69
• Requests: 61
• Page size: 1.6 MB
• Load time: 1.36s

Jupiter

Jupiter is a modern and creative multi-purpose WordPress theme. So, we were impressed at its solid performance considering all the features packed into this theme. With 450+ pre-built sites, you can find the perfect template for just about any online store, from luxury watches to fitness gear.

Key Features:

• 100+ widgets for marketing, selling, lead generation, etc.
• Built in a dark/light theme
• Feature-rich and highly customizable built-in cart
• User account login/registration
• Huge selection of WooCommerce-compatible demos

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 77 (desktop) and 53(mobile)
• Pingdom: 85
• Requests: 83
• Page size: 2.9 MB
• Load time: 2.93s

Shoptimizer by CommerceGurus

With a name like “Shoptimizer,” it’s a theme specifically optimized for WooCommerce performance and to provide a distraction-free browsing experience for your customers. Despite being lightweight, it comes with a huge number of e-commerce and marketing features, making it an excellent choice for any online store.

Key features:

• Compatible with Elementor page builder
• Comes with all demo content and fully-built pages
• Is designed for accessibility out-of-the-box (WCAG AA and screen reader-tested)
• Automatically minifies CSS and creates “critical stylesheet”
• Distraction-free checkout
• Advanced search
• Trust badges, FOMOs, and purchase notifications
• Optimized for SEO

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 100 (desktop) and 97 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 83
• Requests: 79
• Page size: 1.0 MB
• Load time: 531ms

Uncode

Uncode is an ultra-creative WordPress theme specializing in portfolios. Combined with robust WooCommerce support, this makes it an excellent option for creatives that also want to sell their art or merchandise alongside their digital profile. But, it also caters to mainstream retailers that want to sell gadgets, bicycles, apparel, and more.

Key features:

• Gorgeously designed website templates
• Strong portfolio, digital art, and photography-related designs
• 16 online store demos to choose from
• WooCommerce product builder
• E-commerce features, such as a wishlist, side cart, catalog mode, and more

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 93 (desktop) and 60(mobile)
• Pingdom: 79
• Requests: 190
• Page size: 1.7 MB
• Load time: 1.44s

X Theme by ThemeCo

X Theme by ThemeCo is known as one of the most advanced and customizable themes on the market. On top of a number of full website templates, it also comes with four full X Theme WooCommerce shop designs. While its performance isn’t perfect, particularly on mobile, it gives you the most tools to customize and fine-tune your site to improve it.

Key features:

• Highly responsive styling for mobile
• Huge library of interactive and design elements
• Built-in dark/light mode
• Compatible with Elementor

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 82 (desktop) and 47 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 70
• Requests: 76
• Page size: 2.8 MB
• Load time: 909ms

BeTheme

BeTheme claims to be the biggest WordPress and WooCommerce theme, and with 50+ WooCommerce demos, it has to be close. It can definitely do with some optimization on mobile, but that’s mostly regarding images. We still wanted to include it because it’s a performant option if you want a theme that can do it all.

Key features:

• Header and mega menu builders
• Fully compatible with Elementor
• Unlimited color combinations
• Website packs to easily create one-page sites
• Live product search

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 81 (desktop) and 35 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 72
• Requests: 153
• Page size: 2.7 MB
• Load time: 2.88s

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The fastest free WooCommerce themes

The good news is that you don’t need to empty your wallet to get your hands on the fastest WooCommerce themes. There are also thousands of high-quality WordPress themes that are available for free. 

Most free WooCommerce WordPress themes are zero-cost versions of premium themes with basic features. This gives you the opportunity to start out for free but to upgrade when your store grows, and you need more advanced WooCommerce capabilities.

Sydney by aThemes

Don’t be fooled by Sydney’s good looks – it also happens to be one of the fastest WooCommerce themes you can get for free. It’s made by aThemes, one of the top WordPress theme developers today. It’s also a feature-rich multi-purpose theme with a premium version.

Key features:

• Choose from various desktop and mobile layouts, including mobile menu layouts
• Customize your theme’s colors, typography, and footer
• Seamlessly integrates with Elementor
• Supports WooCommerce with useful settings
• Minimal and elegant design

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 100 (desktop) and 99 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 79
• Requests: 52
• Page size: 652.6 KB
• Load time: 456ms

Neve by Themeisle

Neve offers 2 free WooCommerce-compatible templates for an online fashion store and pet shop. The free version has some useful features to customize your pages, but only basic e-commerce capabilities. 

Key features:

• Two different free website templates to choose from.
• Can upgrade to advanced WooCommerce features, like review comparison tables, wish lists, product image hover effects, and more.
• Easy-to-use header, background image, and color customizations
• Built-in dark/light mode
• Popup block editor
• Footer widgets and customization options

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 99 (desktop) and 63(mobile)
• Pingdom: 68
• Requests: 54
• Page size: 564.9  MB
• Load time: 575ms

KadenceWP (Free)

The good news is that KadenceWP also offers a completely free version with strong WooCommerce support and super fast loading times. Users can still choose from a variety of online store templates for jewelry, outdoor gear, soap, coffee, and more.

Key features:

• Fully WooCommerce compatible
• Can upgrade for advanced WooCommerce functionality
• The free version comes with a WooCommerce header cart, product layout features, and product archive image swap
• Supports LMS plugins if you want to build an online course marketplace
• Extensive header customization options

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 99 (desktop) and 84 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 78
• Requests: 70
• Page size: 1.9 MB
• Load time: 885ms

Storefront by WooCommerce

Storefront theme by WooCommerce is a simple, flexible, and effective theme available for free from the official WooCommerce theme library. Because it’s made by WooCommerce itself, it seamlessly integrates with its e-commerce capabilities and provides all the essential tools to sell online.

Key features:

• Compatible with Elementor
• Seamless WooCommerce integration
• Highly flexible and can adapt to any online store
• Accessibility-ready
• Features a fully responsive design

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 81 (desktop) and 64 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 66
• Requests: 82
• Page size: 5.3 MB
• Load time: 1.07s

eStore by ThemeGrill

eStore is available in both a free and premium version. While the free version lacks some of the premium versions’ customization options and advanced e-commerce tools, it’s still one of the most complete free themes for WooCommerce.The free theme has a fairly generic design, which means it can easily and quickly be repurposed for almost any type of store.

Key features:

• Can upgrade to the premium version for more templates, customizability, and e-commerce features
• WooCommerce-specific settings (catalogs, notices, layouts, checkout)
• Compatible with the Elementor page builder
• Comes with built-in interactive widgets
• Functional pre-made header options (search, account, currency, etc.)
• Blogging tools and layouts

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 98 (desktop) and 89 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 89
• Requests: 82
• Page size: 1.7 MB
• Load time: 1.17s

OceanWP (Free)

OceanWP generously offers 3 free WooCommerce website templates for online fashion stores. The designs are still professional and attractive, but you will have to make do without OceanWP’s more advanced WooCommerce capabilities. The upside is that the free themes load insanely fast due to being more lightweight.

Key features:

• Three attractive online store templates
• A large number of header and layout styles
• Four distinct WooCommerce styles
• Product quick view
• Multi-step checkout

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 94 (desktop) and 48 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 83
• Requests: 56
• Page size: 1.4 MB
• Load time: 2.86s

Botiga

If you’re looking for a WordPress WooCommerce theme free of charge, you won’t find many more attractive options than Botiga. This is another classy and beautiful free online store theme by aThemes that’s perfect for beauty products or lifestyle stores.

Key features:

• Easy to customize using Elementor or Gutenberg
• Can upgrade for more themes and advanced e-commerce
• Customize your theme’s colors, typography, and footer
• Beautiful and minimalist out-of-the-box design
• Built-in quick view and mini cart

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 76 (desktop) and 74 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 92
• Requests: 20
• Page size: 424.3 KB
• Load time: 507ms

Blocksy

For a free WordPress WooCommerce theme, Blocksy offers beautifully designed shop templates. Its modern and quirky themes are balanced by minimalist design principles to be lightweight, yet attractive and engaging. If you need more advanced e-commerce tools, you can always upgrade to the Premium version.

Key features:

• Code splitting to only load essential JavaScript
• Translation ready
• Fully responsive design
• Supports various page builders, including Elementor
• Custom header builder with 9 pre-made elements

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 98 (desktop) and 76 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 89
• Requests: 51
• Page size: 840.6 KB
• Load time: 562ms

Orchid

Available in a free and premium version, Orchid’s free theme is the perfect starting point if you want to start your own online store. The default design can be changed into anything you wish with full support for Elementor and convenient built-in widgets.

Key features:

• WooCommerce featured categories widget
• 3 variations of WooCommerce product widget 
• Call to action, banner/slider, advertisement, and service widgets
• Mega menu
• Compatible with many e-commerce plugins

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 88 (desktop) and 62 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 71
• Requests: 112
• Page size: 1.3 MB
• Load time: 1.57s

Bazaar Lite

Bazaar Lite is the perfect option for those looking for a no-fuss and fast-loading WooCommerce theme. The minimal and accessible design means it’s a blank canvas for you to personalize with your own branding and style. Still, it comes with all the essentials, including detailed product pages.

Key features:

• Mobile responsive layouts
• Masonry grid shop pages
• Social icons
• Various blog layouts
• Upgradeable to the premium version for more advanced features

Performance analysis:

• PageSpeed Insights: 79 (desktop) and 32 (mobile)
• Pingdom: 91
• Requests: 40
• Page size: 4.2 MB
• Load time: 720ms

[Bonus tips] How to make your WooCommerce faster?

Even if you use one of the fastest WooCommerce themes, there’s still more you should do to ensure your website performs at its best. These tips will help you supercharge your WooCommerce website:

1. Signup for fast web hosting: The speed of your website largely depends on the quality of your hosting. Look for a WooCommerce hosting provider with a track record of fast and reliable speeds. 
2. Optimize images: Images account for almost half of the average web page’s weight and impact important performance metrics. You can optimize images by compressing, resizing, lazy loading, or changing their format. 10Web Booster image optimization automatically applies a number of image optimizations, like lazyloading, WebP conversion, and responsive resizing.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN can distribute your website’s resources across multiple servers across the globe, reducing network latency and improving the loading time of your website. 10Web Booster Pro comes with Cloudflare enterprise features for even faster content distribution and delivery. 
4. Use 10Web Booster: You can find various plugins to optimize different facets of your WordPress website’s performance. 10Web PageSpeed Booster automatically optimizes the loading speed of your website without having to take any manual action. If needed, PageSpeed Booster can automatically optimize your site in all the following ways:
   • Minify and compress CSS, HTML, and JS
   • Lazyload images, videos, and iframes
   • Cache pages, resources, or your full website
   • Font loading optimization
   • Optimize images by resizing and converting them to WebP,
   • And more.

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Conclusion

There you have the fastest WooCommerce themes to supercharge your business. Any of these themes will help you build a faster WooCommerce store with a better user experience, which should boost your SEO, visits, and conversions. 

