Understanding WooCommerce Cart Fragments
WooCommerce cart fragments help update the shopping cart’s contents without having to reload the whole page. This allows for a smooth shopping experience because changes in the cart happen right away. But if you don’t optimize these fragments, they can cause more server requests and slow down your website.
What Are WooCommerce Cart Fragments?
Cart fragments are small data pieces that the server sends to the user’s browser. They only update the parts of the page that need to change. This quick update means shoppers don’t have to wait for the entire page to reload, providing a smoother and faster shopping experience.
However, each time a cart fragment is requested, it puts some added work on your server. This might not matter much with a few visitors, but it can slow down your website as more people visit. This may lead to longer loading times and poor customer experience.
How Cart Fragments Affect Website Performance
Cart fragments are meant to make the shopping experience better. However, if not managed well, they can do the opposite, reducing your website’s performance. When a cart fragment updates, it sends a request to your server. If your site is not ready to manage many requests, especially during busy times, your server can slow down.
The problem gets worse if your online store has complex designs or lots of plugins, or if it doesn’t use proper caching. These issues can increase the site’s overall resource use, causing delays in showing cart updates to your customers.
A slow shopping cart is frustrating, and may lead to more people leaving the site without finishing their purchase. Which means you could lose sales. So, it’s important to optimize cart fragments. A fast and smooth shopping experience leads to better sales and happier customers.
Preparing Your WooCommerce Site for Optimization
Before you start improving your WooCommerce store, you need to check how it is doing now. By understanding your site’s current performance, you can track your optimization progress and measure how well your changes are working.
You can use both free and paid tools to look at your online store’s performance metrics. These tools help you locate and analyze information about your site’s loading times, find any issues, and often suggest ways to make it better.
Analyzing Your Current Website Performance
The first step towards optimization is to understand where you’re starting from. Fortunately, several free WooCommerce and general website performance tools provide insights into your website’s loading times. Analyzing your current website performance helps pinpoint areas that need attention.
| Tool Name | Description |
| PageSpeed Insights | Google’s official tool offering performance scores and improvement suggestions. |
| GTmetrix | Another popular choice with detailed waterfall charts for in-depth analysis. |
| WebPageTest | A versatile test service capable of running multiple test types. Results include detailed info on opportunities for improvement. |
| Query Monitor (Plugin) | A WordPress plugin for developers to debug database queries and identify slow-loading elements. (Especially helpful for WooCommerce.)Note: Query Monitor is resource-intensive and should be disabled when not actively being used for testing. |
| HTTP Requests Manager (Plugin) | A WordPress plugin to log and analyze each HTTP request your site makes. In addition to logging HTTP requests, the plugin optionally allows you to throttle or block some requests.Note: Throttling/blocking requests is not recommended unless you understand what the impact on the overall site will be. |
With these tools, you’ll get a clear picture of how your site performs and identify areas that need optimization.
Tools and Resources Needed for General Performance Tuning
Optimizing your WooCommerce store’s performance, especially when it comes to cart fragments, needs the right tools and resources. Here is a list of must-haves:
- Reliable Caching: Pressable provides several layers of built-in caching. This reduces the load on your server. We do not recommend using third-party caching plugins, as most will not work with our architecture and can cause conflicts with the built-in caching.
- Performance Monitoring Tools: Keep an eye on your website’s performance regularly. This helps you spot and fix issues quickly as they come up.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN holds your website’s static content on servers worldwide. It sends this content to your visitors from the nearest server. This means faster loading times. Pressable provides an edge cache, which acts as both a CDN and provides page caching.
- Image Optimization Plugins: Make sure to optimize your images. This leads to quicker loading times, which is very important for ecommerce stores that have many product images. One option is Jetpack Boost, which is included in the free Jetpack license Pressable provides for every site.
By using these tools and resources, you can improve the performance of your WooCommerce store.
Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Cart Fragments
Now that you understand cart fragments and how they affect your WooCommerce store’s performance, let’s look at a simple guide to improve them. By following these steps, you can make shopping easier, faster, and more enjoyable for your customers.
Any changes and testing should be done first on a clone of your live site, not directly on the live store. You may want to take advantage of Pressable’s manual backup feature to create easy rollback points before making major changes on the test clone.
Step 1: Identifying the Source of Cart Fragment Loads
Before you start optimizing, you need to find out where and how cart fragments are used on your particular site. Not every theme and plugin manages cart fragments well. Finding these issues is the first step toward better performance.
Audit Your WooCommerce Extensions:
Many WooCommerce extensions interact with the cart and may trigger fragment updates. Carefully review each of your installed WooCommerce plugins and consider the following:
- Necessity: Is the functionality provided by the plugin essential for your store’s core operations and user experience? If a plugin adds features that are rarely used or don’t directly impact the shopping cart display, consider whether it’s worth the potential performance overhead.
- Functionality and Cart Interaction: Understand how each active WooCommerce plugin interacts with the shopping cart. Does it update information on every page load, or only during specific cart-related actions? Consult the plugin’s documentation or contact the developer if this isn’t clear.
