It's easy to make an eCommerce store, but creating one that runs well and grows your business can feel like a slog. Learn common WooCommerce mistakes to avoid from Sarah Rennick at Automattic, lessons from making eCommerce performance optimizations from Patrick Garman at Mindsize and how to deliver better search outcomes from Felipe Elia at ElasticPress, 10up.

2. Senior Software Engineer
WP Engine
Optimizing WordPress eCommerce for
Performance & Growth
Chris Wiegman

3. Common WooCommerce Mistakes
Happiness Engineer
Automattic
Sarah Rennick
And how to avoid them

4. 4
• This can be plugins or themes
• For plugins from WooCommerce.com, a
connection is required to show that an
update is needed
• Having out of date code can cause security
issues and technical issues
Out of date code

5. 5
• Having too many plugins on your site that
aren’t being used can cause slowdowns
• Sometimes conflicts can occur depending on
the plugins being used
Too many plugins

6. 6
• It’s important to use a theme developed with
WooCommerce in mind, as it will be optimized
for store use
• Themes that try and do too much can weigh
down your site and cause slowdowns and
issues
Themes that do more than you need

7. 7
• Most often this happens with settings for
payment gateways and shipping plugins
• It can also happen for WooCommerce and your
plugins
Issues with settings

8. 8
• Since anyone can develop a WooCommerce
plugin or a theme, there can be conflicts
• Testing on a staging site, even for a small
update, can save a huge amount of time if
something breaks
Not testing code updates on a staging site

9. 9
• WooCommerce REST API
• WP-CLI for Action Scheduler
• Custom cron for high volume sites
Not making use of developer level tools

10. @fevered
Thank you.
Sarah Rennick

11. Top 4 tips to successfully improve
WooCommerce store performance.
CEO
Mindsize
@pmgarman
Patrick Garman

12. Test without caching, or any other
performance enhancing drugs.

13. Have a deep understanding of how
your store renders content.

14. 14
Store Page SQL Query Count API Call Count Page Load Time (TTFB) Page Load Time (Full) % of Traffic
Home
Shop Landing Page
Product Search
Product Category
Archive
Single Product Page
Cart
Checkout
Order Thank You
My Account
My Orders
WooCommerce Store Performance Worksheet

15. 15
Spread the load of your digital footprint.
Search Email marketing &
abandoned carts
Reporting Tag manager

16. If you cannot quantify how a
feature increases your sales,
remove it.

17. @pmgarman
Mindsize.com
Thank you.
Patrick Garman

18. WooCommerce product fields and
ElasticPress
Web Engineer
10up
@felipe_elia
Felipe Elia
How to change WC product fields used by ElasticPress in your
website searches

19. 19
Plugins used in this presentation
● ElasticPress
● WooCoomerce
● Debug Bar
● Debug Bar ElasticPress

20. 20
Quickly see how requests and
responses look!
Debug Bar add-on
Debug Bar
ElasticPress

21. ElasticPress
WooCommerce Feature

22. 22
Enabled by default when the
WooCommerce plugin is active
Change product searches
WooCoomerce
Feature

23. 23
ElasticPress gives the user the ability
of searching (and weighting) in the
SKU field
SKU Field

24. What if we want to
remove or add a field?

25. 25
Made available through Github pages,
containing tutorials and all actions
and filters.
10up.github.io/ElasticPress
ElasticPress
Documentation

26. 26
The ep_weighting_fields_for_post_type filter
add_filter(
'ep_weighting_fields_for_post_type',
function ( $fields, $post_type ) {
if ( 'product' === $post_type ) {
unset( $fields['attributes']['children']['post_excerpt'] );
}
return $fields;
},
10,
2
);

27. 27
As ElasticPress saves fields and
weighting in an option, it’ll be needed
to save the settings.
The excerpt field is not available
for selection anymore
Weighting
Dashboard

28. 28
If we inspect the query using Debug
Bar ElasticPress, it is possible to check
which fields are being used in the
search.
The excerpt is not there anymore.
Look at the fields list
Checking the
ES Query

29. 29
Adding a meta field
add_filter(
'ep_weighting_fields_for_post_type' ,
function ( $fields, $post_type ) {
if ( 'product' === $post_type ) {
$key = 'meta.my_custom_field.value' ;
$fields[ 'attributes']['children'][ $key ] = array(
'key' => $key,
'label' => __( 'My Custom Field' , 'textdomain' ),
);
}
return $fields;
},
10,
2
);

30. 30
Checking the Searchable box and
saving will make ElasticPress use our
new fields in searches.
Note the different weighting applied
here too
My Custom Field is now available
for use
Weighting
Dashboard

31. 31
Now we have a new
meta.my_custom_field.value^20 entry
there.
Look at the fields list
Checking the
ES Query

32. felipe.elia@10up.com
Thank you.
Felipe Elia