Remember, the best WooCommerce themes are the ones that can support and grow your business, as well as deliver fast loading times. Both are equally important for success online. 

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Websites like GTMetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights provide suggestions on how to improve the performance of your website. If you are reading this, you are at least aware that every website has opportunities to improve performance, either through manual optimizations or through using plugins like 10Web Booster.

In both tools, you may see a suggestion to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy. This suggestion is to store files locally so that repeat visits to the site are faster. The steps to improve on this recommendation do not improve the initial site visit (there are other improvements for that). Still, all subsequent visits will benefit from leveraging the browser cache.

It should be noted that the suggestion of serving static assets with an efficient cache policy has also been referred to as leverage browser caching or browser caching in WordPress. 

This article explains how to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy and how an efficient cache policy can improve your website’s performance. 

When using GTMetrix, the suggestion will look like the example below on the results page. It will highlight potential savings from implementing browser caching.

In Google PageSpeed Insights, the suggestion looks similar and gives similar information.

The suggestions are similar because GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights use the Lighthouse tool for their webpage analysis framework. Lighthouse is an open-source tool aimed at improving site performance and can run in many different formats.

Let’s take a moment for a quick refresher to remind ourselves how a website’s performance is measured by a collection of metrics, the most important of which is the Core Web Vitals.

Here is a summary:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – The measurement of how long it takes for the largest object to load in the page’s viewport.
• First Input Delay (FID) – This measures website responsiveness.  It measures the time between the user clicking or interacting with the site and the site responding.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This measures how much a page’s layout unexpectedly shifts.

One way to positively impact both LCP and FID is to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy, which means letting the browser know it can locally store a resource for a certain amount of time.

An efficient cache policy will mean faster load times because no matter how fast your internet speed is, loading from a local cache will be faster and save time.

There are a few components, so let’s discuss them in more detail.

How to Serve Static Assets With an Efficient Cache Policy

To understand how to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy, we first need to understand the different aspects, such as static assets, caching, and a caching policy. Let’s break them down here.

What Are Static Assets?

Static assets are files. When we refer to static assets in this article, we refer to individual files that are not expected to change either soon or often.

Files like images, javascript, CSS files and fonts are files that could be considered static assets. Regarding WordPress, these CSS, javascript, and image and font files would usually be part of a theme, a plugin or user content.

Files and pages that are generated dynamically are not considered static assets. An example of this within WordPress would be the static pages generated by caching plugins. This is elaborated on in the next section.

What Is Caching?

Caching is the process of storing answers in a cache so that the next time the same question is asked, the answer can be returned quicker.

Related Articles

• How to Clear WordPress Cache Safely and Efficiently?
• Find the Best WordPress Caching Plugin with Our Top 5 Picks
• 6 Tips to Minimize Main Thread Work on WordPress

Page caching vs. static asset caching

This article looks at specifically static asset (file) caching. This should not be confused with full-page caching, which stores generated pages for later use.

Both page caching and file caching help to improve a site’s performance. When discussing static asset caching, we refer to specific assets such as javascript, CSS, and image files.

Page caching stores the results of a WordPress dynamically generated page and re-serving that version for a specific amount of time. Page caches are usually stored on a server or edge network such as a CDN, and static assets are stored locally on the user’s machine.

Caching regarding how we serve static assets with an efficient cache policy means telling the browser how long it can store a resource locally on the browser before having to re-download it.

What Makes a Static Asset Cacheable?

According to GTMetrix, an asset is cacheable if it meets the following requirements:

• It is a font, CSS, javascript, or media file.
• It returns a 200, 203, or 206 HTTP status code
• It does not have an explicit no-cache policy

What Is a Caching Policy?

We have looked at what is a static asset as well as what it means to cache an asset.

The terms freshness and stale can be used here to describe the status of a cached file. If a file is okay to be pulled from the cache it could be called fresh. When it expires, it would be called stale.

A policy will answer questions such as how long a file is considered fresh and how to check that a file is fresh. The policy states we need to check with the server only after a specific amount of time or let us know to check with the server on every request, but only re-download the file if it has changed.

A few more terms that will be good to understand before we progress further.

How Are UX and SEO Affected by a Cache Policy?

User experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) are tightly tied together. According to Google, studies show that users care about site responsiveness, so Google ranks more responsiveness pages higher.

If static assets are cached effectively, the page will render quicker due to the reduced time it takes to load these assets. The reduction in time leads to improvements in core web vitals such as LCP and FID and, ultimately, a higher search engine ranking.

You can read more about how core web vitals impact page ranking here.

How to Fix Serve Static Assets With an Efficient Cache Policy Issue

Fix Manually

Serving static assets with an efficient cache policy isn’t a WordPress-specific setting, you can set it manually by modifying your webservers configuration file or use a plugin like 10Web Booster hosting to ensure your site is configured with optimized caching settings.

This section will cover editing a web server’s configuration files directly to enable the cache-control and expires HTTP headers on your servers so when it serves static assets it applies HTTP headers in the response.

When a resource is requested, the web server responds with the resource and some extra information in what are called HTTP headers. Think about HTTP headers as metadata about the connection. In the case of caching, the HTTP headers Cache-Control and Expires control how we cache an asset.

The cache-control header contains instructions on if and/or how to cache the static asset. There are many directives for cache-control so lets understand some of the most popular ones.

Here are some examples of what a cache-control header may look like.

Example: cache an asset for seven days
Cache-Control: max-age=604800

Example: Can be stored in a shared cache for up to seven days
Cache-Control: public, max-age=604800

Example: Can be stored, but must revalidated on each request
Cache-Control: no-cache

Example: Cannot be cached
Cache-Control: no-store

The cache-control header is newer and has more options, but in the case that cache-control is not supported, the expires HTTP header accomplishes the same header task and instructs how long an asset is valid before needing re-validation. (Note that the max-age directive in the Cache-Control header takes precedence over Expires)
Expires: Wed Feb 13 21:01:38 CST 2023

Modifying a server config directly

First, let us look at the “hard way” so we understand what happens when we use other tools and services that make it easier for us.

Apache

In the Apache HTTP server, the following snippet could be added to a site definition or a .htaccess file.

Explaining this snippet, it says that any asset where the extension matches .ico or .pdf, etc will have the Cache-Control header set for the asset.

<filesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, public"
</filesMatch>

With Apache, many hosting providers will give you the option to add directives to a .htaccess file. Note that while this is an easy way to add to the server’s config, using .htaccess files is known to impart negative performance hits at the server level.
Nginx

In Nginx, this snippet can be added to a server block.

Explaining this snippet, it says that any asset where the extension matches .ico or .pdf etc will have both the expires and cache-control headers set.

location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$ {
    expires 1h;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, no-transform";
}

For both Apache and Nginx, we are showing how to modify/add headers. We are showing the particular headers we use for caching, but the method can be used for any other form of caching.

Fix With a WordPress Plugin

If the above feels like a lot, it is because it is. Modifying server configs and keeping up to date on manual changes is time-consuming and error-prone.

The 10Web Booster free plan can configure Apache to add headers for static assets, and it also adds headers for cached web pages. If you are not already using 10Web hosting and your host uses Apache, this is a great way to get started on implementing an efficient cache policy.

If you need more options or more control over HTTP headers, you can use 10Web Booster Pro. 10Web Booster Pro leverages its Cloudflare. When you use Cloudflare, it adds the cache-control headers to your static assets and cached pages. This bypasses any server configs or restrictions because your visitors are served up the files from Cloudflare directly.

What makes the 10Web Booster plugin the best choice here is that it does all of this and does it automatically. You do not need to manage any server configs or .htaccess files.

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Alternatively, if you use 10Web Hosting, it automatically implements caching and you do not need to worry about adding headers for static assets.

Still Can’t Fix the Issue? Try These Two Tips

If you have implemented the above steps and you are still seeing that service static assets with an efficient cache policy are still showing up in your reports, here are a few more things you can try.

Verifying Files Are Cached

If GTMetrix and PageSpeed are still reporting that you should be serving static assets with a cache policy you may want to verify that your implementation actually made the expected changes.

In most browsers, there is an easy way to verify whether files are coming from a cache or not.

In Chrome, under view and Developer, select Developer Tools:

Under the Network tab, you will be able to identify files that come from (disk cache) or (memory cache). The difference between disk and memory cache is that memory goes away when the browser is closed, and disk persists when the browser is closed.

Increase the Cache Time

According to statistics from Lighthouse, an efficient cache policy is one that has a high ratio of cache hits to misses, meaning that the majority of the static assets have a max-age or expires set.  For sites that are in production or not changing often, a max-age of three months to even a year is recommended.

They recommend starting a policy of around three months (around 7890000 seconds), if you have already set this, it might be worth increasing the max-age to a year or more if your site is live.

Conclusion

Being able to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy brings speed improvements to your website’s performance. 

This article covered what static assets are, what HTTP headers are, and looked at how to enable and verify the caching headers are in place.

We looked at the nuts and bolts of manually enabling the headers by modifying server configs and how we can make it easier using a WordPress plugin like 10Web Booster, and leveraging 10Web’s integration with Cloudflare to have access to set the cache-control HTTP headers.

10Web Booster is so much more than just a caching plugin. You can read more about the many caching and speed optimization features in this 10Web Booster article.

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While running performance audits of our website on common tools such as Google PageSpeed insights, we often get some warnings. We usually ignore these warnings and don’t bother fixing them, and as a result, those warnings turn out to be harmful to UX (User Experience), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), website performance, and a bunch of other associated factors. In this article, we will learn about a very popular Lighthouse warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load” and will learn how to fix it through various methods.

Exploring “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load” warning

If you are a developer or if you own a website, you might have come across this common warning while running a performance audit of the website on PageSpeed insights. This warning is a recommendation from Lighthouse to help you highlight the issue of lack of visibility of text on a webpage while the webpage is being loaded.

It is a common issue nowadays because people often go after fancy or aesthetically pleasing fonts, and to do so, they use modern font libraries such as Font Awesome, Google Fonts, or Adobe Fonts, which unfortunately don’t exist on the visitor’s system, so they need to be downloaded from the internet first to be rendered on the webpage. It is a time-consuming process, and therefore, Lighthouse takes note of it and throws us this warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load”.  What that essentially means is that text should remain visible even if the web font has not loaded yet.

The primary reason why the text should be unhidden during web font load is user experience. We should never make the visitor see a blank text screen and wait for the fonts to load on their system because this could lead to a poor end-user experience, and that is why Lighthouse marks this as something significant for the website developer/owner to resolve as soon as possible.

Now that we know what this warning is about, let’s dive deep into a few related concepts that might help us understand it better and map the associated relations better.

What is a flash of invisible text (FOIT)?

A flash of invisible text (FOIT) is a common term used to describe a phenomenon when web fonts are used on a webpage. When you open a new webpage, the browser takes a significant amount of time to load a web font as it needs to download its relevant font files first. Such fonts are not available on the visitor’s system by default, and therefore, the text of that web font remains invisible for that loading period. This loading period can be noticeable because they are typically larger files. This is called flash of invisible text (FOIT). This concept particularly relates very well with our Lighthouse warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load” because it reflects the same issue of text being invisible due to the web font being loaded.

