In most cases a WooCommerce checkout can be slow for three reasons:
- Inadequate power of the hosting
- Heavy plugins that run during the checkout process
- Transactional emails sent by WooCommerce during the process
Everybody writes about the hosting, so I will not do it here. Of course, if you have a server that doesn’t have enough power, then change the hosting provider.
Before doing that, be sure your checkout is optimized for performance.
In the past, I published a post about how to speed up the checkout by deferring the transactional emails with very few lines of code.
As already written in my old blog post, WooCommerce will send the new order email during the checkout process, instead of sending it after the process. By doing that, it will slow down the checkout process, especially on slow mail servers.
However, in some situations, you need more code to be sure that the email is sent after the checkout without big delays.
Moreover, during the checkout process, you really don’t need other plugins than WooCommerce, and maybe some WooCommerce add-ons.
All the other plugins and the theme can be disabled during the checkout process. However, if you don’t do anything, WordPress will load all of them.
This is why I decided to create a plugin, especially for the checkout speedup of WooCommerce.
To solve all these issues, you can now use Checkout Speedup For WooCommerce.
After activation, you will find a settings page where you can decide to send the new order email after the checkout process, disable the theme, and all those plugins that you don’t need during the process.
This is a very simple but effective plugin. Speeding up the checkout will be a piece of cake for you.