Fixing eCommerce site speed issues can feel like trying to find your way out of a maze.
You try different routes—install caching plugins, test image compression tools, remove unnecessary scripts—and just when it feels like you’re making progress, you hit another dead end.
Your PageSpeed Insights score is still disappointing. Core Web Vitals keep failing. Shoppers bounce. Ads underperform.
At this point, the real question is:
Are you optimizing the right issues or just switching tools, hoping something sticks?
In this article, we’ll tackle both. I’ll break down the most common performance bottlenecks that slow down ecommerce sites and show you how NitroPack can actually fix them.
Read on.
If we had to describe a modern eCommerce site in three words, they would be “visual, interactive, descriptive.” That’s why the most common performance issues stem from heavy images, videos, JavaScript files, and fonts.
That said, here’s how to optimize all of these without sacrificing your store’s user experience.
Images are often the biggest files on your site, and they load on every category, product, and promotional page.
For instance, on Pet Smart’s home page, half of the resources are images:
To analyze how many image files you’re loading on any given page, go to Inspect > Network > Img
But the problem isn’t that you, they, or any other eCommerce store is loading too many visuals. It’s that most image optimization tools stop at basic compression.
And that’s not enough.
There are a ton of different image optimization techniques that will help you serve your content faster while keeping your visuals intact:
How NitroPack applies image optimization
NitroPack’s image optimization stack allows any website owner to serve high-quality, lightweight images on any device.
This means that our service applies the following optimizations automatically:
Fonts define your brand’s voice and shape shoppers' experiences of your store. But behind the scenes, they’re also among the most common culprits for slow rendering and layout instability.
Here’s the problem:
Most font files include hundreds, sometimes thousands, of glyphs to support different languages and styles. But your pages usually use just a fraction of those characters.
Despite that, the browser still downloads the full font file. Add multiple weights, styles, and families, and the performance hit stacks up quickly.
Unoptimized font files can quickly add up to your page weight
Even worse, fonts are often loaded in ways that block rendering.
This means your content might be ready, but the browser waits for the fonts before showing anything, causing FOIT (Flash of Invisible Text).
Or it shows fallback fonts first, then swaps in your actual fonts later (Flash of Unstyled Text), creating layout shifts that ruin the visual experience and tank your Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) scores.
In a nutshell:
It’s a high-impact issue that’s easy to miss and even easier to underestimate.
How NitroPack optimizes font files
NitroPack applies a set of advanced font optimization techniques to speed up your font delivery and minimize visual disruptions during load:
Over the past three years, video usage on websites has grown by 32% on mobile alone, and e-commerce brands are leading the charge.
Videos can bring products to life, show them in action, and remove uncertainty that stops shoppers from buying.
But when videos aren’t optimized, they can do more harm than good.
Large video files, auto-playing embeds, and heavy iframes can massively delay load times, especially for mobile users with poor network connections.
Even if the video isn't immediately visible, it might still load in the background, eating up bandwidth and slowing down more important content above the fold.
The result? Frustrated users, slower pages, and lower conversions.
How NitroPack optimizes videos
NitroPack ensures that your videos enhance engagement and not slow down your store. Here’s how our service handles video content under the hood:
Personalization, excellent customer services, and an affiliate program—yes, these are all attributes of a great eCommerce store, but they require three or more separate plugins.
Don’t get me wrong, tools like Google Analytics, chat widgets, and personalization plugins are all valuable. They help you convert, support, and understand your customers.
But, unfortunately, they come at a cost.
Each third-party script adds weight to your page, competes for network and CPU resources, and often blocks rendering or delays interactivity. Many of them load as soon as the page starts rendering, even if they’re not needed right away.
Good to know:
A render-blocking resource is any file (like JavaScript or CSS) that prevents the browser from showing content on the screen until it finishes loading. When scripts load too early, they block the rendering pipeline, thus delaying key content and user interactions.
This leads to poor INP scores, delayed input responsiveness, and a sluggish experience that frustrates users before they even engage with your store.