Related Article

• 2023 Guide to Font Loading Optimization on WordPress

FOIT can often occur when you have a poor internet connection since it would take more time for the browser to download the web font or when multiple web fonts are used on a webpage. This issue might be even more noticeable on mobile devices.

Font-display: swap vs fallback vs optional

To fix the issue of FOIT, multiple techniques can be used, including font pre-loading or font-display properties that ensure a fallback font is available that can immediately display the text and, in the meantime, the web font can load properly and then be displayed.

There are three different font-display properties: swap, fallback, and optional.

Let’s briefly explore each of these and how they affect FOIT. 

1. Font-display: swap

Let’s briefly explore how we can add this property to the WordPress site at the code level.

In the CSS file of your project where your web font is being loaded, you can add the font-display: swap inside the @font-face rule that loads the web font. The @font-face property inside your CSS file will look something like this:

This will help you fix the FOIT, and as a result, you won’t see the “Ensure text remains visible during webfont loading” warning anymore on the Google Lighthouse PageSpeed Insights. 

2. Font-display: fallback

This property is similar to the font-display: swap one, but it goes one level ahead to solve the FOIT issue. So, let’s assume that the web font that needs to be downloaded is unavailable, then what will happen? This is exactly where font-display: fallback comes into play. It does pretty much the same as what the swap property does, except for that it also handles the use-case when the web font isn’t available or can’t be downloaded properly. What it does is it simply tells the browser to keep on using the fallback font just in case the web font that needs to be downloaded isn’t available for any known or unknown reason(s).

Using font-display: fallback may cause flash of unstyled text (FOUT) if the web font takes a significant amount of time to load because the fallback font will be displayed until the web font is ready.

3. Font-display: optional

This property behaves similarly to font-display: fallback, except over here, the browser is instructed to use the web font only if it’s available, but to use a fallback font if not. What that also essentially means is that let’s say,  if the web font takes a long time to load, the browser may choose not to display the fallback font at all, which, as a result, can lead to FOIT.

Overall, if you compare all of these three properties, font-display: swap seems to be the best property to overcome the issue of FOIT, followed by font-display: fallback, which has the drawback of getting FOUT if the web font takes a decent amount of time to load, and then font-display: optional. The choice between font-display: fallback or font-display: optional is opinionated and depends on your preference.

How are UX and SEO affected by the invisible text during webfont load?

UX (User Experience) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are two of the most critical factors for any modern-day website nowadays, and knowing how these both are affected by the invisible text during web font load is something very important. Let’s explore both of these below.

UX (user experience)

Seeing an invisible text can turn out to be a nightmare for the end user. No visitor would like to visit your webpage and see the invisible text or some unexplainable shifts and changes of layout because the web font is loading in the background. This certainly leads to a poor end-user experience and can leave your site visitors frustrated and maybe never visit your site again. The invisible text makes it quite difficult for the users to read the content of a webpage, especially if the text is an important part of the user experience, such as navigation links or headlines, call-to-action buttons, etc. 

Metrics such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) and FID (First Input Delay) are three key metrics that determine the end-user experience of a webpage, including how quickly it loads and responds to user interactions. Invisible text affects both of these and other similar metrics quite adversely.  

Let’s explore the effect of invisible text on them.

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Let’s say you got a WordPress page that uses some web fonts that are not available on the visitor’s system by default. So, when the visitor visits your webpage, their browser starts downloading the font files before it can render any text that uses those fonts. If there is an invisible text on a webpage at the time when the browser is downloading the web fonts, the browser may still have to wait for the font files to download before it can paint the visible text on the screen. 

As a result, there might be a significant delay in LCP if the largest paint is a text because the browser must wait for the font files to download first before it can display the largest visible content on the page.

2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Invisible text during webfont load adversely affects Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) in many ways. To help us understand better, let’s take the example of the web page loading process. When a webpage loads, the browser needs to download and render all the resources required to display that page, including any custom fonts that might be used on that page. In case if the custom font isn’t available, then the browser may use a fallback font, which can cause the text to appear differently than it will once the custom font is loaded. As a result, unexpected layout shifts can be witnessed as the text jumps to a different position or size once the custom font is loaded.

3. First Input Delay (FID)

Usually FID is not affected by font loading. This happens because the text elements, even if not rendered properly, can still be interactive.

How does invisible text during webfont load affect Google’s PageSpeed Insights score?

Google’s PageSpeed Insights score is calculated based on various factors including LCP, CLS, FID, and some other metrics. We already saw how invisible text negatively affects both LCP and CLS. If the web fonts on a webpage are causing negative delays in these metrics, PageSpeed is likely to be negatively affected then, even if the page appears to load quickly on the surface. Overall, we can see that invisible text does play a major role in negatively impacting the PageSpeed Insights overall score for a webpage.

To sum it up, the effect of invisible text during web font load is adverse to the UX.

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SEO (search engine optimization)

To understand how invisible text during web font load affects SEO, we need to generally understand how search engines rank websites. Search engines use the content of a webpage to determine what that page is about and to index it properly. Generally, the effect won’t be much since this invisible text stays only during the loading period, and after that everything gets normal. It might affect in case if the font can’t be loaded properly and stays invisible later as well, or if it takes too much time to display the text.

However, another impact is important as well: bad UX (previous section) means bad visitor signals and low CWV and PageSpeed scores. All this adversely affects the SEO as search ranking algorithms take user signals and performance metrics into consideration when ranking the results on the search results page.

Overall, both UX and SEO are negatively affected by invisible text during web font load. Therefore, we should try to fix the “Ensure text remains visible during webfont loading” warning as soon as possible otherwise, we would need to face a lot of negative consequences for not doing so.

Related Article

• WordPress SEO Audit Checklist: 11 Vital Areas to Inspect

How to ensure text remains visible during webfont load? (WordPress fix)

We’ve had a decent discussion around the problem itself and the associated terms and concepts. Now let’s dive deep into the solutions or the fixes for this problem. There are two WordPress ways to fix the problem. One is the manual fix, and the other one is fixing it using a WordPress plugin. Let’s explore both of them briefly below.

Fix manually

There are multiple manual ways through which you can try to ensure that text remains visible during the web font load process. Some of the major ones have been listed and described below. 

1. Specify a fallback font

A great way of dealing with this issue is by specifying a fallback font that will be used until the web font has finished loading. Implementing it is also simple. All you need to do is to add a CSS rule to your website’s stylesheet (CSS) that sets the font-family property to a commonly available system font, such as Arial or Helvetica or any system font of sans-serif types that is available of the device. 

The following code snippet illustrates to you what CSS rule to apply in your CSS file.

2. Use the font-display property in CSS font-face rule

We already discussed earlier how different font-display properties, i.e., swap, fallback, and optional, help us prevent FOIT, and as a result, they help us get rid of the warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont loading”. If you want more details, please scroll up to that section again.

3. Preload the web font

This is an effective technique as by preloading the web font, you’re downloading it and making it available beforehand so that no time is consumed loading the web font while loading the page. 

Implementing this is pretty simple. All you need to do is to add a link element to the head of your HTML document that points to the font file. 

Let’s see a code snippet that visually illustrates to us what link element to add in the head of your HTML document.

4. Use system fonts

The whole problem arises when you use web fonts, right? So how about we get rid of web fonts as the primary fonts and assign system fonts (fonts that are already available on the end user’s device) to be the primary fonts? That would simply eliminate the problem. But there is a tradeoff for this. System fonts are sometimes not very aesthetically pleasing, so you need to deal with this little tradeoff. But this is something opinionated as it all comes down to your preference and the type of webpage content that your website has. 

By using system fonts, we can ensure that the text remains visible even if web fonts take longer to load. The following code snippet shows us how you can modify your CSS file to add a list of system fonts as the default primary fonts.

5. Use font subsets

Font subsets are custom versions of web fonts that include only the characters used on a particular web page. By reducing the file size of the font, font subsets can help web fonts load faster and reduce the chance of text disappearing during the loading process. Some web font services, like Google Fonts, offer the option to generate font subsets.

To sum it up, by using any one or more of the above-mentioned manual techniques, you can ensure text remains visible during webfont load.

Fix with a WordPress plugin

WordPress plugins can be a great option if you don’t want to go the manual route and want a suitable plugin to solve the invisible text during web font load issue for you. There are multiple decent plugin options to choose from, but we recommend you go with the best one available, 10Web Booster. With 10Web Booster, you do not need to code anything, the plugin works out of the box and optimizes font loading automatically.

It uses various optimization techniques, including the following, to solve the issue of invisible text during web font loading:

1. Critical fonts loading – enabled by default and, in most cases, can stand alone to solve the issue. 

2. Font swap – disabled by default.

3. Font lazy loading – disabled by default. 

The first optimization technique, i.e., critical fonts loading is usually enough to solve the problem, but there might be some cases where it might not be used. Let’s see a few cases where critical fonts loading will not be an ideal technique to implement.  

1. When there are multiple font weights and styles to load

If you’re using a web font that has multiple weights or styles, it might take longer to load all the necessary font files, even with critical font loading. In this case, font swap can be used to temporarily display a fallback font until the required font is loaded. This ensures that the text is always visible to users, even while the web font is being loaded.

2. When the website has a lot of content

If your website has a lot of content, it can take longer for critical fonts to load, and users may experience a delay in seeing any text at all. In this case, font lazy loading can be used to load fonts on-demand as the user scrolls through the content. This technique can help to reduce the initial page load time, ensuring that users can access the content more quickly.

3. When the web font is not essential to the user experience

If the web font is not a critical component of your website and its absence doesn’t significantly impact the user experience, then you can use font swap to replace it with a system font or a web-safe font. This ensures that the text is always visible, even if the web font fails to load.

So, in such a few use cases, techniques 2 and 3 can be used to solve the issue. 

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Still can’t fix the webfont load issue? (common problems fixed)

In addition to the above solutions, if you’re still facing the web font load issue and are encountering any one of the following common problems, then this section would be worth a read for you. 

Ensure text remains visible during webfont load – Google Fonts  

When using some custom Google web font(s), you might have come across the same warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load”. This usually happens because the font file first needs to be downloaded and loaded before the font can be displayed, the downloading time can be long, or the font can even fail to load, and as a result, the text of the content may be invisible or display in a fallback font. 

To solve this problem, the following methods can be used. We covered them in earlier sections.

1. Use the “font-display” property 
2. Use system fonts or web-safe fonts as a fallback 
3. Reduce the font file size by using font subsets 

Ensure text remains visible during webfont load – Font Awesome

Choosing a suitable web font for icons entirely up to you. It can be Font Awesome, Material Symbols or a local icons set. However, whatever font library you use, just ensure that the font(s) is well-optimized, load properly and quickly, and don’t cause any noticeable errors or warning such as “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load”.

