When visitors abandon their shopping carts, slow site speed is often to blame over half of mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, a problem that plagues many WordPress and WooCommerce stores.
In this episode, Adam Weeks sits down with Aleksandar Miljković
from BigScoots at Cloudfest in Rust, Germany, to uncover the technical reasons behind e-commerce slowdowns when customers add items to their carts. Together, they look at the role of edge caching with Cloudflare, examine how outdated plugins and themes can create bottlenecks, and highlight new caching solutions that keep sites fast and conversions high.
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Takeaways
Event Location and Format: The episode was recorded at Cloudfest in Roost, Germany, using a drone, reflecting both the event’s tech-forward atmosphere and the podcast’s innovative recording methods.
Website Speed Directly Impacts User Behavior: If a site takes longer than three seconds to load on mobile, 53% of users will abandon it before adding an item to their cart, highlighting the critical nature of site speed for conversion rates.
Tiny Improvements Yield Major Gains: A 0.1-second improvement in page load time can deliver an almost 9% increase in e-commerce conversions, according to statistics.
Cart Functionality Can Be a Bottleneck: Adding a product to a WooCommerce cart on WordPress sites often slows the site down due to the server setting cookies, which bypasses effective CDN edge caching.
Recent WooCommerce Improvements Help Address Caching Issues: WooCommerce introduced a JavaScript-based AJAX method for cart counts, which reduces server reliance and helps maintain cache performance, but many themes and plugins have yet to adopt this functionality.
Solution Enhances Cart Performance: The BigScoots cache plugin now defaults to caching requests even with cart items, ensuring consistently fast page loads even during the crucial shopping cart step by serving content from the CDN cache regardless of cart status.
Importance of UX in E-commerce: Adam Weeks and Adam Weeks emphasize that adding items to a cart should be a positive experience (“confetti plastic”) and not punished by slow site speed, as poor performance can result in lost customers who rarely return.
Episode Transcript
Adam Weeks:
All right, so where are we at?
Aleksandar Miljković:
We are at CloudFest Germany in Rust 2026.
Adam Weeks:
Very cool. And we’ve got a drone, so we figured we might as well record a podcast.
Aleksandar Miljković:
Well, we are in the future, Adam.
Adam Weeks:
We are in the future. Today, when they watch it, it’ll be the future of now.
Aleksandar Miljković:
Yes, yes. And we have to think ahead.
Adam Weeks:
All right, well, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing, and I’m gonna cut to the next part of this podcast.
Adam Weeks:
hi, this is Adam Weeks from Open Channels FM, and I am here today with Alex from. Well, from BigScoots. Tell me a little bit about who you are and where are we at this moment.
Aleksandar Miljković:
My name is Alek. I am a performance specialist from BigScoots, and today we are here at CloudFest in Rust, Germany.
Adam Weeks:
Yeah, very, very cool. So currently we’re being recorded by a drone. This is the future.
Aleksandar Miljković:
This is what? The future.
Adam Weeks:
This is the future. In a beautiful background on the other side of the camera is CloudFest. And yeah, we are excited to be here, but we’re not here to just talk about CloudFest. There are some interesting problems that people in the WordPress ecosystem, people that are looking for hosting. Yesterday we were talking specifically about people when they put something in the cart. You’re shopping, you put something in the cart, and then what. What happens?
Aleksandar Miljković:
Yep. So if you’ve ever, you know, went to buy something online from a website, you’ll sometimes notice that after adding a product to the cart, especially if it’s a WooCommerce WordPress type website, the site will, for some reason, start acting very slowly. Okay, Every. Every next interaction takes a bit more time than the last one. And it’s an interesting phenomenon because a lot of sites today are utilizing cloudflare’s CDN Edge page caching. Okay, so what caching does, as I’m sure a lot of people here know, is it acts as Kind of like a middleman, especially Cloudflare CDN Edge cache. It acts kind of like a middleman between the end user and the server. Right?
Adam Weeks:
Okay.
Aleksandar Miljković:
So it saves a version of the page. Got it. On the CDN on the network edge, and it serves that to a user instead of the request going all the way to the source server. And that results in way faster loading times all around the world, especially using Cloudflare’s CDN Edge network. However, something that is a big part of me.
Adam Weeks:
What you’re working on. What are you working on?
Aleksandar Miljković:
Is finding out why that edge caching might not be working.
Adam Weeks:
Okay.
