Using a WooCommerce CDN Combination
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for powering an online store. Due to its multiple integration opportunities and ease of use, it powers over 30% of online stores and according to WooCommerce has close to 12 million downloads at the time of writing this article. A few features of WooCommerce include:
- Easy integration with multiple payment options
- The website owner has complete control over the digital storefront (from imagery, taxes, stock levels, etc.)
- A vast list of integration opportunities as well as WooCommerce extensions
- Open source (built with developers in mind)
WooCommerce is certainly a very versatile and useful plugin to many WordPress users. However, as more and more products are added to an ecommerce shop, it consumes and requires more resources to deliver requests in a timely manner. For many small companies that are using shared hosting, a large WooCommerce shop may have unpleasant affects on their site's load time.
How latency decreases revenue
It's no secret that, in most cases, the slower the website the less conversions it will generate. Having a fast loading website is essential in today's ecommerce world. Without a fast loading website, users are less likely to convert or even return. According to speckyboy.com, 83% of users expect a website to load in under 3 seconds, although in many cases websites are not optimized to satisfy that expectation. However, working towards increasing the speed of a website should be a top priority for all ecommerce sites.
The data below describes how much more revenue a site is likely to make if their page speed time is improved by one, two, or three seconds. As noted, if the site is making $100,000 per day, they would make over $2.5 million more per year just by increasing their site load time by one second.
For a real life example, take Amazon.com for instance. This ecommerce giant was able to increase revenue by 1% for every 100 ms of page speed improvement. Based on their 2014 revenue of $88.99 billion, that's close to an additional $900 million in revenue for every 100 ms of speed improvement.
As can be seen, optimizing an ecommerce site is imperative for increased revenue and user satisfaction. One efficient way of doing so is to utilize a Woocommerce CDN combination to deliver your website's static resources (e.g. CSS, JS, Images, etc) in an optimized manner via servers strategically placed across the globe.
WooCommerce CDN combination
A WooCommerce CDN combination can help quickly and easily improve the delivery of static web assets to your users. Basically, a CDN works in the following way:
- A users goes to a website which initiates several requests for particular assets.
- The first request for each assets is sent to the origin server. The CDN's edge server then caches a copy of the static assets that are sent from the origin server to the user.
- Subsequent requests for the same static assets are delivered via the CDN edge servers instead of the origin.
This allows for much faster delivery of content as CDNs have multiple servers strategically placed across the globe. Through this method, content in most cases travels a shorter distance from the edge server to the user, instead of the origin server to the user. To learn more about CDNs read our article, What Is CDN.
As additional products and images continue to get added to a WordPress site, a WooCommerce CDN integration can greatly help alleviate the extra strain that this may cause on the origin server. According to HTTP Archive, on average, images account for 64% of a website's size. This may be even larger for certain WooCommerce sites as they revolve primarily around imagery and product variations.
Summary
Ensuring that your site is loading quickly should be a main concern for all website owners. For ecommerce-based sites, slow speeds could mean the loss of thousands of dollars due to higher bounce rates and a decreased likelihood that the visitor will return. If you are using a shared hosting plan to host your WooCommerce-based site, considering a WooCommerce CDN combination may end up being a viable option to easily increase your shop site's speed.