Font Awesome fonts can also be treated and used in a way that you won’t get this warning. You can use the following techniques to get rid of this warning when using Font Awesome.

1. Use Font Awesome’s asynchronous loading script

Font Awesome provides us with an asynchronous loading script that loads the web font(s) separately from the rest of the webpage content, which can help prevent blocking the text rendering. 

You can simply implement this script method by adding the following script in the head section of your HTML file.

Note: You need to replace “your_kit_id” with your Font Awesome kit ID.

2. Define fallback fonts in the font stack

Let’s assume that the Font Awesome web fonts fail to load or are blocked due to some reason. Now in this case, we would need some fallback fonts to display instead of the web fonts which failed to load due to any known or unknown reason. You can define a list of fallback fonts in the font stack. They could be system fonts or web-safe fonts that are available on most devices. 

Let’s see how we can do so with the help of a small code snippet that defines the code that needs to be added to your CSS file below:

Adding such a fallback font will show some character instead of font awesome, for example the letter “i”. Not good, but better than nothing, at least it will indicate that some icon is there.

3. Preload the Font Awesome CSS

Another solution could be to preload the Font Awesome CSS so that the web fonts load faster and reduce the chances of FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text).

The following code snippet illustrates how to preload the Font Awesome CSS via the link tag script.

By using the “as” attribute with the value of “style”, the Font Awesome CSS will be preloaded as a stylesheet.

Ensure text remains visible during webfont load – Local Fonts

Generally, this warning only applies to web fonts, but let’s suppose that you’re still seeing this warning despite using local fonts, then the following steps might help you get rid of the warning.

1. Optimize the loading of your local fonts

You can use a font-loading library like FontFaceObserver to load your local fonts asynchronously, which means that the font will be loaded in the background while the text is displayed using the fallback font. This will ensure that the text remains visible during the font load time.

2. Reduce the size of your local fonts

Large font files can take a long time to load, which can delay the rendering of your text. You can reduce the size of your local fonts by using a font subsetting tool like FontSquirrel to remove any unnecessary characters from the font file.

3. Use CDN

Using a CDN can turn out to be a smart technique. They distribute web content across multiple servers, which results in faster loading times, and as a result, improves a website’s performance and reliability. Local fonts can also be cached and stored via CDN, the same way as local CSS and JS files, or local images, or the entire webpage.

Content loaded via CDN is usually faster than the content loaded from a website server. To sum it up, a CDN can turn out to be quite an effective technique to help solve the “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load” warning for local fonts.

Related Articles

• The Best CDN for WordPress: Which One Suits You Better?
• WordPress CDN – How to Improve Website Load Times with a CDN <s/li>

4. Use a system font stack

System fonts are pre-installed on most devices and are typically faster to load than web fonts or local fonts. Using a system font stack, you can ensure that the text on your website is always visible, even if the font file fails to load.

If you follow these techniques, hopefully, you will get rid of that warning “Ensure text remains visible during webfont loading” even when using local fonts.

Conclusion

To sum it up, this warning is a very critical one since we’ve seen how this can adversely affect many things including SEO, UX, our PageSpeed Insights core, and whatnot. Therefore, by following any of the suitable method(s) we discussed to fix this warning, we can get rid of this Lighthouse warning.
But if you don’t want to go down this hassle of doing things manually yourself, then our 10Web Booster plugin should be a great choice for you to solve this warning.

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FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

Try for Free

Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

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The post How to Ensure Text Remains Visible During Webfont Load appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.

Are you looking for ways to improve the performance of your web application? A crucial step is to minimize main thread work when running performance tests since this is one of the recommendations of PageSpeed.

On the client side, the performance of a webpage is often determined by how fast the browser processes and renders HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code – all on the main thread. That said, with careful planning, reducing strain on that single resource is possible, allowing your app or website to run faster and smoother. In this blog post, we’ll explore what main thread work means, how it affects your WordPress site performance, and look at some best practices to minimize main thread work. Let’s dive in!

What Is the Main Thread Work?

Consider the main thread to be a waiter in a restaurant. The waiter must take orders, process payments, bring meals, replenish beverages, etc.

Suppose the waiter becomes preoccupied with a particular activity, such as taking too long to process orders (e.g., the client has a difficult order or is undecided). In that case, he or she is unable to attend to other duties. This results in a bottleneck, influencing your perception of the restaurant’s performance.

The main thread of a web browser is where the browser handles most page-load-related operations, such as rendering/painting content and handling user input. If you want to learn more about threads, you can check out this article in Mozilla’s developer documentation.

To understand how the main thread does its job, we must first describe what occurs when you attempt to load a page’s resources.

The browser first sends a request to the server. As soon as the server returns the requested content, the browser can begin analyzing (parsing) the HTML code and generating the DOM tree – the HTML structure. The browser is now able to render and display the information.

Image source

In simple words, the browser’s main thread is the procedure of parsing and rendering the code. When a browser meets render-blocking resources that slow down the rendering process, the main thread becomes busy and switches to parsing/executing these resources, e.g. scripts or styles. Therefore, the page cannot be interactive and cannot react to user input.

The primary cause of a busy main thread is JavaScript; CSS files also contribute. Since these files are JS and CSS render-blocking and should be eliminated, the browser should not encounter them while parsing the code and displaying the page.

By looking at the PageSpeed Insights report, you can clearly see how main thread work is affected:

Observe that the PageSpeed suggestion is divided into seven separate sections. You can determine which section has the most influence on performance.

How to Read Google PageSpeed Insights’ Report on Main Thread Work?

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a great tool for debugging web pages. A variety of audits are available regarding the Main Thread and JavaScript.

Using the “Minimize main-thread work” audit is a good start since it analyzes and groups Main Thread activities.

• Script Evaluation: This category measures the time taken for the browser to evaluate any JavaScript code that is used on the page. This can include functions, variables, or other code that has been included on the page. 
• Other: This category includes any other time spent on the main thread that is not related to the other categories. 
• Style & Layout: This category measures the time spent on calculating the layout of the page, based on the HTML elements and CSS styles used. 
• Rendering: This refers to how long it takes for the browser to draw the page after all of the layout instructions have been applied.
• Script Parsing & compilation: This category measures the time taken for the browser to parse and compile any JavaScript code that is used on the page. 
• Parse HTML and CSS: This category measures the time taken for the browser to parse the HTML and CSS code on the page. 
• Garbage Collection: This category measures the time spent on garbage collection. Garbage collection is the process of the browser reclaiming memory that is no longer being used by the page.

Other categories related to main threads are the “Avoid long main-thread tasks” which makes it possible for you to be more specific by showing how long it takes for specific JavaScript tasks to run. If long tasks take too much time, the browser may hang, crash and display messages like “Aw, Snap!”

As well as these audits, PSI’s interactivity metrics also identify pages with Main Thread issues. Time to Interactive (TTI) and Total Blocking Time (TBT) measure the impact of long tasks and unoptimized JavaScript.

With regard to the real-user data (i.e., field data), you should focus on the First Input Delay metric.

The three metrics all deal with interactivity, so if they’re all red, you probably have a main thread problem.

With Chrome’s DevTools, you can analyze the issues even further. Choose “Inspect” from the right-click menu when you open a web page. Click on “Performance” and note how long it takes for the page to load. You can also use the “Coverage” panel in this situation:

When the report is ready, go to the “Main” section and look for gray tasks with a small red overlay. That’s what we call Long Tasks. By using the “Coverage” tab, you can find specific files and see what percentage of JS code remains unused in them:

As you know, the browser has to download, parse and execute each of these resources before proceeding. This blocks the Main Thread. As a result, serving render-blocking resources consecutively slows down the loading process.

Now, let’s see how to minimize main thread work.

How to Fix the “Minimize Main Thread Work” Issue on WordPress?

When minimizing main thread work in WordPress, there are two methods to consider.

1. Manual Method
2. Plugin Method

These optimization methods should be implemented page per page for the entire website. This is quite difficult technically, also taking into account that one should update this on plugin/theme updates, and to make sure that the implementation does not break any webpage on any device. That is why automatic optimization through plugins is safer and easier to do.

Let’s discuss each one of them here.

Fix Manually

The following steps will help you minimize main thread work manually on your WordPress site.

1. Defer JS
2. Minify JS & CSS
3. Remove Unused JS and Delay JS
4. Defer Non-Critical CSS
5. Other Performance Optimizations

1. Defer JS 

Deferring refers to the process of postponing the execution of a function or code block until a later time. In the context of minimizing the main thread, deferring work means pushing it off until a later time, which helps to prevent the main thread from becoming blocked and unresponsive. First, you may defer the execution of JavaScript scripts and load them only after displaying the most relevant content.

Deferring JS will specifically target the script parsing and compilation category.

Before you can manually defer JS, you must identify the scripts using the PageSpeed Insights report. Then, you need to add the defer attribute to each JavaScript file so that it won’t be executed until after the page has finished rendering.

The following demonstrates the defer attribute:

<script defer src="/example-js-script">

</script>

2. Minify JS & CSS 

Minifying JS and CSS files are essential for improving website performance and reducing main thread work. Minifying JS helps to manage script evaluation and parsing & compilation, while minifying CSS addresses the categories related to minimizing main-thread script evaluation and parsing HTML & CSS. 

By removing unnecessary characters, such as whitespaces and comments, minification makes the code smaller and more efficient, which in turn helps the browser load content faster and display pages more quickly to users. While it can be difficult and unnatural to produce CSS code without these characters, writing your code normally and adding a Webpack minification phase can make the process easier. By using these techniques, you can create a better user experience and improve your website’s overall performance.

3. Remove Unused JS + Delay JS

JS files may also be effectively managed by removing unnecessary JS and delaying JS resources. These two operations will address the script evaluation, parsing & compilation sections of the PSI report.

• When eliminating unnecessary JavaScript, the JS files will not be rendered when the content is shown above the fold. Therefore, huge JS files that are not needed for the page’s most essential content will not stop the browser and its main thread from working.
• When JavaScript resources are delayed, the browser will not load them until the first user contact (e.g., hovering, scrolling, clicking). As a result, the main thread will be able to continue.

Related Article

How to Remove Unused JavaScript on WordPress Automatically

4. Defer Non-Critical CSS and inline Critical CSS

If you want to minimize main thread work and pass the Parse HTML & CSS Category of the PSI audit, you should delay non-critical CSS — CSS files that are below the fold and are not necessary to show the page.

The goal is to load non-critical CSS only after the browser has rendered and shown the most vital content. There are further ways to delay CSS files.

First, realize that delaying non-essential CSS and inlining crucial CSS — the files that must be loaded as rapidly as possible — operate in conjunction.

Therefore, you should locate and make inline the necessary CSS in the HTML code. Utilizing a Critical Path CSS generator is an option worth considering. Using the subsequent method, you may asynchronously load the non-critical CSS file.

Related Article

How to Incline Critical CSS & Defer Unused CSS in WordPress 

5. Other Performance Optimizations

There are other categories that you should also optimize in addition to the “Minimize main thread work” recommendation:

• Style and layout
• Rendering
• Garbage Collection.

