Speeding up an e-commerce site

On an online store, speed is a revenue line. Every hundred milliseconds shaved off load time improves conversion, and Google factors Core Web Vitals into rankings. The good news: most slow e-commerce sites are slow because of bad configuration, not lack of power.

Measure before optimising

Start with an honest diagnosis. Look at TTFB (time to first byte), LCP (largest contentful paint) and total page weight. A high TTFB points at the server or the database; a high LCP usually points at an oversized image. Optimise what you measure, not what you assume.

Caching, from most effective to finest-grained

• Full-page cache: the most profitable technique for category and product pages, served as-is without going back through PHP. Be careful to exclude the cart, the account and checkout, which are personalised.
• Object cache (Redis): stores the results of expensive queries in memory. Relieves the database on the dynamic pages full-page caching cannot cover.
• Opcode cache (OPcache): keeps compiled PHP in memory. Enable it always.

Our managed WordPress ships with full-page caching, Redis and OPcache+JIT already tuned, on NVMe in RAID10.

Images, the first dead weight

The product catalogue is often the top cause of slowness. Serve images in WebP or AVIF, sized to their actual display dimensions, with loading="lazy" below the fold. A well-tuned store frequently halves its page weight on this alone. Our managed plans convert images automatically.

The database

On WooCommerce or PrestaShop, the orders table and the metadata grow fast. Clean out revisions, abandoned carts and expired transients, index the most-queried columns, and put the database on NVMe. An object cache sharply reduces the number of queries per page.

When the server is the bottleneck

If TTFB stays high once caching is in place, the server lacks CPU for uncacheable pages — typically during a campaign or a sales event. Move to a Pro VPS with guaranteed resources, or to our managed plan, which handles the tuning for you.

To pick the right foundation from the start, read hosting an online store. Otherwise, compare our managed WordPress and VPS plans.