Tag: performance

Hello Elementor and goodbye bloated themes

Hello Elementor theme screenshot showing placeholder contents in a mock web page layout

My favorite WordPress and WooCommerce theme nowadays is Hello Elementor. It’s more of a theme placeholder than a traditional theme really. Haven’t you heard? Themes are dying!

Big WooCommerce Stores

View of store shelves packed with products and clerk int he foreground checking labels

WooCommerce is known as the leading eCommerce platform for having millions of installations worldwide. It’s had a reputation for scaling challenges. Not any longer! A recent official blog post covered this topic and included examples of six larger WooCommerce stores and a link to the official showcase of sites by category. Scaling is defined there […]

How to fix time-to-first-byte (TTFB) problems

Hand with old fashioned stopwatch timer

Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) is one of the most useful website performance metrics. It’s also one of the hardest to improve. Caching plugins can’t do much for it; actually they contribute to it. Caching plugins don’t fix cache warm-up, authenticated sessions, submissions / processing, and administration. To improve those you need to get TTFB in range. The recommended target is 0.5 seconds. Here’s my tips to optimize your TTFB.

A plugin too far

About a dozen colorful wires on a large switchboard with dials and switches

How many plugins is too many for a WordPress site? Well, there’s no real answer to that question. It depends on several rather circumstantial factors…

Cleaning up your WooCommerce Database

Glasses sitting in front of computer screens displaying code

There’s lots you can do to improve database (DB) performance, but each change comes with risks. Always thoroughly test changes in a development environment first before making permanent database changes in production. Growth in data requires a growth in hosting to handle the scale of database size and queries. There’s only so much you can […]

You had me at Storefront–Benefits of using the official WooCommerce theme

Screenshot of Bookshop - a child theme of Storefront

Storefront* is the official open-source theme for WooCommerce powered stores. There are significant benefits to implementing the official theme and making your site’s design work with it. Storefront can improve both form and function with a little patience in working it to suit your design needs.

Speeding-up WooCommerce Sites

W3 Total Cache plugin logo

Performance is a priority for all website administrators these days. As traffic scales, so too will your performance bottlenecks.