If you run a WooCommerce site, you know how frustrating a slow backend can be. Managing orders and products becomes a real slog when pages take forever to load.
We’ve worked with thousands of WordPress and Woocommerce sites in our SEO and site speed optimization work. In this post we share the things that actually move the needle when it comes to fixing a slow WooCommerce admin backend.
Click here to request a FREE site audit and one of our team will review your site in conjunction with your goals and tell you how we can help.
If you’re looking to DIY, try our FREE WordPress Site Speed Test. It takes just 90 seconds, there’s no optin required and it’ll give you detailed site speed optimization recommendations.
Scroll down and click play to see a video version of this post.
Table of Contents
Click play to see a video version of this post
1. Good Quality Web Hosting is Essential
This might seem obvious, but you absolutely cannot skimp on hosting for a WooCommerce site. Cheap hosts might seem appealing, but their performance (or lack thereof) will cost you time and money in the long run. Think of it as an investment: good hosting pays for itself in efficiency.
The price difference between good hosting and cheap hosting is akin to the cost of a nice lunch, say $30-$80 vs the price of a cup of coffee, $2-$8.
Cheap hosting really is false economy and what you save in dollars you’ll absolutely burn in time with a cheap host.
Cheap hosting isn’t just slow, it’s often unreliable which can cause short outages and downtime. Downtime equals zero speed so the quality of your hosting really matters, even more so with an ecommerce site.
Typically for WooCommerce we recommend:
- CloudWays – best value for performance and highly scalable albeit more technical
- Kinsta – best “managed host”
- SiteGround – best economy host
We recommend these three hosts because they’re good quality, fast and importantly for WooCommerce, they all having Object Caching which is a form of database caching.
Read more on our Fastest WooCommerce Hosting post.
Downtime = ZERO SPEED!Uptime and reliability of your website is even more important than speed!
Uptime monitoring can help uncover issues with your hosting reliability and we recommend uptime monitoring to all our customers. Click here to learn more about the uptime monitoring tools we recommend and why.
2. Update Your Database Storage Engine To Use InnoDB
This one’s particularly important if your WooCommerce site has been around for a while. Older sites often use an outdated database storage engine or format called MyISAM.
This format is slower because it essentially only allows one write operation on a database table at a time.
There are several differences between the two but in simple terms, MyISAM tables will lock a database table while it’s being written to. This means that on a busy site these database write operations start to queue and cause delays in processing which manifest as slower loading to the user.
Think of the database table as an Excel spreadsheet where if one person has it open, another person can’t make any edits.
Innodb tables only lock the row in the database table that’s being written to, so there’s little to no database queuing. It’s like using a shared Google Sheet that multiple users can work on at once.
Converting from MyIsam tables to Innodb tables can give you a solid speed boost particularly in the backend and on higher traffic sites.
The newer InnoDB engine allows multiple writes simultaneously, significantly speeding up your WooCommerce and WordPress backend along with anything else that relies on the database like your cart, checkout and My Account area.
Converting to InnoDb Tables
You can easily convert your database tables using a plugin like Servebolt Optimizer.
**BEFORE YOU DO THIS, MAKE A BACKUP
The plugin will convert the tables AND create indexes for a few of the tables which will also help speed things up significantly.
If you’re having trouble with this plugin you can also run commands directly on your database in MySQL command line or PHPMyAdmin to convert the tables. The plugin WP Optimize also has the ability to convert the tables.
3. Enable High Performance Order Storage
WooCommerce introduced High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) in version 8.2, and it’s a game-changer for WooCommerce speed and performance.
WooCommerce was essentially hacked into WordPress when it was created and the old database structure wasn’t designed for sites with a lot of products and orders.
HPOS creates new database tables specifically for products, customers, and orders, making everything much faster. Anything that relies on the database, backend, cart, checkout, My Account section will all get a significant speed boost with HPOS.
You can enable HPOS in WooCommerce settings > Advanced > Features
There’s several steps to converting across to HPOS. Essentially you need to ensure all the plugins you’re using are compatible (Woo will tell you this), sync the database tables across to the new format and then turn it on.
It sounds like a daunting process but it’s fairly simple. There’s a detailed post on the WooCommerce site here with all the details.
4. Fix PHP Errors
PHP errors can really bog down your backend. One of the common problems we see is out of date plugins causing errors that are not immediately evidence on the dashboard.
We also often come across configuration errors or other problems lurking beneath the surface that are adding seconds to each page load in the backend.
