How to Create a WooCommerce Website in 2022

Intro

Thanks to WooCommerce, WordPress has become an incredibly popular and versatile solution for e-commerce store owners around the world. Digital entrepreneurs are finding great value in the retail capabilities of the free, open-source platform WordPress offers.

It’s easy to see why. WordPress and WooCommerce offer the perfect combination of power and simplicity modern online retailers need. It’s a scalable solution that gives newcomers the tools they need to establish themselves, and a versatile enterprise-ready technology all in one.

This scalability is one of the core values that WordPress and WooCommerce offer to non-technical retail entrepreneurs. There’s no need to worry about migrating from one platform to another once your store becomes successful. That’s one reason why one out of five of the top 1 million e-commerce websites use WooCommerce.

But to truly maximize that scalability, you need more than just WordPress and WooCommerce. You need to set up a tech stack that gives you the power and flexibility you need, and doesn’t burn through your budget in the process.

Choose a website builder and hosting service

Your website builder and hosting solution are fundamental elements of your WordPress tech stack. The way these two technologies work together will have an enormous impact on the ease and efficiency of managing and growing your e-commerce shop. This choice defines how intuitive almost every action you take on a daily basis – from managing product pages to launching marketing campaigns – will be.

Your website builder is your toolkit for designing and publishing web pages. As a WooCommerce store owner, you will end up doing this a lot. Not only should you have optimized pages for each of your products, but you’ll constantly create and edit new landing pages as well. These marketing materials introduce specific audience segments to your brand and the solutions it offers.

You’ll need data In order to identify that audience, analyze their behaviors, and predict their needs. Your WordPress website is the perfect place to collect that data, especially if you integrate best-in-class customer relationship management technologies and other tools.

But every new tool you integrate into your website comes with a cost. Every individual line of code weighs down website performance to some degree. A bloated, tech-heavy website will require significant hosting resources to run smoothly.

To be clear, your website _does _need to run smoothly. Every second it takes for your web pages to load costs you conversions. In fact, Portent has been measuring the relationship between web page load speeds and conversion rates for years. As of April 2022, retail e-commerce websites that take one second to load have conversion rates 2.5 times higher than websites that load in five seconds.

Choosing an inexpensive shared hosting solution may reduce your monthly costs, but it can deeply impact your website’s profitability as it grows. Dedicated servers are a more reliable, albeit expensive, choice. Ideally, you want a managed cloud hosting solution that ensures you only pay for hosting resources you actually use. An interesting solution in that regard is Elementor. A WooCommerce website builder, Elementor offers built-in WordPress hosting features, as well.

Select a payment processing service

One of the primary selling points of e-commerce is the ability to automate checkout transactions online. Unlike a brick-and-mortar retailer, you don’t need to hire cashiers, deal with cash, or worry about physical overhead and security costs. This gives you a significant advantage in the retail marketplace, but it does come with other costs.

You’ll need to process customer’s credit card payments online, for example. This means signing up for a payment processing service that facilitates transactions without compromising trust, security, or profitability.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for finding the right payment processing partner. Every e-commerce store has a unique position in its market, and every individual customer has their own particular preferences.

For example, some payment processors charge a fixed monthly fee along with a low percentage of each. Others charge no monthly fee, but earn a small fixed sum with each transaction. There are many options in between.

It should be obvious that if your shop focuses on selling high-priced, high-margin items with low overall sales volume, your optimal processing costs will be different than if you sold low-priced, low-margin goods at high volume. What works for a heavy equipment manufacturer won’t necessarily work for a discount fashion brand.

Perfect the checkout process

The whole point of optimizing web page performance and page design is making it easy for customers to buy your products. By reducing the obstacles between them and their purchases, you can improve your sales volume and the overall profitability of your business.

That’s why successful e-commerce website owners pay special attention to the checkout process. Even the smallest user experience friction can lead to customers getting distracted, clicking away from your page, and ultimately abandoning their shopping cart. Part of improving your website’s user experience involves making shopping cart abandonment less likely.

Abandoned shopping carts are responsible for anywhere between 70-75% of lost sales, representing $18 billion in lost revenue for e-commerce stores. Make sure your checkout process doesn’t work against you by paying attention to some of the most common reasons customers abandon their carts:

• Unexpected costs. When e-commerce websites add shipping or handling costs to the total, it can drive cost-conscious customers away. In many cases, this doesn’t happen if you make customers aware of shipping costs before they arrive at the checkout page. Consider implementing a membership module so that your customers can get accurate shipping costs included automatically onto the prices of the items they add to their cart.
• Too many forms. Filling out forms is an easy way to make customers lose interest. But if you sell physical goods, you’ll have to take your users address information before completing transactions. Again, having a membership-based website can help you pre-load some of this data and streamline the shopping experience.
• Too many pages. E-commerce customers are not known for having a great deal of patience. The longer and more complex your checkout process is, the more likely you’ll have shopping cart abandonment issues as your website grows. Try to cut out unnecessary elements from the checkout experience, making it as easy as possible for leads to become customers.

