A slow wp-admin area in WooCommerce is a very common performance issue. The speed of your WordPress dashboard directly affects productivity and overall happiness when doing your daily admin tasks. You don’t have to live with a wp-admin dashboard (“backoffice” in some countries) taking 30+ seconds to load.
Learn how we fixed the excruciatingly slow wp-admin load times with our performance troubleshooting approach.
First, does any of this sound familiar?
Do you purposely avoid adding new products because you know it will take 5 minutes longer than it should?
Are you avoiding adding new blog posts because it takes forever to navigate wp-admin? Your content marketing efforts are suffering.
Are you embarrassed to let somebody log in and work on your WooCommerce site because it is painfully slow?
Do you hate logging in to your website to do anything because you know how much time you are wasting as you wait for things to load?
Employee productivity suffers remendously when it takes minutes instead of seconds to perform basic administrative tasks. What a money pit!
There is no getting around it. Website life sucks when you have a slow website, especially in the backend. The inefficiencies and time wasting hurt my performance-oriented brain!
This was Devin’s life before we met, life is much better now ;).
Intake Questionnaire
We asked Devin these questions to find out his performance journey so far:
How much time have you spent on trying to fix the performance issues?
I spent a few months.
What did you try yourself to improve the speed of your site?
I only used a few plugins and even tried cleaning out the database myself.
How many performance optimization services for WordPress or WooCommerce have you already tried?
Only a couple others but no success
How much money have you spent on performance optimizations so far?
I spent a few hundred dollars on services, but nothing was really successful
What were your main concerns when choosing an optimization specialist?
That the problem would be solved!
The Consequences of Poor Performance
Devin reached out to me here because his store was having performance issues everywhere. Destroying both the customer and staff experience.
The wp-admin dashboard area was taking 30 seconds and sometimes minutes to browse. This affected day-to-day operations for the staff who were wasting precious minutes twiddling their thumbn waiting for pages to load. These are precious minutes that Devin was paying for but got no value from.
New potential customers were waiting 30 seconds or longer for the cart page to load – frustrating users and costing conversions.
Devin said “We cannot update orders in wp-admin efficiently so staff are very aggravated.”
Hell yea they are aggravated, who wouldn’t be?
They tried to use Cloudflare to speed up the site only to get new errors like the Cloudflare 524 timeout occurred.
Sometimes it would take up to 5 minutes for the login to complete, if you were lucky.
Taking 5 minutes to log in to WooCommerce is enough to make anybody go insane!
Slow wp-admin Diagnosis and Approach
We always clone your to a managed WordPress and WooCommerce host. This ensures there are enough CPU and RAM available as well as the latest server technology for powering your site.
The database was absolutely huge and bloated so we made sure it had adequate server resources during our diagnosis.
We used troubleshooting tools to identify the major bottlenecks of the store like Query Monitor and Application Performance Monitoring software.
The WooCommerce Performance Solution
We tuned the new managed WordPress host to handle the site by adjusting server configuration variables.
We cleaned the database thoroughly – very thoroughly – no plugin does what we do!
Problematic plugins that were bloating the database and slowing down the site were removed.
Performance Results and Improvements
Moved to managed hosting made their servers even faster with an infrastructure upgrade.
The homepage now loads in under 2 seconds.
The cart page now takes 1.5 seconds instead of 35 seconds.
Devin couldn’t believe his eyes. Now the wp-admin area took under 1 second ot load.
His employees could finally update orders efficiently and didn’t hate their lives during the process.
The staff no longer dreaded entering the doom of the wp-admin slowness.
Users can actually shop normally and conversions are up, so is revenue.
Originally, Devin was concerned about cost. This is no surprise because performance work can seem costly.
The funny part is, Devin is now paying less for hosting than he was before. This optimization project will pay for itself!
So to recap, Devin got these goodies:
a faster site
a stable site
more conversions
less embarrassment
less support queries
a cheaper hosting bill
eventually Devin will actually be paid money from this optimization project – better than free!
Devin waited months to improve his website life, don’t wait for months, you deserve speed now 🙂