In order to avoid large, complex layouts and layout thrashing, using styles for layout calculations rather than using JavaScript can be an effective way to minimize main thread work on your website. By using CSS transitions, you can achieve visual effects and motions much faster than with JavaScript. The strategy involves adding normal styles and applying CSS transitions for any effects and motions that you want to incorporate. By using CSS for layout calculations, you can reduce the amount of work that the browser’s main thread needs to perform, which can improve overall performance and user experience

You should also monitor the total memory usage of your web page when using the Garbage Collection.

Optimizing each page of a website with the methods mentioned above can be a technically challenging task, especially when considering the need to maintain consistency across all pages and devices. Furthermore, the need to keep up with plugin and theme updates can further complicate the process.

For these reasons, using automatic optimization through plugins can be a safer and easier approach. However, it is still important to understand the underlying methods and techniques for optimization, as this can help you to identify potential issues and ensure that your website is performing at its best. The next step will be to identify which plugins can be used to optimize your website automatically.

Fix With a WordPress Plugin

Another way to minimize main thread work on WordPress is by using the plugin method. One of the most prominent plugins is the 10Web Booster.

10 Web Booster is designed to help minimize main thread work on WordPress websites by utilizing various techniques such as deferring JavaScript, minifying JavaScript and CSS, removing unused JavaScript and delaying its loading, deferring non-critical CSS, and other performance optimizations.

• Minifying and compressing JS and CSS is also an effective option for reducing main thread work. This process involves removing white space, comments, and redundant code from source files. 10Web Booster uses advanced algorithms to identify which files are safe to minify without compromising their functionality; this ensures that any changes made won’t make your website unusable.
• The plugin also allows you to remove unused JS and delay its loading; this means elements like trackers that aren’t needed right away are prevented from slowing down other processes until they’re specifically called upon. This happens without breaking webpages.
• Additionally, 10Web Booster can defer non-critical CSS and resources like fonts, so they aren’t loaded until later in the page’s life cycle; this helps speed up initial rendering times by allowing only essential elements on the page’s visual hierarchy before its content has been laid out completely. All these happens without compromising the initial page layout and styles, that is without breaking them, and without harming CLS metric.
• Finally, In addition to the optimizations mentioned for minimizing main thread work, 10Web Booster offers a variety of other features to help improve website performance. These include browser caching, lazy loading of images, reducing image size, optimizing the database, and more. 

Let’s examine the different optimization levels available to minimize main thread work.

Standard

The standard level integrates and compresses CSS and JS files, reducing their size and making them lighter. In this level, a subset of JS files are specified to load only when triggered by user interaction. The graphics on a website are transformed and supplied as WebP images, which are lower image files without sacrificing image quality. Lastly, lazy loading is enabled for photos, videos, and iframes, and delaying loading material that is not required.

Balanced

The balanced level includes all the optimization choices found in the Standard level and the production of critical CSS. This enables critical CSS or the visible section of the page that will be delivered first to load before any other content. Any additional CSS styles load after the essential styles.

Strong

Strong offers all the optimization settings of Standard plus a delay for all JavaScript, which means that all JS will load upon user input.

Extreme

Extreme website optimization incorporates all three tiers, Standard + Critical CSS and Delay JS.

Conclusion

You should keep track of your WordPress site and minimize main thread work if you want to improve the speed of your website. One plugin that can automate many of the optimization methods outlined in this article is 10Web Booster, which is available as a free download from the official WordPress plugin repository.

The free version of 10Web Booster offers a range of optimization features, including critical CSS, JS delay, and font swapping, and can be used on up to six pages of a website. For users who require optimization for additional pages, a Pro version of 10Web Booster is available, which offers all the same optimization features as the free version, but with unlimited usage. The Pro version of 10Web Booster also includes Cloudflare enterprise CDN integration, that will provide fast loading of not only resources (CSS, JavaScript, fonts) from the nearby servers, but also the distribution of fully cached webpages through the Cloudflare network. 10Web Booster simplifies the optimization process, enabling website owners and developers to easily apply the best optimization practices without the need for extensive technical knowledge or expertise. By leveraging 10Web Booster, users can ensure their website runs smoothly and performs at its best, resulting in a better user experience for their visitors.

This will make your site load faster and improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score. Reducing main thread work can be a bit technical and time-consuming, but it’s worth it for the performance benefits.

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster
On any hosting!

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FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

Try for Free

Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

Try For Free

The post 6 Tips to Minimize Main Thread Work on WordPress appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.

If you’re someone managing a website, you’ll likely be familiar with the “reduce unused JavaScript” message that pops up on a website checking tool whenever you have some irrelevant JavaScript code on specific web pages. For instance, you may have seen the message when you checked your website through PageSpeed Insights – an online website testing tool – and want to optimize your site to eliminate the error. On the face of it, the message seems straightforward: remove unused JavaScript code to improve your website speed and performance. But there’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes.

And as a website manager or owner, is it something that should cause worry? Does it affect a website’s rank on Google? And what about user experience? More importantly, what can you do to fix it? If you’re looking for answers to all of these questions, this article will explain in detail what the message means, what causes it to come up as a problem on website checking tools, and what common manual fixes you can implement to eliminate it.

Of course, manual fixes may only solve the problem for the time being. As you add more elements to your website to make it more interactive and visually appealing, you will likely have to reduce unused JavaScript once again. As such, the article will also discuss efficient tools which can quickly identify the root cause of the issue and prevent you from resolving it repeatedly. So, let’s start by first looking into what it means to reduce unused JavaScript.

What is unused JavaScript and how to identify the causes?

As the name suggests,  unused JavaScript consists of JS files that a webpage doesn’t use to render main elements or files that may be used later – the page can load and display the primary content without such files. Usually, it is above-the-fold content – the most important elements the viewer sees on the front page before scrolling down. However, unused JS files can be render-blocking, meaning that their presence in the code can cause the webpage to take more time to load and render the essential elements necessary for a good user experience. 

Related Article

• 6 Practical Tips to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources on WordPress

Of course, not all JavaScript is render-blocking, and you need JS to add dynamic components to your website for more interactivity. However, the problem is the wrong execution time. As the web browser starts loading your web page, it parses the entire HTML before loading the page. Whenever it finds a link to a JS file or comes across inline JS – the JS code written within HTML – it stops the parsing process to fetch and execute the JS code. Naturally, the longer the JS file, the longer the execution time. And if the JS code is in a place where it is unnecessary to render the rest of the page, the rendering process will take longer for no reason.

So, JavaScript itself is not an issue. Instead, it might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, you can have third-party code in your HTML for analyzing your website for monitoring purposes. Tracking codes by Google Analytics and Facebook are typical sources of such third-party code. Although it is necessary for efficient website management, it is not essential for loading the main components of the page. It just comes in the way as the browser parses your page’s HTML. Similarly, you will likely add plugins to improve user experience. But such plugins also use JS and cause slow rendering. 

However, it’s not always about wrong placement. You can have utterly redundant code that has no use in the entire website. Usually, you get “dead JS” if you have pieces of old code from previous web page versions that are no longer functional. Such occurrences of redundant code increase rendering time, and you should remove them immediately. Also, code for testing website performance may have JS files. Failing to remove such testing code can result in JS files piling up on your web page. 

You can get more detailed reports on the factors causing the “reduce unused JavaScript” message to pop up by using online testing tools to check your websites. The insights will allow you to optimize JS more effectively without compromising the website’s user-friendly elements. The following section gives three ways you can check whether your website needs improvement in terms of unused JS code.

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How to identify unused JavaScript?

You can check whether your website contains render-blocking JavaScript through readily available online utilities. We will explore three primary ones that are pretty well-known – PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and Google Chrome’s Developer Tools – that will let you quickly understand the problem areas and help you implement the proper fixes. 

Checking from PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a free online utility that helps you assess your website’s health for both desktop and mobile devices. Besides checking for unused JavaScript, it gives you a detailed report on several statistics to measure user experience and provides suggestions for improving your website’s performance through intuitive visuals. You can quickly check for unused JavaScript by following the steps below.

1. Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your website’s URL in the textbox. Click Analyze.

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2. Next, you can select Desktop and scroll down to the Opportunities section.

Image source

3. You can expand the Reduce unused JavaScript message drop-down to see the problem.

Image source

As you can see, WordPress plugins are the leading cause of unused JavaScript. You can also view the third-party sources for the plugins and see the estimated time savings if you reduce unused JavaScript – in this case, it is 1.03 seconds.

Checking from GTMetrix

GTMetrix is another well-known free website-testing tool that gives you all the relevant statistics to assess your website’s health. It provides a detailed report on performance metrics, structure, and other vitals that help you understand where your website might need improvement. Also, the tool assigns a letter grade to your website with a summary, indicating the website’s overall performance level. You can check for unused JavaScript by following the steps mentioned below.

1. Go to GTMetrix and enter your website’s URL. Click on the Test your site button.

Image source

2. After processing, GTMetrix will display the results as shown below.

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3. Click the Waterfall tab and then click JS.

Image source

The waterfall chart lists all the unused JavaScript files on your website. Hovering over the Timeline will show you the load time breakdown, revealing all the processes and their duration. The snapshot above shows that the execution time for the particular JS file is 44 milliseconds – called the Blocking time in the chart, 50 milliseconds for the server to generate a response – called the Waiting time, and six milliseconds for the browser to download the response from the server – called the Receiving time.

Using Google Chrome’s Developer Tools

You can also check for unused JS directly using Google Chrome’s Developer tools. Go to menu items on Google Chrome – displayed as three vertical dots in the top-right corner. Click More Tools and then click Developer Tools. The screenshot below shows what you’ll see for a sample WordPress website.

Click Coverage in the console and then click on the button as written in the console’s window. After a while, the console will list all the JS and CSS files and their corresponding usage rates in bytes. As such, you can analyze the JS files having the highest number of unused bytes and view additional details. For instance, the screenshot below shows a JS file that has 62.6% of the total bytes unused.

How are UX and SEO affected by unused JavaScript files?

So why is it so essential to reduce or remove unused JavaScript? We briefly discussed this point earlier and mentioned that unused JS files could be render-blocking. But what if they’re render blocking? Would you lose conversions if your website’s elements load slower than similar sites? Or will Google’s ranking algorithm rank your website lower than others due to slow-loading content? Answering these questions requires understanding what aspects of user experience (UX) unused JavaScript affects and whether UX is essential for website rankings on Google.

Reports suggest that you can lose almost 90% of users due to bad UX and that for every $1 invested in UX, you get a return of $100. They also suggest that a good UX can increase conversions by 200%. The numbers should convince you that UX is critical to your business’ success. Unused JS blocking or slowly rendering the website’s essential elements will likely frustrate users and cause them to abandon the site prematurely. It is particularly true in the case of e-commerce websites where users may never purchase due to suboptimal user interface (UI). 