The simplest way to uncover these errors is with a free plugin called Query Monitor
There’s more details in the video at the top of the page but essentially install the plugin and once installed you’ll see a new section in the admin bar in the backend. You’re looking for errors or warnings that the plugin detects.
If you click into the errors you’ll get a bunch of technical detail which will help indicate which plugins are causing problems and what the problem is.
5. Keep PHP Updated
Each new version of PHP is faster than the last. You should always aim to use the highest version your site supports.
PHP 8.3 is the current version as of late 2024.
Ideally you want to test plugin compatibility before making the switch over. There’s a number of tools you can use to check compatibility but really you want a developer to help you with this as you can often introduce problems by using a PHP version that isn’t supported by all your plugins and theme.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network
A CDN or content delivery network like Cloudflare can offload some of the workload from your hosting, freeing up resources for your backend.
Our CDN of choice is Cloudflare and even their free plan can make a dramatic difference to your site performance.
That said, we recommend Cloudflare’s APO service because it essentially caches your entire site on their network offloading more of the workload to their system freeing up your hosting.
Cloudflare also offers a number of other performance benefits including DNS hosting (they’re one of the fastest DNS hosts worldwide as per dnsperf.com) as well as security, firewall and other site speed optimization features.
We also use Cloudflare to block brute force attacks and SEO crawlers that can hammer your site performance. More on that in the next point.
7. Secure Your Site From Brute Force Attacks & Other Threats
The typical WordPress site gets anywhere from 1000 to 10000 brute force attacks per day. This can place substantial strain on server resources even on low traffic sites.
Using Cloudflare we can filter this traffic and block it before it even hits your hosting.
We also typically block crawlers from SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush which also place substantial load on the site further hurting your site performance.
We have a detailed post with the Cloudflare rules we use for WordPress here.
If you have a high traffic site we recommend the paid Cloudflare plan at $25 month which includes a fully featured firewall which will further filter and block malicious traffic from hitting the site.
8. Install Wordfence
Wordfence is a security plugin that can help filter out threats and malicious traffic that gets past Cloudflare.
If you’ve setup the Cloudflare rules we recommended in the last point then the free plan for Wordfence is typically all you need.
If you’ve read anything around the web you’ll see people claiming that Wordfence is a performance drain on a site but typically we don’t see that. While the plugin does add a tiny bit of load to the site, it’ll more than make up for that in the performance gains you get from malicious traffic being blocked.
9. Block Unnecessary Crawling in robots.txt
You can prevent search engines from crawling pages that put unnecessary strain on your server, such as WooCommerce search, add to cart, and add to wishlist functions.
Often we see Google and other crawlers hammering the add to cart and add to wishlist functions on Woo site, adding and removing things from the cart multiple times per second.
This serious hurts the site performance and is also bad for SEO too.
A simple way to fix this is to add some lines to your robots.txt file to stop search crawlers loading these URLs. You can copy and paste these lines below.
Disallow: *s=*
Disallow: *add-to-cart=*
Disallow: *add-to-wishlist=*
Disallow: */search/*
You can also use Google Search Console to identify and block other problematic query strings that are being crawled.
Things that don’t work!
Most of the content you’ll find around the web on WordPress and WooCommerce Speed Optimization is written by content writers who only have a basic level of technical knowledge and have never even optimized a single site!
We see all sorts of recommendations that are completely irrelevant, do nothing or can do significant harm to your site and business. Here are some of the common recommendations we see that do nothing to speed up your Woocommerce backend:
- Increasing the WordPress memory limit – if your memory limit is not high enough backend pages will crash and show a warning message. Unless this is happening to you, increasing the memory limit won’t do anything
- Caching the backend admin panel – NOOOO! This is a horrible recommendation and you’ll have a situation where you have data loss or you’ll corrupt your database. Do NOT do this under any circumstances
- Limiting the WordPress heartbeat – this doesn’t do anything for backend speed, period!
- Limiting post revisions – no this does nothing either
- Anything to do with your theme or page builder – changing your theme or removing your page builder does nothing because these are unrelated to the Woocommerce backend speed
- Minifying anything! – minifying and combining javascript, CSS or HTML on the modern web does nothing for performance. Your web server compresses these files with Gzip and Brotli compression already so minification is not needed.
Next Steps & Optimizing Further
If you’re looking for help with your WooCommerce site speed or looking to pass Google Core Web Vitals, we can help!
Click here to request a FREE site audit and one of our team will review your site in conjunction with your goals and tell you how we can help.
If you’re looking to DIY, try our FREE WordPress Site Speed Test. It takes just 90 seconds, there’s no optin required and it’ll give you detailed site speed optimization recommendations.