Optimizing a 500+ product WooCommerce site to be mega-fast

Project highlights

• Reduced 57 active plugins to 19
• Reduced TTFB from ~5,000 to 0
• Rebuilt pages to be less resourceful, without a change in design
• Conversion rates dramatically increased; with mobile users as a priority, went up from 1.2% to 1.8% from the speed increase!
• Homepage speed reduced to 0.9 seconds from 3.5!
• Wrote bulk URL redirects after reconfiguring permalink structure
• 0 downtime during update
• With some UX and SEO consulting to follow, I was on my merry way as a freelancer does

I had to optimize a high traffic woocommerce site as sluggish performance was hurting their ecommerce metrics, in other words, revenue.

So they reached out for help and I got to work, the process took two to three weeks.

Web.Dev was scoring their page 12/100 for performance.

Their WordPress dashboard was cluttered with notifications.

I tested and removed all but 19 plugins. I had to analyze hundreds of code files to cut code, combine, and minify. Set up lazy loading for all images, prefetched dns, removed unused fonts, and basically anything that was verified as useless, was removed.

In most cases and here included, you can also rebuild page in many ways. Like implementing a plugin to the theme, uninstalling and removing most of the code.

You have to closely analyze the resources and in the order they’re loaded, and work with bigger pieces first. Removing the big chunks that make the most impact, then getting into fine-tuning.

This included things like removing elements of their WordPress page builder and cooking up a minified version of the same functionality to embed it in to their theme.

Here is a desktop performance result for a category page after I optimized; on pagespeed insights.

Other screenshots from the project

It’s great to build methodically so you don’t end up with clutter. However, businesses usually become aware of these things once they happen. And no matter how big a site is, it can be optimized to load very fast. They were handling many orders each day, and I did the whole process with 0 seconds of downtime.

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