You’ve done the hard work. Your e-commerce store is live on WooCommerce or Shopify, your products are dialed in, and you know how to attract the right audience. That’s no small achievement. Now comes the part that separates good stores from great ones: performance.
Running an online store can feel fast-paced and intense, but it doesn’t have to be fragile. In most cases, a few hidden performance bottlenecks, not exactly big strategic mistakes, are what quietly hold conversions back. The good news is that these issues are common, easy to spot, and surprisingly quick to fix.
With a few targeted improvements, you can create a faster, smoother shopping experience that boosts checkout rates and protects your revenue. Below are five high-impact e-commerce performance issues you can fix quickly to get more out of the traffic you already have.
1. Low-Quality Plugins
Plugins are the unsung heroes of most online shops. They automate tasks, add features, and make your store feel more capable without custom coding. You can find plugins for virtually every need in e-commerce, including marketing, SEO, inventory management, and customer support. But here’s the catch: not all plugins are built with the same level of attention to performance. This is why a single inefficient plugin can slow down your entire site, create conflicts, or make pages behave unpredictably. Therefore, picking the right plugins is critical for your business.
The Maya Plugin for Shopify is a prime example of a purpose-built solution, a plugin that is as useful as it is reliable. You can use it to install Maya Checkout, a third-party payment gateway Shopify stores can integrate in minutes. The plugin and payment gateway are particularly helpful to Philippine merchants because Shopify Payments, the platform’s integrated and built-in payment gateway, isn’t available locally. With Maya Checkout, you’ll be able to accept cards, e-wallets, and QR Ph without slowing down your store or cluttering your backend.
2. Lack of Mobile Responsiveness
Shopping on a phone is the first touchpoint for a large portion of modern customers. This means people tend to leave the moment they feel even slightly inconvenienced by distorted images or non-mobile-friendly buttons.
Improving the mobile experience starts with making sure your site adjusts to the screen instead of simply resizing everything. Product cards, photos, buttons, filters, and text blocks should rearrange themselves naturally. It also helps to look closely at touch comfort. Buttons should be spaced well enough that someone browsing with one thumb isn’t accidentally tapping the wrong thing.
One way to ensure mobile responsiveness is to test your store across different devices and browsers. After all, screens come in all shapes, and a layout that looks perfect on one phone may break on another. Tools that simulate devices can help, but checking on a physical phone now and then gives you the truest view of what shoppers see.
3. Friction at Checkout
Hidden fees, confusing payment steps, and slow-loading pages all contribute to abandoned carts. That’s why it’s important to have a reliable WooCommerce or Shopify payment gateway for Philippines stores. As mentioned, with Maya Checkout, your store can accept a wide range of payment methods through a simple and straightforward process.
Beyond speed and payment options, Maya Checkout opens the door to a global market. The plugins for installing this payment gateway are designed with clear pricing and easy integration for Shopify and WooCommerce stores, helping you expand your reach while boosting sales volume. It also provides real-time authorization, billing, and T+1 settlement, along with automated reports and notifications. Moreover, features like the authorize-and-capture option let you hold funds until an order is ready to ship, giving you flexibility without frustrating your customers. This level of control is invaluable for managing stock, processing changes, or updating order totals without disrupting the payment flow.
4. Slow Loading Time
Nothing pushes people away from websites faster than slow web pages. The delay might come from oversized images, heavy videos, bulky code, or old scripts that weren’t cleaned up properly. Even small pieces of inefficiency can stack up until your pages start loading in slow motion.
Large product images usually cause the biggest drag. Photos, therefore, need to be resized to the exact dimensions you use on-page and compressed before uploading so your store doesn’t have to process more than necessary. Videos deserve the same attention. Hosting data-heavy clips directly on your server can slow things down, so embedding them through external platforms is usually the safer route.
Loading time also suffers when the backend gets dusty. For example, plugins you’ve removed can leave code behind, and older themes sometimes contain unused CSS or JavaScript that browsers still need to interpret. Cleaning these up, putting a content delivery network in place, and checking your site speed regularly help keep things running smoothly.
5. Confusing Navigation
A confusing menu can look harmless at first glance, but it affects your store more deeply than almost any other design choice. That’s because visitors lean on navigation to understand your structure, find products quickly, and feel like they're in control. When your menu is cluttered, inconsistent, or arranged in a way that requires too much thinking, shoppers lose their sense of direction and can quietly drop off.
In contrast, a clear navigation makes sense immediately. People don’t wonder what’s hidden inside a label. They also don’t need to scan too many choices before deciding where to go. Grouping related products under simple parent categories keeps everything tidy and gives visitors a mental map to follow.
Smooth transitions matter here as well. Submenus should open cleanly, not jump around the screen. Icons can also help, especially on mobile, because they give shoppers visual cues as they move through sections.
A polished navigation system feels like a well-labeled aisle in a physical store. When everything is easy to find, people stay longer and may buy more.
Avoid Site Issues and Make Your E-commerce Site More Hardworking
You now have a clear, actionable roadmap to transform your e-commerce store's performance. By dedicating time today to tackle these five performance issues, you invest in a faster, more reliable, and ultimately, more profitable business. Maya Business can be your growth partner for this fix.
Sign up for Maya Business, and you can stop leaking sales while accelerating your success. Setting up a Maya Business account lets you open a Maya Business Deposit account and use it as your settlement account. With an industry-leading 2.5% per annum interest rate, you’ll earn PHP 25,000 in interest per year on a PHP 1 million deposit. Furthermore, you’ll be able to send money to your partners and suppliers for free via InstaPay and PESONet, letting you save more.
Signing up also qualifies you for a no-collateral Maya Flexi Loan offer of up to PHP 2 million in just 3 months, allowing you to have another funding source to further develop your business. Just use Maya as your primary processor for all wallet and card payments. The more you use our solutions, the better the loan offer will be.
Sign up for Maya Business today to enjoy the benefits of Maya Business solutions.