How NitroPack handles render-blocking scripts
NitroPack’s JS optimization features give you the control and automation needed to keep third-party tools from hijacking your performance:
Caching is supposed to be the easiest win in site speed—store a page once and serve it instantly next time. However, in e-commerce, a simple caching setup can quickly become a nightmare.
Setting up the wrong cache policy can lead to your cache expiring too frequently, forcing pages to reload from scratch. Or worse, it may not expire when it should, and your visitors may end up seeing out-of-stock products or outdated prices.
On top of that, some tools wait until the first visitor hits a page before caching it. This means every product launch, campaign, or landing page starts off slow, exactly when traffic is highest and when the first impression matters the most.
And then there’s the dynamic nature of eCommerce: inventory updates, personalized content, logged-in users, and cart data. If your caching strategy isn’t built for that complexity, you’re either breaking functionality or slowing everything down.
How NitroPack’s advanced caching mechanism works
NitroPack removes the guesswork and manual configuration from caching, using an intelligent, ecommerce-ready approach that adapts to your store’s needs:
The following lines might sound counterintuitive to the last point, but hear me out.
Caching is essential, but that doesn’t mean everything should be cached.
In ecommerce, some pages need to stay dynamic by design. Your cart and checkout are two of them.
Why?
Well, imagine the following scenario:
A shopper uses a public computer to purchase products from your store. Because of improper caching, the cart’s quantities don’t update. The shopper removes an item, but it still shows in the cart. This frustrates them and may lead to an abandoned purchase.
But let's say that regardless of the unpleasant cart experience, they decide to move forward. If the checkout page is also cached, the next person who uses the same computer could easily see the previous shopper’s personal details, like their address and payment info, because that data was cached.
The worst thing that could happen to them and your business’s trustworthiness.
That’s why applying the same blanket optimizations across the entire site is a bad idea.
How NitroPack optimizes sensitive pages
Apart from Cart Cache, NitroPack also gives you complete control over what gets optimized and how, so you can avoid over-optimizing pages that should stay dynamic:
Over time, as you add more features and plugins to your store, unoptimized or excessive code begins to accumulate. This includes unused CSS, unnecessary JavaScript, and redundant styles that don’t contribute to the user experience but still get loaded with every page.
Unoptimized CSS file
In fact, these unused code bytes do contribute to the user experience—negatively.
Every extra kilobyte of unused code drags down your site’s performance, making it sluggish, especially on mobile.
So you have two choices:
Minified CSS file
How NitroPack fixes bloated code
Let’s say you don’t want to say goodbye to some of your plugins and decide to take the second route. NitroPack optimizes your code by minifying and combining your CSS and JavaScript files, reducing their size, and improving load speeds:
If your site is slow, if you’re seeing high bounce rates, or if you struggle to pass Core Web Vitals tests, NitroPack can help. Run a performance audit or check your site’s PageSpeed Insights score to see where NitroPack can make a difference.
Absolutely. NitroPack’s optimizations are applied across all devices, including mobile, ensuring your site loads quickly and performs optimally for mobile users, which is crucial for conversions.
Setting up NitroPack is simple. You can install the plugin on your site configure the settings via an easy-to-use dashboard, and NitroPack will automatically start optimizing your site.
NitroPack is a WordPress-only plugin, designed to optimize performance specifically for WordPress-powered ecommerce sites, including WooCommerce. For non-WordPress sites or custom PHP-based ecommerce platforms, NitroPack can be integrated via our SDK to provide tailored optimizations.
No, NitroPack’s optimizations are focused on performance without changing the appearance or functionality of your site. You can adjust settings to ensure that optimizations don’t interfere with your design.
Niko has 5+ years of experience turning those “it’s too technical for me” topics into “I can’t believe I get it” content pieces. He specializes in dissecting nuanced topics like Core Web Vitals, web performance metrics, and site speed optimization techniques. When he’s taking a breather from researching his next content piece, you’ll find him deep into the latest performance news.