- Alternative Solutions: Explore if there are alternative plugins that offer similar functionality with a more efficient approach to cart updates. Sometimes, consolidating features into fewer, well-optimized plugins can be beneficial.
- Deactivate and Test (on your clone): Suspect a particular plugin? On your development or staging clone, temporarily deactivate it and monitor the number of wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments requests using your browser’s developer tools (Network tab). If the number of requests significantly decreases, that plugin is likely a major contributor.
Tools to Help Identify Problematic Plugins:
- Query Monitor: As mentioned earlier, this plugin can help you identify which plugins are running specific AJAX actions, including those related to cart fragments. Look for AJAX calls initiated by specific plugins.
- HTTP Requests Manager: Analyze the list of HTTP requests. Identify patterns where specific plugin files or actions consistently trigger wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments requests on non-cart-related pages.
Check which pages create the most cart fragment requests. Does this happen on every page load, or are specific actions causing it? Once you find out where the extra cart fragment loads come from, you can take specific steps to fix them.
You can email yourself a CSV with the last 10,000 server requests from a site’s Pressable control panel. This allows you to search, filter, and sort server logs in more sophisticated ways than simply viewing them in the control panel. If your online store is high-traffic, you may want to collect logs over a few days to create a larger data set.
Step 2: Reducing the Number of Cart Fragment Requests
After identifying the sources of excessive cart fragment loads, the crucial next step is to minimize these requests. The goal is to ensure cart fragments are only triggered when absolutely necessary for a real-time update of the cart content that the user is actively viewing or interacting with. Reducing unnecessary requests will directly lessen the load on your server and improve overall site speed.
1. Optimize Theme-Related Cart Fragment Usage:
Your WooCommerce theme also plays a significant role in how cart fragments are handled. Consider these aspects:
- Theme Features: Some themes have built-in AJAX features for the cart (e.g., updating the cart count in the header). While these can be beneficial, ensure they are implemented efficiently and don’t trigger unnecessary updates on every page. Review your theme’s documentation and settings related to WooCommerce and cart functionality.
- Customizations: If you have custom code snippets related to the cart in your theme’s functions.php file or elsewhere, review them carefully. Ensure they are optimized and only trigger cart fragment updates when truly needed. Inefficient custom code is a common source of performance issues.
- Consider a Lightweight Theme: If your current theme is feature-heavy and you suspect it’s contributing to excessive cart fragment requests, consider switching to a more lightweight and performance-focused WooCommerce theme.
2. Explore AJAX-Based Alternatives for Specific Functionality:
Instead of relying solely on the default cart fragments for every dynamic update, explore AJAX-based solutions for specific features:
- Wishlists: If your store has a wishlist feature, ensure that adding or removing items from the wishlist uses AJAX to update the wishlist itself, rather than triggering a full cart fragment refresh. Many, but not all, dedicated wishlist plugins handle this efficiently.
- Product Variations: For product pages with variations, ensure that selecting a variation updates the product information using AJAX without necessarily triggering a full cart fragment update unless the cart content itself is directly affected (e.g., adding the selected variation to the cart).
- “Add to Cart” Functionality: While the “Add to Cart” action will naturally trigger a cart update, ensure that the process is optimized. Some themes or plugins might have less efficient implementations that lead to more overhead.
3. Conditional Loading of Cart-Related Scripts:
Many themes and plugins load scripts related to cart functionality on every page of your website, even if the user isn’t actively interacting with the cart. Explore techniques to conditionally load these scripts only on cart-related pages (the main cart page, checkout page, and potentially product pages). This can prevent unnecessary script execution and reduce the initial page load time, indirectly impacting the frequency of potential fragment requests. This often requires code modifications or specialized plugins for asset management.
4. Review Third-Party Integrations:
Any third-party services integrated with your WooCommerce store (e.g., live chat, analytics, marketing automation) might indirectly trigger cart-related actions or load scripts that interact with the cart. Review these integrations and ensure they are implemented efficiently and don’t contribute to unnecessary cart fragment requests.
Key Takeaway:
Reducing cart fragment requests is often a process of elimination and optimization. It can be tedious, but by systematically reviewing your plugins, theme, and custom code, and by exploring AJAX-based alternatives, you can significantly minimize the number of unnecessary requests and improve your WooCommerce store’s performance. Remember to always test your changes thoroughly in a staging environment before applying them to your live site.
Step 3: Implementing Ajax Lazy Load for Cart Updates
AJAX lazy loading is an advanced technique that can significantly improve the responsiveness of your WooCommerce store, particularly when dealing with frequently updated cart elements.
How it works:
Instead of the server sending updates to the cart fragment every time a small change occurs (e.g., when a user changes the quantity of an item), AJAX lazy loading defers these updates. The cart is only refreshed when a specific user action triggers it, such as:
- Clicking an “Update Cart” button
- Changing a product variation and then moving the mouse off the variation selector
- Proceeding to the checkout page
This approach dramatically reduces the number of server requests, as the cart isn’t constantly pinging the server for every minor adjustment.
Implementation:
Implementing AJAX lazy loading typically requires custom coding or the use of a specialized plugin.
