This is part 17 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. While JPEG and PNG have been a de-facto standard for storing images for the web for a long time, webp is here to change that. With an estimated reduction of 30% of storage space requirement, the impact for improved load times, and bandwidth usage is significant. Wordpress comes with support for WebP since version 5.8. Read more →
This is part 13 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. In this article we take a brief look at the Wordpress REST API and how deactivating it may or may not boost your sites' performance. Read more →
This is part 16 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. While automatic updates seems to be a good idea for blogs and smaller websites – in Ecommerce this feature might set you up for disaster. Disable automatic updates, in order for you to control plugin and core updates in a stable (development, staging, production) environment. Read more →
This is part 15 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. Activating and configuring Wordpress' firewall is one of the easiest ways to improve the performance of Wordpress & WooCommerce. The more plugins you are using, the more important it is to know about this feature. Read more →
This a tiny bash script, supposed to be executed via a cronjob, that helps you to back up your MySQL database on a regular basis. Read more →
This is part 8 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. There are many reasons why one might want to log data on an e-commerce website. Data is crucial for reports, analysis, debugging and more. Here we take a look at what to log when and what not. Read more →
This is a quick overview, a summary of all plugins mentioned in my article series on Wordpress and WooCommerce performance. I consider them mandatory or least very helpful to improve overall site performance. Read more →
This is part 26 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. Pre-compressing static assets reduces the CPU load of your server and avoids to compress static files upon each an every request. Here's how you can do that with Gzip, Brotli and Grunt. Read more →
This is part 25 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. Using Memcached or Redis to store Wordpress's WP_Object_Cache into memory can greatly improve site performance. Read more →
This is part 23 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. Although it's a practical feature, a major reason for the success of Wordpress, and yet PHP's gettext is slow, because with each of your plugins, the number of slow physical file reads increases. Here we talk about avoiding the internationalisation and localisation features of Wordpress to speed up site performance. Read more →
This is part 7 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. In this tutorial you will learn how to use the excellent Perfmatters Plugins. We will boost the frontend performance of our Wordpress & WooCommerce store by joining and minifying CSS and JS resources using tools like Gulp or Grunt. Read more →
This is part 6 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. In this article we will take an in-depth look at transactional emails, and how to optimise your stores performance by deactivating non-essential emails and by sending email asynchronously to your customers. Read more →
This is part 14 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. In this article we will install the Crontrol Plugin to get visibility into which fake cronjob Wordpress is executing and if applicable we will deactivate the Wordpress Cron logic altogether and instead have a real cronjob execute the events. Read more →
This is part 12 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article focuses on the configuration of PHP's OPCache. Read more →
This is part 9 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article focuses on Wordpress's poor table indexes and how to improve them. In particular all the meta tables, which are used heavily throughout a Wordpress site. Read more →
This is part 3 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article shows how to improve Wordpress Debugging in your local development and/or staging environments. Read more →
This is part 2 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article focuses on completing the initial project setup of your Wordpress & Woocommerce store with a .env file where all your credentials and configurations can be stored in one place. Read more →
Having worked on numerous Wordpress & WooCommerce sites over the last years, I have tried almost everything to speed up and improve page rendering times. Here I will share my key findings with you, put together into 25 tutorials. I hope they help you to achieve a fast, performant and easily maintainable WooCommerce store. This is the Tutorial overview and introduction. Read more →
This is part 1 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article focuses on the initial project setup of your Wordpress & Woocommerce store. Your main benefit of creating your project structure this way is that you will be able to update Wordpress, all of its Plugins and Themes with a single command in your Terminal. It's faster, more simple and gives you full control over each major and minor version in use. You will be able to revert a single plugin, keep track of core modifications you make and take advantage of the whole Packagist and WPackagist universe in your Wordpress & WooCommerce store. Read more →
This is part 4 of my article series 25+ Tutorials on How to boost the performance of your WooCommerce store. This article shows you how to get started with automated Wordpress Deployments via GitHub Actions. Read more →
I consider this guide an experiment, a test to see if its possible to replace the Wordpress frontend entirely. Getting rid of Wordpress frontend means getting rid of overhead like database requests, bad plugin code. Instead we get performant, clean templates and have more control over the frontend. This is a rather extreme step with downsides. You loose all the frontend logic, plugins, search result pages, category pages, archive and so on – you loose flexibility, have to rebuild all of the thinngs just mentioned from scratch. Still this might be worth it, if you love Twig, and want to bring it's benefits into the Wordpress cosmos. In this article I outline what you need to get started. Read more →