But poor UX is just the beginning of a more significant problem. Google’s ranking algorithm considers UX a considerable search engine optimization (SEO) factor, affecting the website’s position in the search results. After June 2021, Google updated its ranking algorithm to measure UX more holistically through a set of metrics collectively known as the Core Web Vitals. Primarily, the metrics measure three things – the time it takes to load the most prominent elements of the website, visual stability, and user interactivity. Let’s understand the metrics in more detail to get a better perspective.

The metric measuring the loading time of a website’s primary content is known more formally as the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Suppose you have an e-commerce website that sells clothing items. You are likely to feature a fashion model’s image as the primary visual content on the website to display a particular clothing item. LCP will measure how long the website takes to load the featured image completely, as it is the primary element of the page. Google considers an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds good, while anything more than 4 seconds is considered poor.

In contrast, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the content’s stability on the webpage as it loads, meaning how much the content shifts from one place to another. For example, you can experience unstable content when you try to click the checkout option on an e-commerce website, but you can’t do it because the content shifts down. The higher the instability, the higher the CLS score, indicating a poor user experience. Google measures CLS by multiplying the impact fraction and the distance fraction – the impact fraction measures the size of the element that shifts relative to the viewport, and the distance fraction measures how far the element moves relative to the viewport. A viewport is a user’s viewing area. 

Finally, we have the First Input Delay (FID) measure, which measures interactivity by calculating how long a website takes to respond to a user’s input. For example, FID would measure the time it takes for a website to expand a drop-down menu after you click on it. The longer the website responds to your click, the higher the FID will be, suggesting a poor user experience. Since measuring FID requires live users, checking it through the tools mentioned above is complex. As such, the tools often use Total Blocking Time (TBT) as a proxy for measuring FID. TBT is the difference between LCP and Time to Interactive (TTI) – the time it takes for the website to be ready for the user to interact. Since LCP is a website’s time to load the primary content, TBT measures the time a website takes to allow users to interact after loading all the essential components. During this time, the browser blocks the website from the users.

JavaScript mainly concerns the FID score since JS components comprise most of a website’s interactive elements. Also, as discussed earlier, since unused JS delays the parsing process, it can delay loading the items necessary to make the page ready for users to interact. As such, FID can increase if there’s a lot of unused JS in the code, reducing the overall UX score and thus affecting the site’s ranking. Lighthouse – an open-source website testing tool available in Google chrome’s Developer Tools – gives 30% weightage to TBT, the highest of all other UX measures. Since TBT is a proxy for FID, it is evident how significant user interactivity is for your website’s performance and ranking. A TBT score of fewer than 300 milliseconds is considered good.

How to remove unused JavaScript on WordPress?

Now that we know what unused JavaScript is, how to check it, and why it’s essential to reduce or remove unused JavaScript, let’s discuss some ways to help you achieve it. Several manual fixes exist that can quickly help upgrade your website’s performance. We’ve already touched upon a few, such as removing third-party plugins and optimizing HTML to ensure JS links don’t come in the way of parsing. However, you can also remove unused JavaScript automatically through several tools designed to boost your website’s Core Web Vitals. So, let’s start with the manual fixes and then move to automated solutions.

Fix manually

Some common fixes you can apply to remove unused JavaScript manually involve using minimal themes, fewer plugins and third-party code, and avoiding page-builder plugins. Let’s look at these in more detail.

• Using lightweight themes and builder plugins: A straightforward way to reduce unused JavaScript is to apply lightweight themes to your webpage. Using page builders like Elementor and Divi can bloat your website due to heavy frontend with many JS files.
• Fewer plugins and third-party code: JS plugins cause additional JavaScript to accumulate on your webpage. Such plugins usually enhance a page’s design by including sliders, galleries, forms, buttons, etc. Also, third-party codes such as Google and Facebook Ad trackers can slow down the page-loading process. The solution is to use only the relevant plugins, smaller tracking codes (you can search “reduce unused JavaScript Google Tag Manager” to get suggestions), and host third-party code on local servers instead of loading it through external links. In addition, avoid loading third-party code during above-the-fold content (content that the user sees first when a page loads). You can do so by optimizing the placement of JS code so that it doesn’t appear when the browser parses above-the-fold content.
• Remove heavy JavaScript files: You can find heavy JavaScript files with usage rates through Google Chrome’s Developer tools. You can remove the ones with the least usage rates after ensuring that above-the-fold content doesn’t require it.
• Delay loading JavaScript: You can also use plugins to delay JavaScript loading, meaning that no JS file will become active until the user interacts. The technique improves server response time and ensures you don’t get the “reduce unused javascript” message on website checking tools. It works well with heavy Youtube and Facebook files, in which case you get errors like “reduce unused javascript facebook” or “remove unused javascript youtube”. With Youtube, it’s commonly the Base.js file that appears when you use Youtube player’s iframe API. For Facebook, it’s usually Facebook chat plugins and tracking codes.

Fix automatically with a WordPress plugin

A quicker way of applying the above fixes is through a WordPress plugin to remove unused JavaScript. The plugin can help you remove unused JavaScript automatically to save time and effort. 10Web Booster is a plugin with several features to boost your website’s Core Web Vitals and ensure your visitors get a perfect user experience. The plugin can easily delay loading JavaScript scripts to allow the page to load faster and reduce FID to boost your site’s ranking on Google’s search engine. The whole experience is automated and works out-of-the-box. JS delay technique is available in both free and pro versions of the plugin. You can download and use 10Web Booster for free from wordpress.org.

10Web Booster can do more than help remove unused JavaScript from your websites. It’s a complete solution to boost your website’s performance through state-of-the-art optimization features that ensure a PageSpeed score of 90+. As a killer feature, it includes a robust content delivery network (CDN) built upon Cloudflare’s extensive network spanning 275 cities across the globe. And combined with full-page caching, 10Web Booster reduces server response time and allows users to interact seamlessly with your website. 

Conclusion

You’ll likely get hundreds of results if you search for articles on the unused JavaScript topic, indicating how significant it is to remove unused Javascript to improve website performance. However, as discussed earlier, the culprits are mainly external JS links or third-party tracking codes that appear as the browser parses HTML to deliver above-the-fold content. But heavy plugins with excessive JS can also cause the issue. Although JS plugins make your webpage pretty and interactive, too many can backfire and adversely affect your business by lowering conversions. With 10Web Booster, you can quickly identify such files and plugins causing issues and let 10Web remove unused JavaScript for you. 

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster
On any hosting!

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FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

Try for Free

Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

Try For Free

The post How to Remove Unused JavaScript on WordPress Automatically appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.

Optimizing a WordPress site requires a lot of effort. For a fast WordPress site, you’ll need to use a fast theme, optimized plugins, and a good host. However, Google PageSpeed Insights will ask you to eliminate render-blocking resources even after doing all these.

As a WordPress site owner, you may need clarification. After all, you never had to eliminate render-blocking resources on WordPress. This article will take a closer look at how to eliminate render-blocking resources. We’ll cover the topic in detail as we cover its definition and the required process to achieve complete rendering blocking removal. Let’s get started.

What Does “Eliminate Render-Blocking Resource” Mean?

To understand what render-blocking resources are, we need to learn how a site loads. It starts when a visitor requests your website. Then, the browser asks the server for resources to load. As the browser parses the webpage, it follows a top-to-down approach, i.e., load the top part of the webpage’s code first, followed by the rest.

Related Article

How to Reduce Initial Server Response Time in WordPress 

Even though the process looks optimal, it is not.

A browser encounters resources such as CSS, JavaScript and font files when it loads the site. Once it locates these files, it starts downloading them instead of continuing to parse the site. This causes a brief pause in the site loading, causing the website loading speed to slow down.

The “waiting” time is wasted. However, we can make the browser do something useful in that time rather than wait.

To make it more clear, let’s take a look at an example.

When a WordPress site loads, it loads code for sections, including the header, body, and footer. Often, plugins or the theme attach JavaScript code to the header, even when it loads later (for example, in the footer). So, when a visitor opens a webpage in a browser, it’ll have to wait for the JavaScript to download and process for something that loads later, making the browser wait.

This delays above-the-fold content to load slowly, impacting loading time and user experience.

As a webmaster, your job is to eliminate any resources that limit website loading. For example, Google knows the impact of render-blocking resources and asks the website owner to remove them for optimal loading time.

In this post, we’ll learn how to eliminate render-blocking resources manually and by using a WordPress plugin.

Benefits of Eliminating Render-Blocking Resources

To learn about the true impact of fixing render-blocking resources, let’s look at the benefits below:

• Improved page loading time, resulting in a fast site.
• Page becomes ready to interact.
• Reduced size of the initial document object model (DOM).
• Google loads your site faster due to fewer resources.
• Fewer CSS and JS files to download/load.
• Improved mobile user experience.
• Better deployment across devices and platforms.

How to Identify Render-Blocking Resources?

The best way to identify render-blocking resources is to use Google PageSpeed Insights. Alternatively, you can also use other tools such as Pingdom and GTmetrix. First, however, we suggest using Google PageSpeed Insights.

Once you open the tool, you need to enter your site URL. Then, it’ll check your site and show you the results. 

In PageSpeed Insights, to see the list of render-blocking resources, go to Opportunities and then select “Eliminate render-blocking resources.”

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Additionally, you’ll also notice that it showcases Core Web Vitals Assessment. Here, you’ll see three crucial metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).

Out of these three metrics, render-blocking resources impact LCP and FID. In the next section, we’ll learn how render-blocking resources affect Core Web Vitals.

How Render-Blocking Resources Affect Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals determines how well your site does when loading resources. It measures the website’s performance based on three crucial metrics including:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the time to load the page’s most meaningful content. It tries to learn how a user will perceive the page loading time.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric aims to learn about the site’s stability. It refers to user experience. As a webmaster, you should lower the layout shift to improve the CLS score.
• First Input Delay (FID): The FID is the time a user needs to wait before interacting with the site.

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By definition, render-blocking resources can impact LCP and FID. A lower score means your site might fail to pass Core Web Vitals Assessment, which is not good as Google may penalize your site.

Let’s take an example to understand it better.

Render-blocking resources delay the site loading time. It does it because the browser stops the site rendering from loading resources such as JavaScript and CSS. Google’s Core Web Vitals, LCP, measures the time it takes to load meaningful content or above-the-fold content, which the user perceives as the time taken for the site to load. 

Similarly, First Input Delay (FID) also depends heavily on the initial scripts and styles that the browser parses and executes. For example, if there is a heavy JavaScript in the header, it is executed, and blocks the main thread. This makes the page unresponsive to user interaction, leading to higher FID. In both cases, render-blocking resources lower the LCP and FID scores, impacting Core Web Vitals.

You must also take care of edge cases when optimizing Core Web Vitals. Generally, removing render-blocking resources does not impact CLS score significantly. However, few cases, it can also negatively impact it, reducing your Core Web Vitals score.

Let’s look at an example below. When you remove render-blocking items, you may shift a style or script needed to load above-the-fold content. So, if you move it to the footer, the browser may start loading the above-the-fold content. However, with no access to the important script/style, layout shifts when re-rendering happens later. This is similar to fonts.

