Google’s page speed score has always been a crucial factor in determining website performance and the success of the developer. In today’s fast-paced world, users expect websites to load quickly, and search engines rank faster websites higher in search results. Therefore, it’s essential to have an optimized website. Many developers turn to Google PageSpeed, a tool that measures website performance and usability. It can grade websites on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better performance. The tool evaluates various aspects of the website, including speed, render-blocking resources, and more.
Why are these scores Important for WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores?
In this post, we will focus on optimizing PageSpeed scores for WordPress and WooCommerce stores, two of the most common websites. According to [Colorlib](https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics/#:~:text=Around 810 million websites use,platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.), 810 million websites run on WordPress, and over 5 million sites use the WooCommerce ecommerce plugin.
Large WordPress stores can have a lot of data in their database, which can worsen website performance and increase page loading time. This issue is especially important for WooCommerce websites as ecommerce customers are known to leave slow websites. According to a study by Amazon, every 100ms slower, it costs 1% in revenue.
How WordPress cache plugins can help improve Pagespeed scores
Cache plugins are tools that store a website’s data in a cache, allowing pages to load faster by reducing the number of requests to the server. Cache plugins work by generating static HTML files and serving them to users, bypassing the dynamic page generation process. This significantly improves the speed and performance of WordPress websites and can drastically speed up WooCommerce stores.
You may be interested in my other post: Using W3 Total Cache with WooCommerce.
Many cache plugins are available for WordPress, both free and paid. Some of the most popular cache plugins for WordPress include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Fastest Cache. WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin that offers advanced features such as lazy loading, database optimization, and file optimization. A good free alternative is W3 Total Cache, a powerful cache plugin that supports CDN integration, object caching, and more. WP Fastest Cache is another popular free cache plugin that offers a simple setup process and excellent performance.
One excellent plugin that I use on this website is LiteSpeed Cache. This plugin is best paired with a server running LiteSpeed Web Server to get a perfect performance score of 100/100. Many shared hosting companies offer this as standard, like Shockhosting.
In conclusion, optimizing PageSpeed scores is crucial for the success of any website, especially for WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. Cache plugins can significantly improve the speed and performance of WordPress websites by reducing the number of requests to the server. With a range of cache plugins available for WordPress, website owners can choose the best one for their needs and improve their PageSpeed score.