Slow Product Category Page WooCommerce - Need Speeding Up

Question

I have installed and customized WooCommerce Product Pages on my WordPress site, but one of the product category pages takes about 7 seconds on average to load. Other category pages load in around 3 seconds. I am struggling to find the reason for this. There are less products on this page than other pages and less sub-categories. I have installed plug-ins such as 'W3TC' and 'Better WordPress Minify' but it hasn't made much difference.

Has anyone else experienced an issue like this and if so, would you mind sharing how you resolved it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

Using caching plugins is fine and dandy but the reason these pages load slowly is simply the data model that WordPress uses, post-types and the metadata look-ups. The only way to truly get speeds up is good hosting and turning on Object Cache on the server.

We enable this on a WP-Engine site and it was night and day. 12 seconds turned into 2.5 seconds.

Object caching Object Caching is designed to capture queries to the database and store them in memory. This allows you to run an "expensive" query - a query that takes a long time - one time, and then reuse the results again. When used properly, Object Caching can give your site a speed boost by reducing the time that is spent accessing the database. Please note that this change can take a while to take effect.

Answer 2

There can be many reasons for a WordPress pages to load slower. But you problem seems to be unique.

Here are some useful tips by which you can speed up your page loading:

• Optimize Your Images

The page on which you are having issue might have High Resolution Images.

• Avoid displaying flash on your Page

• Avoid too many advertisements

Cut off the Unnecessary ads from the page.

• Do not use inline cascading style sheets

Besides utilizing inline cascading style sheets make a CSS file and call up file on all page of your site that will likewise help in repressing download speed.

• Put stylesheets at the top - Put scripts at the bottom

Utilize javascript at the bottom of the page this will serve to load up your page fast. When web browser download javascript it will finish downloading your internet site data, and so any analog downloading will end while browser request Javascript downloading.

• Use CSS Sprites

A CSS sprite is an an image comprised of other images used by your design as something of a map containing the coordinates of all the images. Some clever CSS is used to show the proper section of the sprite when your design is loaded. Here you do not have to load multiple images which are used on you site. Just loading of a single sprite image will do all your work.

• Limit Your External Scripts

There might be a issue that external script is being loading on that page. You need to check and limit the same.

• Add LazyLoad to your images

You can use this technique to load the page part by part.

• Control the amount of post revisions stored

I saved this post to draft about 8 times.

WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.

• Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

Let me know if the problem resolves using these tips for you site.

Answer 3

The list of suggestions that WisdmLabs mentions above is great!

However, I'm not sure if you've seen the plugin for Wordpress called W3 Total Cache. It has a load of built in functionality to automatically improve the performance of your Wordpress web pages.

It's free and worthwhile using if you are looking to improve the performance across your whole site.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/