Is your WooCommerce backend slow?
It’s crucial to ensure having a faster site to provide users the best experience. But, do you know that a faster backend is just as important as your faster loading site? Webmasters who run WooCommerce sites are well aware of this issue that the more products they add, the slower their WooCommerce dashboard will become.
The thing is, your WooCommerce backend’s speed and efficiency impact your ability and productivity most to manage almost everything on your site. Therefore, you can’t avoid the slow speed of your slow WooCommerce dashboard.
There are several things to consider when it comes to fixing or optimizing a slow dashboard. I’ve listed some common solutions for fixing a slow WooCommerce dashboard in this guide.
How To Fix WooCommerce Backend Slow?
To make the best use of your WooCommerce WordPress site, the admin dashboard should work faster and effectively. But the thing is, when you add more and more products to your site, the dashboard becomes overwhelmed and gets slow. The good news is, there are some easy fixes to this issue.
So, let’s have a look at the solutions.
1. Get Faster Hosting
It’s a fact that all hosts are not equally created, but it impacts the most when it comes to the faster loading speed of your WordPress dashboard. Especially when your site starts to grow.
In that case, if you can afford, go for managed hosting to get dedicated resources. It’s an expensive one, but it also works more efficiently if you’re driving a lot of traffic. On the other side, shared hosting also works fine for smaller sites or with a low budget.
But make sure to get a decent shared hosting, as they don’t allocate much disc space, memory, and bandwidth. Prefer a host that supports PHP 7+ and provides some caching functionality.
One more thing that you should consider is making sure that your host server is located in the same country where most of your customers live. This will help to improve your store’s performance. Keeping that in mind, let’s move forward to the next point.
2. Use a CDN
The easiest way to improve loading speed is to integrate a CDN into your website. CDN is a network server located all over the world. Its goal is to store static files like JavaScript, CSS, Images of your WooCommerce site.
Usually, CDNs offload bandwidth to their data center, which helps speed up the admin dashboard. But, when you go to choose a specific one, you’ll get several options. So, which one to choose, to get the best result. Well, here are some CDNs that I’ll recommend.
3. Use A Better Cache Plugin
Cache plugins have a huge impact on the speed of your WooCommerce admin panel and loading times. You may know that cache stores data so that it can serve data immediately for future requests without requiring database queries.
But to make the best use of caching plugins, you should ensure setting them up correctly. Otherwise, these caching plugins can be problematic for your site. When you go installing a plugin, consider learning the processes to configure caching plugins for WooCommerce.
WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and LiteSpeed Cache are the best-known options for caching your WooCommerce dashboard as well as speeding up your site.
4. Deep Clean Your Database
Often, WordPress databases get bogged down with thousands of items that you might never use or require. All these items may cause database queries to take a longer loading time than necessary. Therefore, it will be the best option to clean these unnecessary WordPress databases.
You can use your cPanel’s phpMyAdmin file or WordPress plugins like WP Rocket to clean your database. Besides that, if you’re running a large WooCommerce site, you can check out this plugin called Transients Manager by Pippin Williamson. This plugin is best for developers.
5. Disable WordPress and WooCommerce Dashboard Functionality You Don’t Need
Customizing the displayed functions from your WordPress dashboard may seem very redundant. But, do you know, this simple change can make your admin panel much faster? There are several functions available that you won’t need; in that case, disabling them will be the best solution. So, here’s what you can disable or remove from your dashboard.
- Remove the order count from your admin menu;
- Disable any widgets from your dashboard that you don’t need or use anymore for both WooCommerce and WordPress core.
- Hide the tag, featured, and type admin columns from your WooCommerce product list.
- Disable background image regeneration.
- Clear the customer session in your status settings. From the same tab, you can also delete the WooCommerce transient.
- Disable wp-cron jobs and replace them with real cron jobs
6. Disable “Object Cache” In W3 Total Cache
If you’re using W3 Total Cache, disable the “object cache” by navigating to the general settings. Often this function makes the admin panel slower. However, you’ll require enabling object cache to increase the performance of your dashboard.
So, here, you can go for the Redis object cache plugin to enable object caching for your WooCommerce dashboard. Usually, Redis is only supported on cloud hosting like Cloudways, Kinsta, Pantheon. But, you can enable Redis directly in your hosting account.
7. Find and Remove Slow Plugins and Unused Themes
It is a best practice to keep only the plugins and themes that you require and delete the rest of the unnecessary ones. Unused plugins leave things in your database, which makes your admin panel slow. In the case of unused themes, these also do the same things.
Actually, the number of installed plugins really doesn’t impact the loading speed, but the quality of these plugins does. You should avoid High CPU Plugins and only Use Popular and Well-Supported ones for your site.
On the other side, selecting a theme isn’t that easy, especially for beginners. While selecting a theme, you should consider several things. Many themes inject a lot of code, and some of them don’t follow WordPress standards. As a result, they make the admin panel slower.
To check if your theme makes your WooCommerce dashboard slower, simply create a backup and switch to the default WordPress theme or the WooCommerce recommended theme Storefront. Once the switching is complete, notice if the speed has increased or not. If your dashboard loads faster after the switch, then the problem is in your theme.
8. Keep the Core, Plugins, And Themes Updated
For WordPress developers, performance always remains the key factor. So, to improve and maintain the performance you should keep pace with your WooCommerce site’s core, plugin, and theme updates as they are released.
But make sure, setting up a staging site to research and running thorough tests before updating. It’s crucial to test the new version of WordPress, WooCommerce, themes, and plugins before hitting any update.
9. Disable Debug Settings When You Aren’t Using Them
When you enable debugging options in your WordPress, it can make your WooCommerce site slower. In that case, if you don’t need to enable debugging on your live site, make sure the debugging constants like WP_DEBUG and SAVEQUERIES are set to false in your wp-config.php file.
10. Update to the Latest Version of PHP
Upgrading to the latest PHP versions can easily make your site 2x faster. In that case, if your site is running on an older PHP version, update it to the latest version 8.0, and it’ll give you an immediate performance gain.
Your hosting company won’t upgrade you to the latest PHP version, which implies that you have to take the initiative and do the upgrade yourself. So, see your current PHP version on the WooCommerce server environment. Then upgrade to PHP 7+ in your hosting account. You can also enable a PHP extension called OPcache.
It is best to improve PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. As per Sitepoint, when you enable OPCache, it can decrease response times by up to 50%.
11. Display a Sensible Number of Posts in the Admin Panel
Often the admin panel starts loading slow just because it loads too much on the screen at once. This includes posts and object types like products or orders. Some people display hundreds of items at once, but there’s no need to do that. It’ll be best to keep the displayed items in your dashboard to a sensible number.
12. Use a Lightweight Page Builder
Page builders are slow, and obviously, they’ll slow down your WooCommerce admin, too, specifically Divi and Elementor. Therefore, go for Gutenberg blocks, Genesis Framework, GeneratePress, or Oxygen Builder. Removing the slow page builders and getting a better one definitely improves a loading score.
Last Thoughts
Probably, there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with a slow WooCommerce backend. Every time you’re trying to perform an important task, and you’ve to wait and wait until the dashboard starts to work.
I know it’s very disturbing, but, fortunately, you can optimize your WooCommerce dashboard to fix the slow loading speed. In this “WooCommerce backend slow” guide, I’ve covered the common ways that help you fix your slow WooCommerce site. So, it’s time for some fixes on your side?
Leave a comment if you face any issues while fixing your slow WooCommerce dashboard. Also, let me know which technique worked for you.