Leverage video hosts instead of YouTube

Video marketing is a popular tool for engaging leads and closing sales. Tutorial videos can even help streamline the checkout process by showcasing some of your product’s most compelling features. However, video content can weigh down your website considerably if it is not hosted correctly.

In general, you don’t want to upload video content directly to your hosting server and run it off your WordPress website. Specialty video hosting platforms use purpose-built high-bandwidth servers to do this far more efficiently. You can simply embed video links from your host and show your best content to website visitors without dragging down performance.

Many web entrepreneurs use YouTube for this. As the largest video hosting provider by far, YouTube is reliable, powerful, and free. However, it does come with significant drawbacks.

The most important drawback is the fact that YouTube makes money off of advertising. This means it’s using your video content to draw users off your domain and onto its own. If customers click onto YouTube from your website, you can be certain you’re not getting them back during that session.

Paid video hosting solutions give you a far greater degree of control over how your video player works in the context of your website. They can also provide you with specialized marketing data and user statistics that free hosts like YouTube typically keep for themselves.

Use popups for upselling

Popups have earned a bad reputation over the years. People associate them with a disruptive user experience that constantly advertises to users, preventing them from freely browsing and shopping at their leisure.

There is some truth to this, but the main reason why digital marketers have abused popups for so long is simply because they work. Even the annoying, highly disruptive popups often work – their website owners wouldn’t keep them up if they didn’t generate profit.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to use popups to annoy your customers. In fact, you can use them in a far more clever way than that. Instead of disrupting the user experience, you can use popups to enhance it. You can use popups to draw users’ attention to things they care about at the exact moment when it makes the biggest difference.

For example, popups can play an extraordinary role in driving upselling opportunities in the checkout process. If you configure your popups carefully, and give them compelling content that speaks to customers’ real needs, you can use them to drive sales of high-margin items that your customers may not otherwise think of buying.

In most cases, customers will appreciate your website driving their attention towards an upgrade of the product they’ve already expressed interest in buying. Combine that with a small discount, and you may be able to increase cash flow with minimal investment simply using popups.

Use SEO to constantly draw new customers in

Your e-commerce store needs a constant flow of new customers to stay in business. You may be able to quickly get customers through your existing brand, or by leveraging social media to create a community. However, search engine optimization is the best long-term solution for consistently introducing customers to your brand.

Search engine marketing works for a very simple reason. It allows you to advertise your products to people who are looking specifically for them. You don’t have to compete with an endless feed of cat videos and political arguments – you have immediate access to people whose wallets are practically open right in front of you.

SEO takes time to generate results, but those results are cumulative. They build up over time, and can easily become your primary source of new leads.

So what does it take to succeed at SEO? Several things:

• A solid strategy. Search engine success is rarely an accident, especially in e-commerce. If you want to guarantee SEO results, you’ll need to craft your brand messaging around the things your audience cares about, and successfully research search intent before creating content designed to meet customers’ needs.
• Constant investment. The more you invest in search engine marketing, the greater its returns will be. It’s true that you can’t simply “buy” a top-ranking spot organically, but you can invest in off-site and on-site search engine optimization – and if you want to succeed with SEO, you’ll have to.
• Great content. More than anything else, your search engine rankings depend heavily on the quality of your website content. Remember that its quality, not quantity, that matters – a blog full of low-value content is actually worse for your brand than having no blog at all.
• Research! Use tools like Rank Tracker to keep tabs on your SEO campaigns and fine-tune them to maximize their impact. There are no shortcuts to SEO success. You’ll need to pay close attention to who consumes your content and why, then create even better content before repeating the cycle.

Build your website with long-term success in mind

All of the optimizations described above can help you drive the profitability and success of your WooCommerce website. If you plan on growing your business over time, you will ultimately spend a great deal of time and energy optimizing different aspects of the user experience to maximize conversions.

There’s no need to wait for your website to grow before taking these opportunities into account though. You can do it right now, ensuring your website is fully optimized from the very start. From here, your business can grow naturally on the basis of the real value it offers to its customers.

Summary: What an optimized WordPress tech stack looks like

WordPress is a powerful and robust platform for building and running highly automated e-commerce solutions. The more care you put into your choice of technologies, the better your online store will ultimately run. Let’s recap some of the things you need in your WooCommerce tech stack:

1. A fully-featured website builder.
2. Web hosting you can rely on.
3. Professional payment processing.
4. Optimized checkout transactions.
5. High-performance video hosting.
6. Popups that enhance the user experience.
7. Excellent SEO strategy.

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list – some successful e-commerce businesses run hundreds of plugins and extensions. But it’s an ideal starting point that will give your store the opportunities it needs to thrive in today’s challenging retail environment. Good luck!