Faster Woo Widgets

Description

Every WooCommerce site should be as fast as possible to earn the maximum revenue.

Our Faster Woo Widgets plugin replaces the defacto WooCommerce widgets with far faster equivalents.

Install the plugin, replace your widgets, enable the option to ‘remove woo baggage’ and you’ll have a page loading in 2 seconds instead of 65 seconds (based on an 800,000 product store).

The replacement widgets are superior to the default WooCommerce widgets for more than just performance too with more options and more functionality.

Faster Woo Widgets Performance

Whilst Scalability Pro improves long running WP_Query SQL, Faster Woo Widgets eliminates table scans caused by widgets. The primary culprits are the WooCommerce ‘Product Category Widget’ and the WooCommerce ‘Price Filter Widget’.

In the video below you can see these 2 slow WooCommerce widgets enabled on our demo site (almost 1 million products) and you’ll see pages taking over a minute to load.

The difference once you eliminate the WooCommerce widgets is phenomenal.

What Does It Look Like?

Faster Woo Widgets is designed to inherit the look of your theme/WooCommerce by default but they are easily customisable using CSS (more at the bottom of the page). We do offer a Custom Widget Styling service if you would like us to do this for you. Below are examples from our demo store Foundthru.

Colour Filter

Price Filter

Layered Nav Category Attributes

Layered Nav Category Widgets

Our widgets are lightning fast and work up to 5 category levels deep. This limit exists because of the more performant way our code is written. If you need more than 5 category-depth levels, we can look at increasing this with an option. Our first priority is performance.

Options include:

• List or dropdown – will inherit styling from any existing WooCommerce CSS you have
• Reset or do not reset filters – lets users drill down with a category or reset the other filters when they choose a new category
• Show product counts or hide them – you get better performance if you don’t show the product counts, but our widgets still outperform every WooCommerce widget plugin out there even if you do show product counts
• SEO friendly – the SEO title updates to reflect the category and any selected attribute filters

Layered Nav Attribute Widgets

These let you pull any attribute into a sidebar widget. As with the category widget, you can style as a list or a dropdown.

Other options include:

• Narrow or Expand Results – similar to the ‘reset category’ option – this lets you choose if a filter should narrow the results or expand them. This is useful, for example, when you are adding a colour filter – you can choose to show products which are either black or white (expand the results) or which are both black AND white (narrow the results).
• Display as a list, a dropdown or a ‘checkbox list’
• Show or hide product counts – as with the category widget, you will get better speed if you hide the product counts as a smaller SQL query is required to generate the applicable filters for the current shop archive view.

Recently Viewed Products widget

The default recently viewed products widget breaks page-caching – if you visit the page logged out, then someone else visits that page logged out, user 2 will see user 1’s recently viewed products. Our widget uses Ajax to ensure that pages can be fully cached and then they fetch the recently viewed products for that user.

Price Filter Widget

The price filter widget gives you a slider for your users or a price dropdown. It’s a ‘static’ price filter, meaning you choose the options yourself rather than have the database calculate the maximum and minimum every time. You can set £1000+ or similar as your top range if you’re using the dropdown.

This gives more speed and a more consistent look for your users.

WP_Query optimisation

This plugin optimises the WP_Query code in order to pull products back more quickly. It works best in conjunction with Scalability Pro (due to the indexes created by Scalability Pro and some other options it gives), but on its own you’ll see a vast improvement if you have a sizeable number of products.

SEO Optimisation

Unlike the default WooCommerce widgets, these filters will update your SEO title to reflect the search the user has performed.

For example, if your user is in the ‘Dog Bowls’ category and has selected the colour attribute filter ‘Black’ then your page title will change to ‘Black Dog Bowls’ followed by your site title.

Customisation Options

The widgets will inherit your theme and/or WooCommerce widget styling by default but you can customise at will using CSS.

One special note on this – the brackets surrounding category/attribute counts in lists can be styled independently or removed altogether. To remove them altogether, add CSS like this to your site:

.awdff span.count:before {
 content:"";
}
.awdff span.count:after {
 content:"";
}

You can use similar CSS to the above to style the brackets surround the product counts, e.g. to change their colour or size.