WooCommerce by default comes with a lot of widgets installed. A lot of times these aren’t used anywhere as themes have their own code to display products. They can add back-end load and front-end load if you have them in sidebars or footers. You can easily disable the following WooCommerce widgets globally with a single … Read more
Reviews are enabled by default when you install WooCommerce. If you aren’t using them, they load unnecessary scripts, dashboard widgets, and product meta options. There is now an option built into WooCommerce to disable them globally. To disable WooCommerce reviews simply uncheck the “Enable product reviews” under the “Products” tab in the WooCommerce plugin. This … Read more
By default, WooCommerce has a status meta box (widget) that loads in the WordPress dashboard. A lot of times this isn’t used, as there isn’t a lot of information. We find that people either use a more in-depth reporting tool or a more robust solution such as Metorik. In this case, if you aren’t using … Read more
WooCommerce sites, especially large ones, almost always encounter load time issues with the following AJAX request. https://domain.com/?wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments Even on our small WooCommerce test site it took longer than any other request and wasn’t needed as this was on the homepage. On large sites, we have seen this account for up to 10-second delays. That’s right, … Read more
When you have WooCommerce installed it by default loads its scripts and styles on every page of your WordPress site. This is definitely not great for performance. As you can see below on our test site, WooCommerce was loading 8 scripts on our home page, where we don’t even have any products. Disable WooCommerce scripts … Read more
Below is a list of all the filters available in Perfmatters. These allow you to further customize the plugin. If you need an easy way to add a filter, we recommend the free Code Snippets plugin. Check out this article on how to add PHP to your WordPress site. perfmatters_allow_buffer The perfmatters_allow_buffer filter allows you to selectively … Read more
The warning from Google to properly size images is a very common one that comes up these days. This happens if an image being served by the browser is bigger than its container. Below we’ll dive into a few tips on how you can fix this. Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data … Read more
This is a good place to get started after first installing Perfmatters. We’ve put together some recommended settings we typically use across our own sites and clients’ sites. Tip: See our documentation on how to run a website speed test the right way. If it appears your website is slowing down, it might simply be … Read more
While defer JavaScript pushes the script to the bottom of the page load, you can instead delay JavaScript based on user interaction. This can be a great way to significantly speed up the paint of the page for Google Lighthouse when something isn’t needed right away. Especially heavy third-party scripts like Google Adsense, Google Analytics, conversion pixels (FB, … Read more
Time and time again, we see WordPress users struggling with performance. In a lot of cases, it’s not hard to achieve faster speeds. Most of it comes down to choosing the right technology stack and following best optimization practices. Having been in the performance industry for years, we’ve seen what does and doesn’t work. Google uses … Read more