For some time now, user complaints regarding the speed performance of WooCommerce or WordPress have been increasing. Mainly caused by a lack of skill in using the aforementioned tools, although some issues have indeed been reflected in reality.
To the delight of every WordPress and WooCommerce user, the creators have decided to implement changes that significantly impact the speed of your website. Let’s find out what changes they make.
Table of Contents
New order data tables in WooCommerce
Since version 7.1, WooCommerce optionally allows storing user orders in new tables. What does this change? In previous versions, WooCommerce faced a significant issue with stores that had a large number of orders. Specifically, it stored orders in the same tables as posts, entries, products, etc. This inevitably caused the website to slow down as the number of orders increased, as it had to search for our data amidst the clutter where literally everything was stored together.
I remember a situation where we started managing a store with a large number of orders that was barely functional. We immediately removed unnecessary old orders, preempting this action by exporting them to CSV. And it turned out that the store sped up several times over.
Now, if you activate this feature and migrate the data, your store won’t be exposed to such an issue. I recommend everyone whose sales are increasing proportionally to the world’s inflation to enable the aforementioned feature.
Caching for database queries in WordPress.
WordPress also noticed that complaints about the speed of websites running on this platform are increasing. Therefore, it decided to implement a “ticket” that had been awaiting implementation for 7 years. Specifically, every database query is now stored in cache.
How does it work?
You enter the product page, and WordPress sends a query to the database for the product title, price, description, image link, etc. Then, it dynamically generates all the elements, and that’s how the page is displayed to you. Before version 6.1, WordPress used to do this every time. Imagine a scenario where every time a customer asks you a question like, “What is written in Table A with number 5?” you go to the database, search for what the customer asked, and then when you find it, you come back and read it out loud to the customer. It’s a bit exhausting and time-consuming, especially for your processor.
Now, this process will occur differently. If the query remains unchanged, everything comes from the cache. In short, if a customer asks you something that someone else had asked before, you automatically know the answer and can convey it without any effort. This means that your “processor” hardly gets tired at all, which speeds up its operation, especially when you receive a large number of such inquiries.
My website still runs slowly despite updating it.
If your website still runs slowly, you probably have too many plugins, excessive code, numerous queries, and an excess of everything on it. If you’re unable to handle this yourself, let me know. We’ll check your site and advise on how we can assist you. Get in touch.
Summary
If you run your business and your website is on WordPress, we highly recommend keeping it updated regularly. Of course, after updating, we recommend testing everything to ensure that nothing on our site has “broken down.” If you encounter any issues, please let us know at [email protected], describing your problem.
