It’s 2021! The use of online solutions has become more common than ever. Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic took all over the world with fear and panic, everything went behind the doors. That’s the beginning of an online era.
Previously, people used to opt for online shopping for limited products, like clothes, footwear, accessories, electronics, etc. But after this, we have seen a surge in demand for things like prescription eyeglasses. Therefore, the number of online optical stores is increasing significantly. It means this field is becoming more competitive for businesses.
The era of WooCommerce
Currently, WooCommerce is the most preferred e-commerce platform across the globe to build dynamic online stores. It is open-source and comes with countless free themes and plugins. If you want to create a digital eyewear store, WooCommerce is an ideal option because it allows you to customize your e-store.
With this e-commerce platform, you can leverage plugins like the WooCommerce contact lens prescription plugin. Do you know the availability of plugins and themes makes WooCommerce a reliable solution for digital eyewear stores?
But building a WooCommerce website is not enough, especially if you want to gain an edge over your competitors. The best way to retain customers while attracting more is by offering your customers the best shopping experience. The question is how to do this?
Imagine you have a well-designed and feature-rich WooCommerce eyewear store. But it takes longer to load pages. If this is the case, your online visitors will quickly become frustrated and leave your site. Today, the site loading speed matters the most because no one wants to waste time waiting.
So, we can say the page loading speed is one of the crucial factors that help your potential customers to decide. It means you have to keep the loading speed of your WooCommerce store up. Below, we have listed some best practices to improve your eyewear e-store.
Optimization of WooCommerce setting
The first step of improving your WooCommerce optical store is optimizing your settings. The process involves:
- You have to change your login page URL. Every WordPress website has this login URL by default – domain.com/wp-admin/ because it is easy to remember. But this makes it susceptible to bots and hackers.
- Does your eyewear e-store have a blog? If yes, then limit the number of blogs.
- The next step is disabling pingbacks, as they are of no good but generate unnecessary spam.
- Set the number of user comments on your posts or page between 10 and 20.
- If your WooCommerce site has any outdated plugins and themes, make sure to remove them.
Install a fast loading WooCommerce theme
Keep in mind, the speed of your eyewear e-store depends heavily on the theme you have used. So, it is vital to pick the right WooCommerce theme. We understand that with thousands of WordPress themes, it is challenging to make a decision.
A beautiful and feature-rich theme might sound like an attractive choice, but it may fail when it comes to usage. Instead, look for the one that is fully compatible with your WooCommerce store.
To do so, first, shortlist your preferred WooCommerce theme and then test their speed so that you choose the best.
Avoid crowding your site with plugins and extensions
No doubt, it’s tempting to install as many WooCommerce plugins as possible to your online eyewear store. Who does not want to leverage 54,000+ free plugins of WordPress with additional premium plugins? But you do not need all of them. If you install dozens of WooCommerce plugins, you will end up crowding your e-store. As a result, it will affect its loading speed.
Always go for necessary plugins and extensions and improve your customers’ shopping experience, like WordPress contact lenses prescription form, Virtual Try on eyeglasses plugin, and many more. Moreover, your eyewear website builder will guide you throughout the process.
Optimize the size and delivery of your site images
Do you know the image account of most of the website page sizes? The percentage is more for e-commerce websites. After all, they have a lot of product images and banners. For this reason, it is crucial to compress and optimize the size and delivery of your website images. If you fail to do so, too many visuals can bring your website down.
If you are wondering about videos, we are here to answer all your questions. As compared to images, videos are heavier. But in most cases, websites load videos on demand, so they have less impact on page load speed.
Install cache WooCommerce
When someone visits your WooCommerce eyewear store, their browser loads all the data from your site, including videos, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on. The process may take time as per the size of your e-commerce store. You can avoid this by installing a cache, which helps their browser keep a memory of your website. So, the next time they return to your store, it takes much less time.
Increase your memory limit
By default, WordPress comes with 32 MB memory for PHP. If your e-commerce store falls into storage, it will try to increase the memory limit to 40 MB or 64 MB. If you are building a WooCommerce site, the memory limit will not be enough.
If you ever receive this message on your dashboard, “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted.” It means you need to increase the memory limit of your eyewear store. Thus, it is advisable to expand your memory limit to 256 MB.
The bottom line
While these are a few simple practices, they can significantly improve the load speed of your online eyewear store. Whether you already have an optical e-store or starting one soon, do not take the loading speed of your e-commerce site lightly. It can impact the decision of your customer if they want to go ahead with you or not.
So, build a beautiful and feature-rich website to boost your user experience. Did you mention installing the necessary plugins, such as Virtual Try-on glasses plugin, WooCommerce contact lens prescription plugin, and many more?
Author bio
Suzan Jones is a tech enthusiast who loves to explore different tech related innovations and love to write about them, a passionate blogger with 7 years of experience as a marketer.
