Building a WooCommerce Store That Grows with Your Business

The online landscape has gotten super competitive. And online stores are also following suit to become the go to portal for online shopping for their customers. WooCommerce has been a lifesaver for WordPress websites. Quite a powerful plugin that offers multiple features for online shopping, WooCommerce has been the go-to plugin for many businesses, offering numerous WooCommerce plugins to businesses of different sizes. But creating a store that is going to evolve and scale up with your business will need careful planning and execution. Let us walk you through the basics to help you understand the basic and most critical steps.

Preparing your store for success

Before we dive straight into the technicalities, the first step would be defining the business objectives. What are the services or products on offer? Who will be the target audience? What is the perfect buyer persona for your business. Answering all this will guide the store’s design, features and scalability roadmap.

Choosing a reliable hosting plan

A scalable store demands a robust hosting solution. If you are planning for a large scale store, we suggest going with a WooCommerce managed hosting plan to ensure high uptime, faster loading and scalable resources. In case you have a smaller online store with a handful of products or services on offer, any inexpensive shared hosting will do just fine. However, this might hamper in the way of scalability as your store starts to grow and grab more online traffic.

Mobile optimization

With mobile devices contributing to over half of all the online traffic that you get, forgetting to optimize your store for mobile devices is critical. Choose responsive themes and designs to test your site on multiple devices to ensure that every user gets a seamless shopping experience, no matter what device they are on.

Building the foundation

Choosing the theme

While it might be super lucrative to pick a theme that looks awesome, it is important to remember not all themes are created equal. Since the them is going to be the backbone for your online store, ensure the theme you choose is perfectly optimized for WooCommerce. When choosing prioritize 

• Speed and performance
• SEO compatibility and readiness
• Customization options

Implement the necessary plugins

WooCommerce is just one of the major plugins that will be installed. Apart from it, there are plenty of other plugins that you can add to boost your store’s capability. AdTribes can also be integrated to help manage and optimize your products to get them in front of millions of shoppers. Most common ones include

• Yoast SEO: Helps to optimize your website content to rank on search results.
• Payment plugins: Enables seamless transactions from multiple payment methods.
• Analytics integration: Helps to monitor the performance of your online store with the help of Google Analytics.
• Marketing plugins: To manage promotional campaigns like newsletters and emails using plugins like MailChimp.

Security

This part is non-negotiable. Implement SSL certificates to encrypt data and install security plugins to protect your website from malicious online attacks. We suggest that you regularly update WordPress, WooCommerce and all the installed plugins to patch any existing vulnerabilities.

Optimize for performance

Speed up page

It is no secret that we never liked slow loading websites. If it takes over three seconds, we are much more comfortable to switch to another online store. Don’t miss out on traffic and sales with a slow website. Best practices to boost speed include

• Compressing media files before uploading.
• Using CDNs to deliver content to users worldwide from the nearest servers.
• Enable caching to serve pre rendered pages to reduce load times and save on server resources.

Optimize for SEO

SEO is crucial if you want to feature on the top of search results. Just after the sponsored posts that is. High search engine visibility is going to boost organic traffic to the site. Here are some things to help with SEO.

• Use descriptive meta titles and tags
• Optimize website content using targeted keywords
• Write blogs to share value to the readers and improve your rankings.

Scaling your WooCommerce store

Expand your offerings

As your business starts to grow and thrive, you will need to diversify your product offerings. Analyze customer feedback, demands and the market trends to introduce complementary items or new categories to align with your brand.

Automation

Bust out all the manual repetitive tasks with automation tools. Tools like Zapier and others are excellent options to send cart abandonment notifications, managing inventory updates and automate support responses.

Invest in marketing

People need to know about your thriving business if they are to buy from your online store and the right marketing strategies can help spread the word. Consider

Social media marketing: Run targeted ads on platforms like YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.

Email campaigns: Use segmentation to send personalized offers and updates to boost conversions.

Influencer marketing: Recently one of the most effective marketing channels, collaborate with influencers in your niche to be able to reach a much larger audience base.

Future proofing your store

Upgrade hosting as needed

As the traffic starts to flow in, you will need to ensure that your hosting plan is able to handle all the pressure. If not, consider switching to a more scalable solution. Either upgrade to a higher tier or consider managed or cloud hosting for greater flexibility.

Regular updates

Make sure your store has the latest version of WordPress and plugins installed. We suggest that you schedule regular maintenance to 

• Update the theme and plugins.
• Create multiple backups in case of data loss.
• Check the website for any broken links or outdated content.

A WooCommerce is much more than a simple website. It needs to be scalable, fast and responsive to be appealing to the users. Invest in the right tools and hosting plans to focus on performance and staying agile to the changing online trends. Start small, think big and create a store that is ready to kick Amazon right in the shin. Best of luck!