Aleksandar Miljković:
There are lots of cases where people say, you know, the plugin says, yeah, Cloudflare Edge cache is working okay, everything’s fine, everything’s green. Yeah, but the site is still slow and you know, people aren’t getting into the headers to see why.
Adam Weeks:
All right, so when a slight site slows down, what are some of the negatives? Like what’s so bad about a site slowing down when someone puts something in the cart?
Aleksandar Miljković:
So if we talk just pure statistics, Okay, I think on mobile, 53% of users will exit a site. Won’t even get to the cart, won’t even add an item to the cart if the site takes longer than three seconds to load.
Adam Weeks:
All right, something’s not working. I’m impatient. I need to go back to my doom scrolling and time for this.
Aleksandar Miljković:
I don’t have time. I want to give you my money and I’m not gonna wait in line on a website in order to give you money.
Adam Weeks:
Well, so many times like whoa, like the something’s not working. Like ah, that something’s wrong with the website. Forget it, I’ll try later.
Aleksandar Miljković:
Exactly.
Adam Weeks:
And then later doesn’t happen.
Aleksandar Miljković:
Exactly. Later almost never happens.
Adam Weeks:
Okay.
Adam Weeks:
Also we have a statistic, I think it was from Google, that just a point one second improvement in site speed or page loading times results in an almost 9% increase in conversions in E commerce.
Adam Weeks:
9%. So like point one, I guess 0.1.
Aleksandar Miljković:
It’s not even. This is longer.
Adam Weeks:
Yeah, that was point two.
Aleksandar Miljković:
I was timing it right there.
Adam Weeks:
All right, so what you guys have done is the work to say, hey, it’s not okay for when someone puts something in the cart stores. That’s like the most important part of what they’re trying, what they’re there for. And they’re not able to seal the deal. They lose a client, they lose a customer. And so what you’re doing is the work to speed that up. And how has the success been on that?
Aleksandar Miljković:
It’s been an amazing success. People are seeing way faster loading e commerce websites. And adding a product to the cart shouldn’t be a negative experience. We should have confetti plastic whenever a user adds something to a cart and not punishing that by making the experience be excruciating. And the science behind it is pretty interesting. So that edge caching is most commonly bypassed because the server sets something called a cookie, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. So if a cookie is being set on 11, if a cookie is being set on the back end, cloudflare’s cache will be bypassed.
Adam Weeks:
Okay.
Aleksandar Miljković:
What sets those cookies? That’s the question. And why does it always happen when something is added to the cart?
Adam Weeks:
Got it.
Aleksandar Miljković:
So when something is added to the cart, that means that this session is special, Right?
Adam Weeks:
Okay.
Aleksandar Miljković:
This is a different session than all sessions without something in the cart. This is special.
Adam Weeks:
Yeah.
Aleksandar Miljković:
And the way WooCommerce used to work is that for that little cart count, you know, the cart count, the little number. It used to use a PHP method in order to print that number out. That’s what would break the caching. WooCommerce, a couple of versions back, released a WCAJAX call which allows US to use JavaScript to get that number instead of using php on the backend, which in theory allows us to not bypass the cache because no cookies are being set in that same way on the server side. However, a lot of themes and a lot of plugins still weren’t utilizing that new functionality that WooCommerce has added.
Adam Weeks:
Got it.
Aleksandar Miljković:
And so we’ve seen more and more adoption of this new method. And now with BigScoots, our BigScoots cache plugin by default tells BigScoots cache to cache requests even with items in the cart, and not bypass in those situations, which in the end leads to. Adding a product to the cart has no impact on whether you. Whether your session or, you know, whether the page that you’re trying to access is being served from the server side or from the CDN cache. It’s always going to be served from the CDN cache. Okay, which leads us to under one second page.
Adam Weeks:
We’re not going to lose those. Yeah, snap. Exactly. Very cool. I’m glad you’re doing the good work of speeding that very important process.
Aleksandar Miljković:
Fighting the good fight.
Adam Weeks:
It’s a lot of work, but yeah. Well, thank you for sharing what you’re doing at BigScoots. It’s fun to. I think we should probably go back to like, you know, some roller coasters.
Aleksandar Miljković:
There’s a roller coaster? Yes, and I’m looking forward to it very much.
Adam Weeks:
All right, well, before the drone falls out of the sky, I’m going to go ahead and grab this drone. This is Adam Weeks from OpenChannels FM.
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