The Slowest WooCommerce Shops in the East Midlands

A warehouse worker on a landline phone beside shelves of cardboard boxes, holding an order sheet.

9 times
longer for the slowest shops to show their main content than the fastest: 8.1 seconds against 0.9.
Nearly double
the files on a typical slow home page: 99 requests against 56 on the fastest.
1.2 seconds
for a typical slow shop's server to answer, against 0.17 on the fastest.

I've spent over 10 years helping speed up and optimise WooCommerce sites, and it leaves you assuming that every site has more than a few issues. So rather than tarring them all with the same brush, I decided to review almost 1,500 WooCommerce stores across the East Midlands. We then compared a range of them: the fastest, the slowest and those that sit in the middle.

While nothing came as a surprise, the fastest sites are the ones that have faster servers, use fewer and smaller images, and make the most of caching. It shows that, as with the dozens of sites I have worked on in the past, it is possible without an expensive rewrite, and (sometimes) without moving host.

Old leather trunks and suitcases stacked in an antiques market, beside a vintage bicycle and an office chair.

1. Out-of-date PHP

65%
of shops showing their WooCommerce version are not on the latest release. Two are still on WooCommerce 3.
4 years
since the PHP on a typical end-of-life shop last got an update. The oldest was nearly 8.
Three quarters
send none of the four basic security headers.

I have been writing PHP for over... erm, since version... long enough. It's changed a lot over the years, and WordPress along with it. At times WordPress has dragged its heels and continued to support older versions of PHP, much to the anger of many of us.

In the modern world of AI hunting for vulnerabilities, keeping all your systems up to date is essential. As we saw with the PHP issues on 21 October (opens in new tab), hackers could easily take control of old servers, access their data, and then use these sites to launch malicious attacks and spread further.

Of the sites we checked, 40% broadcast which PHP version they use, and of those, 27% used versions that no longer get security updates. As we can't see which versions the other 60% use, it is likely to be the same.

It's not all bad news. We checked these sites within hours of the 21 October fixes being released, and 50% of sites (that we can see) had already updated.

“Time is of the essence to get all sites updated. For an urgent free review, please contact us.”

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2. Images, media and sliders

3 times
the image weight on a typical slow home page: 1.7 MB against 496 KB on the fastest.
5.4 MB
for the biggest single image we found, a PNG.
Nearly two thirds
of sliders download every slide image the moment the page opens.

Sliders, carousels, big hero images: they all look great. They make your site pop, and for an eCommerce site this is very important. Designers love them, site owners love them, and developers who try to optimise sites... well, that's another story.

When we looked at the numbers, nearly 60% of the slowest sites had sliders on their home pages, compared with just over 35% of the fastest. Of course, it's not just a case of having them or not. The slider you use, the way it loads the images and the file sizes matter too. We found that a typical slider has 8 images, and this alone accounts for about 38% of all the image data the user has to load. Most users don't even see them.

A woman in an office pressing a button on a photocopier with its lid open.

3. Caching

14 times
faster server answer from a cached page: 0.16 seconds against 2.3 uncached.
7 in 10
slow shops show no sign of a caching plugin.
Under a third
of slow shops serve their home page from a page cache, against nearly half of the fastest.

At its core, caching is like spending the time to position, take, edit and print a photo, then selling copies of the print. You do all the work up front and then just reproduce it. Caching is the same concept. Every page and product on a WooCommerce site takes time to generate, so if we save a copy of the generated page, we can reuse it. It gets a lot more complicated than this, but that's the basics.

It's not a silver bullet. You create a snapshot of a page and everyone sees the same thing. So if you want to show custom messages or different products to different people, it gets fiddly, but it's still doable: from caching small parts of pages, to full images, all the way down to the search results.

“We found that pages served from a cache returned data from the server 14 times faster than those without!”

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4. Defer, async and lazy loading

92%
of slow shops have scripts in the page head that hold it up.
Twice
as many CSS files to wait for before anything is drawn: 19 against 9.
Over half
take more than 1.8 seconds to show anything at all.

