Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing sectors with over 3.74 billion internet users, online store owners are optimistic about the bright future of online buying and selling. In 2018, online shopping sales is expected to be valued at $638 billion on the mobile devices alone and the overall growth of ecommerce industry is predicted to reach approx 18.7% by 2020.
Amazon and Ebay are two most popular ecommerce giants that are known for their credibility all around the world. However, when it comes to small online stores, it’s important to choose the CMS wisely because of administration and management issues. Easy to follow tutorial with step-by-step instructions how to start a blog or how to make a website using WordPress with build in drag and drop page builder.
What is WooCommerce? widely used ecommerce CMS in the world with a market share of over 41%. Its user friendly interface, high responsiveness and various customization options makes it perfectly suitable for small scale ecommerce stores. In fact, a WooCommerce Product Blocks Pro WooCommerce powered online store could be set up within minutes and is ready for business within a few hours.
However, before powering up your online store with WooCommerce, you have to get a domain name, a WooCommerce optimized hosting, a plugin to boost your web store’s speed and a catchy theme for your store. BigCommerce Headless Commerce
Choosing A Domain Name
Choosing the right domain name for your ecommerce store isn’t hard but you should make your choice wisely. Remember that the domain name is the first impression of the store. For the potential customers and visitors, this domain name defines your brand. Here are some of the tips while you think for a domain name.
- Keep it concise and creative.
- It should be easy to pronounce, type and remember.
- Try to avoid alphanumeric sequences.
- Try to include your target keyword.
Once you have decided on the list of perfect domain names for your store, start checking the availability of the domains. To ease the process, try out different online domain name generators to gather ideas for your web store’s name.
WooCommerce Specialized Hosting
WooCommerce is undoubtedly one of the best things that ever happened to the ecommerce industry but every platform needs the right web hosting to bring out all the benefits to light. To build a successful WooCommerce store, you need a robust hosting solution that is both scalable and reliable.
During our research, I discovered several hosting solutions for WooCommerce stores. Out of these, Cloudways offered the best mix of features and price.
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that offers specialized 100% Varnish Compatible WooCommerce hosting with a guarantee of 99.9% uptime. The platform allows you to setup your store on five top tier cloud infrastructure providers including DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, GCE, and Kyup (an auto scalable container infrastructure provider). The users take advantage of the user friendly Cloudways platform and the multitude of services offered by the hosting solution.
Hosting with Cloudways would give you many perks including:
- Free SSL Certificates and default HTTP/2 protocol for enhanced security.
- 24x7x365 days live human interactive support by cloud hosting experts.
- Pay as you go price plans (the lowest plan is just $7).
- Automatic and scheduled backups.
- Free migration for WooCommerce stores.
- Pre-Installed WP-CLI.
- Built-In MySQL Manage.
- Increased Speed With PHP-FPM.
- SSD Based Hosting.
- Secure SSH & SFTP Access.
- PHP 7
- ThunderStack — A combination of caching, server and database technologies that boosts your web store’s overall performance.
The icing on the cake is that Cloudways offers a free trial so that you can experience the platform and its optimization features even before you spend a dime.
Breeze — A Cache Plugin for Your WooCommerce Store
Ecommerce stores often struggle when the traffic spikes up or the store operates near the edge of the allocated resources. The result is a slow web store, a situation that has caused many stores to go under!
This is where Breeze comes into play. It is a cache plugin by Cloudways that optimizes your WooCommerce store and makes it load fast. You just have to install and activate the plugin to give your WooCommerce store a fresh breeze of optimization. Breeze offers a host of features including:
- Plug-n-play installation.
- Easy to configure options.
- File level cache system.
- Simple database cleanup.
- HTML, JS and CSS minification.
- Grouping of static files that reduces the number of requests.
- Support for the Varnish cache.
- Simplified CDN integration.
WooCommerce experts at Cloudways, tested the performance of the Breeze cache plugin at a WooCommerce store with 1000 products. The average load speed of the store (before the installation of Breeze) was 342 ms. Once the Breeze plugin was installed and activated, the store loaded up in just 298 ms.
Premium WooCommerce Theme(s)
You can always use free themes for your WooCommerce powered online store. However, when it comes to creating a catchy, secure and highly customizable ecommerce store, a premium WooCommerce theme makes a world of the difference.
Premium WooCommerce themes make a web store look visually pleasing that eventually results in more leads and high conversion rates. Under the hood, the various components of the themes work seamlessly to ensure speed and smooth operation of the store.
Dessign.net is a reliable resource for premium WooCommerce themes. The themes are especially designed for various product niches. The list include
- Virtual Store WooCommerce Theme
- WooCommerce Free Shop Theme
- Eshop WooCommerce Theme
- Large Grid WooCommerce -Full screen
- Modern Shop WooCommerce Theme
- Shopper WooCommerce Theme
All these themes share the following features:
- Custom background images, colors and borders
- Theme Options
- Menus Capability
- Responsive Design/ Layout
- Valid XHTML + CSS
- Search Engine Optimized
- Compatible with all major browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE, SPartan, Chrome)
- Responsive Slider
When it comes to ecommerce store setup, WooCommerce is currently the undisputed king. Now that you are well aware of the requirements for a successful WooCommerce store, you could launch a successful WooCommerce store in no time!
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