In short, carefully identify which resources need to be delayed or deferred. By carefully studying the site’s layout and the associated resources, you can know which resources to defer.

So, if you want to make Google love your site more for ranking purposes, you need to sort out render-blocking resources as it directly impacts the Core Web Vitals, especially LCP and FID scores.

What Is the Critical Rendering Path and How Does it Work?

Before we proceed further, we also need to learn about the critical rendering path. In the “Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources Explain” section, we learned how a browser loads a site. Browsers utilize a top to down approach to load a site. In technical terms, we can term this as a critical rendering path.

The process starts as soon as a visitor requests the site from his browser and goes on until the site completely loads.

As a webmaster, your work is optimizing the rendering path to ensure that it only takes a few milliseconds to load. However, it may take a lot of effort to do it correctly, especially considering that these optimizations are executed for different devices.

In most cases, you only need to optimize the above-the-fold content or the first paint. It is the time a user waits for the site to load from a blank page to a visual contact.

Image source

Technically, steps are taken for the code files (CSS, HTML, JS) to transform into pixels. It includes the following steps:

• DOM construction
• CSSOM construction
• Render Tree construction
• Layout operation
• Paint operation
• Compositing operation

As a general rule of thumb, you can use the following page load time to know how the user feels:

• 0 to 100 ms: instant loading, users feel amazing and are ready to interact.
• 100 to 1000ms: users feel connected but can feel slightly distracted
• 1000 ms or more: users lose focus on the performing task.

To optimize the critical rendering path, you need to remove any render-blocking resources. This optimization can include any of the following:

• Prioritize content loading to improve above-the-fold content loading

• Reduce resource numbers that affect the critical rendering path. You can use defer method to delay resources that are not required instantly.
• Compressing file size can also improve resource serving time.

Types of Render-Blocking Resources

There are four types of render-blocking resources. These resources include:

• CSS
• JavaScript
• Fonts loaded through Web
• HTML imports (obsolete, but you can encounter them in legacy sites)

However, not all CSS and JavaScript are render-blocking. In loose terms, you can define render-blocking resources as any code that prevents quick website loading. These render-blocking resources impact the critical rendering path.

Does that mean you should remove all CSS and JavaScript from your site? Obviously, no! Without using CSS and JS, most of the web won’t work. They help you create beautiful, engaging, modern websites.

The good news is that these render-blocking resources can be removed or delayed. By doing so, the browser can optimally load the website.

Let’s explore the key render-blocking resource types below.

Render-blocking CSS resources

Render-blocking CSS resources are CSS files that block the critical rendering path. These files end with the”.css” extension and are easy to identify. CSS is mainly used to design websites, including layout, color, size, spacing, animations, etc.

You can eliminate render-blocking CSS by using async CSS or defer CSS techniques. Moreover, you can also use in-line styling for above-the-fold content.

Render-Blocking Fonts Resources

Google makes it easy for websites to use its vast collection of fonts through its Google Fonts library. However, even though Google uses advanced techniques to deliver fonts to browsers, it can still slow down the website.

You can use multiple methods to eliminate Google fonts render-blocking resources, including DNS Preload, Prefetch Google Fonts, Load Google Fonts locally, Add Font CSS, and so on. 

You can apply similar techniques for any font that should be loaded in webpages.

Related Article

2023 Guide to Font Loading Optimization on WordPress

Render-Blocking JavaScript Resources

Lastly, we have render-blocking JavaScript resources. Just like CSS, JS can also block critical rendering paths. These files end with “.js” and hence are easy to identify. Also, you can defer or async JavaScript to remove render-blocking JavaScript. 

How Are UX and SEO Affected by Render-Blocking Resources?

Have you thought about why you should remove or eliminate render-blocking resources? The two important reasons are UX and SEO. For the most part, a website may function adequately without leaving your site as it is. However, not eliminating the render-blocking resources leaves optimization on the table. And for businesses, that’s not advisable.

Google ranks sites based on Core Web Vitals. As render-blocking resources impact first spray (above-the-fold content) loading, it increases the time the site takes to load this section. This means it affects user experience. Google takes note of it, and you can see a lower SEO score.

Website speed is one of the first things a visitor experiences. If the website loads slowly, visitors are likely to leave or try a different search with alternative keywords. This plummets the chance of website conversion.

Around 40% of desktop users leave a website if it takes more than 2 to 2.5 seconds to load. This number is even higher for mobile users. This is known as the bounce rate. While it is not an official ranking factor, Google doesn’t keep websites with higher bounce rates on their first page.

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A slow website is bad for your SEO and conversions. Website conversion rates drop by 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between 0-5 secs). Way back in 2009, the online giant Amazon found that every 100ms of latency on a webpage was costing them 1% of sales—that’s billions of dollars leaking.

Well, your website may not have started earning billions yet but how many sales or conversions would be unnecessarily lost for website slowness? Overall, slow site speed affects your visitors which translates to low website traffic. 

User experience is also critical to a site’s success. A website that offers good user experience should load fast at its core. By definition, render-blocking resources slow a site down. It delays the first print, which directly impacts the user experience. Moreover, if you remove render-blocking resources, you’ll also see an improvement in Core Web Vitals, which measures a site’s user experience concerning speed and execution.

If you want to read more about how render-blocking resources impact Core Web Vitals, check it out in the earlier section of the article.

How to Fix the “Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources” Issue?

With a clear understanding of render-blocking resources and how to identify them, we can now focus on how to fix the issue. First, we’ll showcase how to fix it manually and then see how you can use the WordPress plugin called 10Web Booster to automate the process.

Fix Manually

You must take care of multiple aspects to manually fix the “eliminate render-blocking resource” issue. First, let’s learn how to manage CSS and JS separately.

1. Fix eliminate render-blocking JS manually

You can defer Javascript parsing to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript.

As mentioned before, a browser loads the resources/code in a top-to-down manner. Therefore, it is clear that if it encounters a JavaScript file, it will stop and try to load it before proceeding further. Undoubtedly, it makes the user wait for the website to load.

However, not all JavaScript files are necessary for the initial page load. And that’s where you can delay its execution by deferring it.

When you defer a JS file, the browser waits to download/parse the file until the website’s main content is ready. Once the above-the-fold content loads, the browser parses the deferred JavaScript file.

Defer the JS file: To defer a JS file, you can use two attributes. These attributes include async and defer. They offer the same result, but there is a crucial difference between them. If you use defer attribute to the script, the browser will not download and parse the JavaScript file until needed. However, in the case of the async attribute, the browser only stops the Javascript file parsing while it downloads the file and can start parsing it once downloaded.

To visualize the difference, let’s look at the graphic.

Image source

The source code for adding async and defer attributes are as below:

<script src=”awesomescript.js” defer> </script>

<script src=”awesomescript.js” async></script>

So, which one should you use? It depends. The defer attribute ensures that the JavaScript file executes in the order it appears in the code. For async, that’s not the case, as it can sometimes work out of sync and break resources, leading to issues. 

In short, use async only if the JS file script is entirely independent of the page. So, you can use an async attribute for third-party scripts, including analytics scripts, trackers, and ads.

All-in-all, deferring JavaScript is an easy fix. But it also requires you to work on your code manually and correctly identify which JS files you want to defer. Furthermore, if you delay the wrong file, it can negatively impact the site’s appearance (as it is required to load some aspects of the site before it is shown to the user). Finally, it can also impact the Core Web Vitals metric or add new issues to the site.

So, before making any changes, you must know what you’re doing. If you’re not confident, then it is always a good idea to hire a WordPress/web developer to do it for you.

Related Article

How to Defer Parsing of JavaScript in WordPress?

2. Locate Critical CSS and inline them

Manually fixing render-blocking CSS takes work. Here, you need to identify which CSS file to delay carefully. You’ll find your site malfunctioning if you remove the much-needed CSS necessary for rendering above-the-fold content.

That’s why it is essential to identify the styles required to load the first paint (above-the-fold content). To identify critical CSS, you can use tools such as HTML Critical Webpack Plugin, Critical, and Criticalcss.com. Once you have located Critical CSS, in-line those styles, so the browser doesn’t have to wait for resources to download and parse to load above-the-fold content. For the non-critical CSS, you can defer them.

Related Article

How to Inline Critical CSS & Defer Unused CSS in WordPress?

3. Identify Conditional CSS and optimize them

Additionally, you can also use the media attribute to identify conditional CSS. This CSS is device or situation-specific. For example, the following code falls under conditional CSS. 

<link href="print.css" rel="stylesheet" media="print">

<link href="big.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen and (min-width: 1300px)">

<link href="mobile.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen and (max-width: 400px)">

These files are downloaded at every browser request, irrespective of whether conditional CSS is used. That means that where conditional CSS is not required, it gets skipped and is not counted as a render-blocking resource. However, if the CSS rule executes, it acts as a render-blocking resource. That’s why you need to separate all these conditional CSS that use the @media rule. To easily do so, you can use the PostCSS plugin and then defer load it.

4. Don’t use @import CSS rule

Lastly, you must ensure that you don’t use the @import rule with CSS. The practice is beneficial when managing your CSS code within HTML. However, it slows rendering as the browser waits to load all CSS before rendering the HTML. That’s why it is best to use <link> tag to load your CSS on a single page.

5. Other Manual Tips To Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Additionally, you can also use the following tips to eliminate render-blocking resources  WordPress manually:

• Remove or reduce unnecessary/unused JavaScript and CSS.
• Minify and compress code files
• Do code refactoring and splitting

Fix With a WordPress Plugin

Manually eliminating render-blocking resources on WordPress is a challenging task. It requires a proper understanding of WordPress and coding knowledge. That’s why, for most users, it is advisable to use a WordPress plugin to do the heavy lifting for you.

Related Articles

• Autoptimize Alternative – How 10Web Beats Autoptimize

We recommend using 10Web Booster, an automated WordPress optimization plugin. It removes the need to identify render-blocking resources, locate them, and optimize them. Instead, all you need to do is install and activate the 10Web Booster plugin on your WordPress site and let it manage automatically. Our plugin does more than that; it automates the complete optimization process to ensure a 90+ PageSpeed score.

To get the best result, you should follow the following process:

• Test your unoptimized site with PageSpeed Insights
• Activate the 10Web Booster plugin
• Retest the site

Once you retest, you’ll find that most render-blocking resources are either delayed or eliminated to optimize website loading time. Furthermore, it optimizes font delivery and identifies and uses critical CSS to ensure the site passes the Core Web Vitals assessment. We can easily term 10Web Booster as a “eliminate render-blocking Javascript and CSS in above-the-fold content” WordPress plugin.

With the 10Web Booster plugin, you get the following benefits:

• Use of critical CSS
• Optimized font delivery
• Delay or removal of non-critical third-party JS
• Cloudflare enterprise CDN for fastest content delivery
• JS minification and compression
• Page and resource cache
• CSS and HTML minification and compression

Additionally, the plugin also gives you access to more useful optimizations, making 10Web Booster an all-in-one solution. These features include:

• Image lazyload
• Converting image format to WebP
• Container-specific image resizing
• iframe and video lazyload

On top of that, 10Web Booster is free! The free version lets you boost the homepage and 5 other pages. If you want to optimize the whole site and also get CDN benefits, check out 10Web Booster Pro.