When someone visits your website, their browser needs to download the files to show the page. Aside from the actual text, all the images, videos, styles and additional scripts need to be downloaded too. Unless you explicitly tell Chrome or Safari that a file isn't important or needed while the page loads, it will make the user wait. So if you have an image at the bottom of the page, it might need to load before the header is shown. The same applies to a script that will run a slider on the home page but can't start until the page loads.

By using defer, async and lazy loading, these files don't load until the rest of the page has loaded. This makes a huge difference to how long a user waits. Almost half of the sites we looked at make the user wait while maps, videos and forms load first, and 40% of images aren't lazy loaded. On a typical slow shop, even after the server has replied, the page waits another 0.8s before anything appears, while the browser fetches files it has been told it needs first. Google wants the main content shown within 2.5s (opens in new tab).

“The fastest sites lazy-load 7 in 10 of their images and defer nearly 4 in 10 of their scripts.”

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5. Page builders and code they never use

6 in 10
slow shops are built with a page builder, against just over a third of the fastest.
93%
of the CSS on a typical slow home page is never used.
3 MB
of unused code on a typical slow home page, twice the fastest.

This is a slightly controversial topic. Page builders like Elementor and Divi make it really easy for non-developers to create complex pages, and at times entire websites. However, this comes at a price: your website now has to load the code for many of the possible combinations. A website made with a page builder will need to load twice as many asset files, and often takes longer to generate the page on the server.

We found that just over 35% of the fastest sites use a page builder, whereas 60% of the slowest use one. It's not a direct correlation: as the table below shows, it's a complex mix of strategies. It does show that not using them will result not only in a faster site but, from many years of experience, one that is easier to optimise and maintain long term.

“Elementor is the biggest player: 30% of the slowest shops used it, against 15% of the fastest.”

What makes the difference

Typical home page figures for the fastest, middle and slowest WooCommerce shops
Home page, typical	Fastest	Middle	Slowest
Main content shown	0.9 s	3.5 s	8.1 s
Served from a page cache	46%	21%	31%
Server answer	0.17 s	0.92 s	1.20 s
CSS files holding up the first paint	9	18	19
jQuery holding up the page	63%	86%	87%
Scripts deferred	39%	23%	23%
Images lazy-loaded	70%	62%	64%
Requests	56	92	99
JavaScript	373 KB	580 KB	736 KB
Images	496 KB	1,301 KB	1,660 KB
Any image over 300 KB	33%	59%	59%
Has a slider	37%	51%	58%
Built with a page builder	37%	60%	60%

As you can see, it's not a single thing that affects how fast a site loads, and none of this takes into account what the sites sell. But whether you are selling beauty products with full-screen images, or you're a wholesaler wanting to list 50 products on a page, it is possible to do it quickly. Some of the fastest sites we reviewed had single images 0.3MB in size.

Caching is the silver bullet that everyone calls for, but as this table shows, the faster your server can respond (by doing less), the smaller the combined size of all the assets, and the more efficiently they are loaded, the better.

With a clean website and a clear plan for reducing its load, content-rich, dynamic websites can be a fast and snappy experience. You do not need to move to a new host (but it can help), and you do not need a new website or theme. Just ask yourself: do I need this slider on the home page, and do I really need that plugin I added?

How we measured

East Midlands businesses found and checked by our own crawler, counted as WooCommerce from the site itself.
Three groups of home pages: the fastest, the ones around the middle, and shops taking more than 3 seconds.
Every page loaded in Chrome on 21 October 2026, all three groups on the same machine with the same settings.
"Typical" is the median: half the shops are above it and half below.
Lab timings can vary between runs, so use them to compare the groups rather than as exact speeds.

Images by rawpixel.com (opens in new tab) and 8photo (opens in new tab) on Magnific

Is your shop one of them?

Slow shops lose sales. We look at the whole picture, from the server and caching to images, scripts and the code your theme and plugins load, and fix what is actually holding your shop back. Get in touch for a free review of your site.

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