Shops are slower than brochure sites by nature, and most of the difference is fixable.
THE ORDER TO WORK IN
- Enable caching, correctly excluding cart and checkout.
- Compress and resize product images. This is usually the single largest gain on a shop.
- Remove extensions you do not use. Each one loads on every page.
- Move to PHP 8.1 or newer.
- Use a light theme.
- Add a CDN.
WOOCOMMERCE-SPECIFIC GAINS
Disable cart fragments on pages that do not need them, which removes an uncached request from every page load Limit the number of products shown per page
Turn off features you do not use: reviews, coupons, or the geolocation setting that defeats caching
Clean up expired transients and old sessions
MEASURING
Test a product page and a category page, not just the homepage. Those are where customers spend time.
Test from a phone on mobile data, which is how most Nigerian customers will see it.
IF IT IS STILL SLOW
Open a ticket with a GTmetrix link and we will check the account from the server side.