[Bonus Tips] How to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources on Elementor?

Elementor is a popular WordPress website builder. It offers a visual drag-and-drop editor and access to many elements and templates. So, we have you covered if you want to know how to eliminate render-blocking resources in Elementor.

By now, you know that eliminating render-blocking resources takes work. It requires extensive site understanding and technological grip to do it successfully. However, plugins like 10Web Booster can handle all of these without the need to write a single line of code.

All you need to do is download and activate 10Web Booster on your Elementor site.

Related Article

11 Essential Elementor Speed Optimization Tips 

Elementor knows about the issue. For now, they have provided an experimental feature on their page builder. This can be an alternative solution if you do not use 10Web Booster. Check out the exact steps below.

To eliminate render-blocking resources on Elementor, you’ll need to rely on the builder settings.

•     First, open your WordPress dashboard, and go to “Elementor.”
•     From there, select “Settings” and then “Experiments.”
•     There, you’ll find the options to load fonts and CSS directly, turn on non-render-blocking and also improve asset loading.
•     Finally, turn all of them to “Active,” and that’s it!

Conclusion

We hope you know how to eliminate render-blocking resources. You can do it manually or use a WordPress plugin to do it for you. Both are viable options with their benefits.

If you go with manual fixing, your site will not have an excess code that gets added when using a plugin. However, the challenge is to have the technical knowledge to do so.

You can hire a developer if you don’t want to do it yourself. However, that would add cost. And whenever you make changes to your site, you need to rehire the developer to optimize.

That’s why it is best to opt for a WordPress plugin such as 10Web Booster to do it for you. Once set up, it automates the whole process, giving you complete peace of mind.

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster
On any hosting!

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FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

Try for Free

Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

Try For Free

The post 6 Practical Tips to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources on WordPress appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.

As digital platforms evolve and the online sphere becomes increasingly competitive, off-page SEO is becoming more important than ever before. And if you’re looking for the ultimate off-page SEO checklist, you’re at the right place. In this article, we’ll go over the nine key elements of successful off-page SEO and some common mistakes to avoid along the way.

The Relevance of Off-Page SEO in Today’s Digital Landscape

If you’re wondering what is off-page in SEO, it is the optimization that takes place beyond the boundaries of a website, to improve its ranking on search engine results pages. This is done by enhancing the website’s online presence and building a strong online reputation. 

Image source

And when it comes to executing effective off-page SEO techniques in today’s fiercely competitive digital landscape, a comprehensive off-page optimization checklist can be a lot more helpful. 

However, many reasons contribute to the significance of off-page SEO with respect to the growing competition in the online arena. Search engines like Google use backlinks as a ranking factor, so some link building techniques can help improve your website’s backlink profile. Thus, having a comprehensive link building checklist can help you create an effective off-page SEO strategy. 

Related Article

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WordPress SEO Without Plugins: The 11 Essential Tasks You Can Do Manually 

The 9 Key Elements of Off-Page SEO for Long-Term Success

Taking your website to the next level in search engine rankings needs a strong focus on off-page optimization. But where do you start? What are the off-page SEO tips you need to keep in mind?

Here’s a comprehensive compilation for your reference. In this detailed and in-depth discussion, we will look at the ultimate off-page optimization checklist of the key elements you need to know for long-term success.

1. Create Shareable High-Quality Content: Original Statistics, Practical Expert Content

The first important element of this off-page SEO checklist is a strong focus on creating high-quality content that is shareable and useful for your target audience. This means creating expert content that is practical and relevant to your readers.

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When creating original content, it’s essential to offer something unique that nobody else has. This could be an original statistic, research finding, or a detailed analysis of an industry trend. Whatever it is, make sure it will resonate with your audience and make them want to share it with others. 

2. Create Linkable Assets: Infographics, Tools, Cheat Sheets, etc.

If you want your off-page SEO to be effective in the long run, create assets you can use for linking purposes. These are infographics, tools, and cheat sheets that other people will want to link to. The more high-quality linkable assets you have, your off-page SEO will be more successful. 

However, creating linkable assets can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort. If you can create something people find genuinely useful, they’ll be much more likely to link to it. And the more links you have pointing to your site, your search engine rankings will be higher. Therefore, creating linkable assets is an integral element of an ideal off-page SEO checklist. 

3. Invest in Digital PR: Distribute Your Assets, Increase Brand Awareness

With the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, it’s more important than ever to invest in digital PR to ensure that your brand remains visible and relevant. To achieve maximum impact, you can create a checklist that includes essential activities such as:

• link building,
• social media optimization,
• influencer marketing,
• brand management. 

Investing in these PR resources ensures that your digital PR efforts align with your overall SEO strategy, resulting in increased reach and impact. This way, you can reach a wider audience, get their reviews, and increase brand awareness by distributing your content across multiple channels and platforms. 

4. Invest in Social Media Marketing

The next element in our off-page SEO checklist is an investment in social media marketing. You see, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide an incredible opportunity to reach a large audience with your marketing message. 

But to succeed with social media marketing, creating interesting and engaging content is equally critical to an idea off-page SEO activities list. In addition to creating great content, ensure you are consistently active on social media. Post regularly, interact with other users and ensure your brand is top of mind when people are looking for products or services like yours. 

For better results, you can also use off-page SEO tools to identify the most effective social media platforms for their target audience and monitor their competitors’ social media presence. 

5. Invest in Relevant Connections in Your Niche: Founders, Journalists, Influencers

Another critical element in our off-page SEO checklist, building relevant connections, is a great strategy that takes time and effort, but it’s worth it for long-term success. As you build a relationship with them, they’ll be more likely to share and promote your content to their audience or you can collaborate in guest posting or link exchange. 

6. Learn All the Processes That Happen in the Team to Identify “Outside SEO” Link Building Opportunities

When it comes to off-page SEO checklist, there are a lot of different processes and elements that identify “Outside SEO” Link Building opportunities. This comes as a benefit of collaboration with other teams in the company, such as the business development or influencer marketing teams that can have huge impact on link building if organized correctly.

7. Use Some Popular Link-Building Strategies: Guest Blogging, Unlinked Mentions, etc.

For your off-page SEO strategy to succeed, you must use some popular link-building strategies. Guest blogging and unlinked mentions are two great examples. It involves writing articles for other blogs in your industry. This is a great way to get exposure to your blog and build relationships with other bloggers. 

In addition to other elements in this off-page SEO checklist, guest blogging can help you build links to your own site. Unlinked mentions are another great way to build links. 

Whenever you mention another website or business in your blog post, include a link to their site. This is a simple yet effective way to get more links pointing back to your site.

8. Catch Up With Peer SEO Specialists: Facebook Groups, Slack Channels, Newsletters 

The next element is staying up-to-date on the latest industry news and trends is important. One way to do this is to connect with other SEO specialists through Facebook groups, Slack channels, and newsletters. These are places where you can actually get new opinions and tested strategies, as blog posts can be generic and too focused on general topics.

9. Be Patient

When it comes to off-page SEO, one of the most important things to remember is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Like in case of on-page SEO, you need to be patient and give your efforts time to work. You also need to be consistent with the elements this off-page SEO checklist consists of, which means posting fresh content and building new links regularly. 

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If you want your off-page SEO efforts to pay off in the long run, you need to focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few high-quality backlinks than many low-quality ones. 

The bottom line is that off-page SEO takes time, effort, and consistency. 

But if you stick with it, you’ll see the payoff in terms of improved search engine rankings and increased traffic from organic search.

5 Common Mistakes Most SEO Specialists Make in Off-Page SEO 

Now that we have had a detailed discussion on the critical elements of off-page SEO checklist, let’s now take a look at the most common mistakes that can negatively impact your rankings.

1. Getting Involved in Spammy Link Swap Networks

Spammy link swap networks are schemes where website owners agree to link to each other’s sites to inflate their link popularity artificially. However, Google and other search engines have gotten wise to these sorts of schemes, and they will actually penalize your site if you’re caught participating in one. 

So, it’s best to stick to tried-and-true methods like highly relevant manual outreach for guest posting or other collaboration opportunities.

2. Focusing on Short-Term Gains and Underrating Linkable Asset Creation

Linkable assets are those pieces of content that are genuinely useful or interesting enough that other websites would want to link to them. These are the things that get shared a lot on social media and generate natural backlinks over time.

But if you want your off-page SEO efforts to pay off in the long run, ensure you’re investing time and energy into creating truly link-worthy content. It’s worth it in the long run!

3. Focusing Only on Link Building and Neglecting the Other Off-Page Aspects

If you’re solely focused on link building, you’re missing out on a lot of other potential ranking factors. 

If you’re only focused on link building, you may miss out on opportunities to engage with potential customers on social media or get covered by popular industry publications. At the same time, you’re also neglecting other important ranking factors, like site speed and mobile-friendliness.

To optimize your off-page SEO, it’s important to focus on all the different elements that can impact your search engine rankings – not just one or two. By diversifying your efforts, you can ensure that you’re doing everything possible to improve your visibility and attract new visitors.

4. Working in a Vacuum: Not Investing in Collaborations With the Other Teams and External Specialists

As we saw in our off-page SEO checklist, off-page SEO is all about building relationships and working with other teams and specialists. However, some SEO specialists make the mistake of not investing in these relationships and instead working in a vacuum. 

By not collaborating with other departments, you may be missing out on chances to get backlinks from outbound processes that you were not aware of. 

5. Not Paying Enough Attention to the On-Page Factors Such as Page Speed

Page speed is a crucial ranking factor, and even a slight improvement can have a significant impact on your website’s search engine placement. To improve your page speed, optimize your images and minimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Minifying these files can reduce the amount of code that needs to be loaded, which can speed up your pages. Alternatively, you can try 10Web Booster to get a 90+ page speed score instantly.

Conclusion

Maximizing your off-page SEO efforts can lead to a powerful online presence that sets you apart from the competition. Following the proven strategies outlined in the off-page optimization checklist, you can take your website to new heights. From conducting thorough keyword research to analyzing the off-page tactics of your competitors, you will be able to craft a winning SEO strategy. 

Regularly creating engaging content, building valuable backlinks, and leveraging social media to connect with your audience will establish your website as a trusted authority. And by tracking your progress, you’ll have the data to make informed decisions and continuously improve your results. 

FAQ

Want to speed up your website instantly?

Speed up your website automatically

Get 90+ PageSpeed Score automatically with 10Web Booster. On any hosting!

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Speed up your website instantly

Speed up your website instantly

• Automatically get 90+ PageSpeed score
• Experience full website caching
• Pass Core Web Vitals with ease

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The post 9-Step Ultimate Off-Page SEO Checklist for Lasting Results appeared first on 10Web - Build & Host Your WordPress Website.