- Custom Coding: This method offers the most flexibility but requires strong PHP, JavaScript, and AJAX skills. You would need to modify your WooCommerce theme or create a custom plugin to intercept the default cart update behavior and replace it with AJAX-driven updates. This is complex and should be undertaken by an experienced developer.
- Plugins: Some plugins claim to offer AJAX cart functionality. However, it’s crucial to exercise caution and thoroughly research any plugin before installing it. Poorly coded plugins can introduce conflicts, security vulnerabilities, or performance issues. It’s always a good idea to test new plugins on a clone of your site before adding them to the live site.
Recommendation:
To set up lazy loading for cart updates, you need to do some coding or use special plugins.
If you’re not comfortable with coding, consider consulting a qualified WooCommerce developer. While implementing or troubleshooting custom AJAX cart functionality is outside Pressable’s scope of support, we can connect you with a strategic partner for development services.
WooCommerce support may be able to recommend some well-regarded and up-to-date plugin options. When exploring plugin options, carefully evaluate their reviews, ratings, and support documentation. If support is provided in a forum, check for how quickly and thoroughly the plugin developer responds to support requests.
Step 4: Monitoring Performance Improvements
Optimizing your WooCommerce cart fragments is something you should do all the time. Regularly check how your site is doing. This way, you can see improvements and find any new issues.
Use the same tools for testing performance like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and performance monitoring plugins. After you make changes, these tools can help you measure how your site is performing.
Keep track of important numbers like page load times, time to first byte (TTFB), and how many HTTP requests there are. Checking these numbers often helps make sure your changes work well and keep your website running smoothly.
Advanced Techniques for Further Optimization
Basic optimization steps can really improve your WooCommerce store’s performance. However, there are also some advanced techniques that can make it even faster and more efficient. These methods look closely at server settings and may need some technical skills. But, the results you’ll get are worth the work.
Using these advanced strategies can help take your WooCommerce store’s performance up a notch.
Database Optimization for Faster Retrievals
Your WooCommerce store’s database keeps important info like product details, customer information, and order history. As time goes on, your database can get bloated. This can slow down how fast information is retrieved and harm your website’s performance.
You should clean up your database often. Delete old orders and unused product variations. Also, remove abandoned carts. Doing this gets rid of extra data and helps your website run faster.
Try using database optimization plugins. They can help make your database tables better, cut out extra data, and boost performance. Plugins like WP-Optimize or WP Sweep can do this for you. They make sure your database stays simple and efficient.
Sites with a large number of products (or product variations) can also benefit from adding custom database indexes. This can be achieved with a service like WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage or by custom implementation done by a specialized developer.
Using CDN Services for Static Assets
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a group of servers spread all over the world. It stores copies of your website’s static files, such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript files. Then, it sends these files to users from the server that is closest to them. Using a CDN can help reduce delays and make your website load faster.
For WooCommerce stores, this means that product images and other static parts will load quickly, no matter where the visitor is. This creates a faster and better experience for all users.
Pressable’s edge cache, which provides both a CDN and page caching, is included for free with every plan and enabled by default on all sites.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
Dealing with Plugin Conflicts
Sometimes, the code in two or more plugins can clash, causing errors or problems with performance.
If you think a plugin conflict is hurting your store, you can easily check this by doing a conflict test (turning off plugins one at a time). Begin with the plugins you have added or updated recently. After you turn off each plugin, look at how your website is doing. This step-by-step method can help you find the plugin that is causing the problem.
When you find the one that causes the issue, think about looking for another plugin or reaching out to the plugin developer for help.
Note: Conflict testing should be done on a temporary clone and not your live site.
Resolving Theme-Related Performance Bottlenecks
Your choice of WordPress theme can have a significant impact on overall site performance. If your theme isn’t well optimized or has too many extra features, it can slow down your store.
If you have a theme with a lot of extra features, think about turning off the ones you do not use. This can help make the theme’s code simpler and improve your store’s performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I perform website performance checks?
Keeping a regular focus on performance checks is important. There isn’t a specific number you have to follow, but once a month is a reasonable guideline. If you’ve made big changes to your website recently, check more often. Regularly reviewing your website performance, and incorporating performance testing as a regular part of your staging/development process, can help you find problems early.
Can disabling cart fragments negatively affect my store?
Disabling cart fragments may look like an easy fix, but it can hurt the customer experience. Your online store would reload the whole page every time the cart is updated. This makes the shopping cart feel clunky and not user-friendly. Store owners should look for better ways to optimize their carts instead of just turning off this feature.
Are there any recommended plugins for optimizing cart fragments?
There are no plugins that focus only on improving cart fragments. However, some WooCommerce extensions can help improve your site’s performance. WooCommerce support may be able to make up-to-date recommendations.
Can Pressable support help optimize my store?
Pressable’s scope of support extends to WordPress core and platform/server issues. It does not include troubleshooting third-party code (plugins, themes, custom code) or website optimization. But the support team is happy to review your performance test results to help identify key information and share some suggested next steps for you. Please do not hesitate to reach out to the 24/7 Pressable support team with any questions.