Start Scaling Your Store

Over the last decade, ecommerce has seen exponential growth, becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. From online stores selling thousands of products to highly-niche products, the ecommerce model has proven effective for businesses of every size and market demographics. Platforms such as woocommerce have revolutionized the ecommerce industry by eliminating the need to have technical skills to develop an online store. With woocommerce, you can set up an entire store and start selling without even writing a single line of code! in this book, you’ll learn some essential tactics for scaling your woocommerce site. It’s a must-read for any growing ecommerce businesses.

Growing a business from scratch is never easy. It’s a lot of hard work and as your business grows, you need more resources to accommodate your growth. It’s the same for your online business. When you start things off, your store could be a very basic site that requires very few server resources. Over time, you will need: better hosting more powerful integrations more flexible features on your site and that’s just to get started. Magento and woocommerce have very different resource requirements for scaling a business. Let’s take a look at what they are.

It’s common to hear questions about how scalable woocommerce is and the difficulty in scaling it. While not much coding is needed, getting it right the first time is not negotiable. That means if you have no idea how scaling works, it’s always a good idea to get help from the experts. This article can be a starting point for you as you seek to scale your woocommerce website for your growing business. Pixel fish’s team of experienced ecommerce web designers can help optimize your woocommerce online store to improve your business. Take your online store business to the next level with a pixel fish ecommerce website.

Woocommerce stores can be scaled, but before you start scaling it, below are a few factors that affect the scaling of your woocommerce store.

Vertical scaling is simple. When you need more resources, you increase your server’s specifications by adding more ram, cpu, and storage. Then, you are good to go until you need to do this again. This solution works until you reach the maximum capacity of your server. Unfortunately, vertical scaling is not infinite, physical machines that host your store have limitations. This is when scaling becomes complicated, and you must migrate to a multi-server infrastructure. Also, one more reason to not use a cheap server : it will only lead to reaching its maximum capacity faster and requiring migration to a larger server.

1. Theme and Plugin Code

There are a few things to keep in mind when using this plugin to ensure you get the most out of the platform. 1. You have to use wordpress as your foundation. Wordpress is a stable and secure platform. Using wordpress will give you access to a wealth of plugins and themes designed explicitly for ecommerce sites. 2. Choose a well-coded theme that’s right for your business. Your ecommerce site’s theme may look great, but without well-coded html, css, and javascript, your site can run into various issues. 3. Site speed is perhaps the most critical factor to consider – a slow site can result in customer frustration, increased load times during busy periods, and even delays in executing actions.

Your woocommerce theme and all of the other plugins and extensions on your site can take up a lot of space on your site. Every time a visitor loads your site, their browser has to send a request to your server. The more requests their browser has to make, the slower your site will be. Minimize the effect of plugins by: -making sure your theme and plugins have optimized code -only keeping the plugins you really need -keeping everything updated always. An outdated version of wordpress or any of its plugins can lead to problems. You can opt for automatic updates with a plugin like jetpack.

Woocommerce is a free wordpress plugin that operates on wordpress’ open source framework. The plugin provides all the elements needed for a successful ecommerce solution. The open source framework means that wordpress’ core code is available to everyone, so developers can edit, modify and build upon this code in any way they see fit. This allows businesses to build a completely unique solution, tailored to their brand. Wordpress has a ‘diy’ reputation, but don’t underestimate it’s potential for enterprise-level businesses. Due to the open source framework and additional plugins, customisations and features , enterprises can create robust solutions on this platform with ultimate control.

1. Choose the Right Host

To get the best return on your woocommerce development efforts, you need to follow certain tips that are discussed below: opt for a dedicated hosting server a dedicated hosting is more reliable than the shared hosting. This is because it is suitable to tackle high traffic during the peak shopping days without any instance of slow speed or crashing. You need to check that the server should be of latest version and databases (php and mysql) should be updated as well. Go with user-friendly theme theme plays a major role in deciding the look and feel of your woocommerce store. You need to ensure that the theme that you choose should be intuitive.

Being a fully-hosted platform, bigcommerce eliminates all the technical concerns like storage, backups, downtimes, updates, and security. As your business expands, all you need to do is update your plan, and bigcommerce will take care of the rest. It’s a pretty much hassle-free solution to grow and scale up your business. Result: both bigcommerce and woocommerce have equal space to grow and scale up with unique benefits and drawbacks. You can make your business growthful and scalable regardless of any of the platforms you choose between the two. Hence, there’s no specific winner for this round! winner: it’s a tie! score after round 4: woocommerce – 3 & bigcommerce – 2 [both get 1 point due to a tie!].

Choose a reliable hosting provider: your woocommerce hosting provider plays a significant role in your store’s performance. Opt for a reputable provider that offers dedicated resources, optimized servers, and robust security features. Optimize images: large, unoptimized images can significantly slow down your site. Optimize your images by using compression tools and appropriate file formats to reduce image sizes without compromising quality. Use caching plugins: caching plugins can help speed up your woocommerce store. The plugin will temporarily store frequently-used data, reducing the need for repetitive server requests. Enable content delivery network (cdn): a cdn helps distribute your website’s content across multiple servers around the globe.

You can handle large online stores. This platform was designed for scalability. You can choose any hosting provider and scale your store as much as you need. For that, magento is better than woocommerce for a significant number of products. Another magento benefit is online shoppers can enjoy a fast checkout process together with a default guest checkout. You receive the online shop integrated with paypal, authorize. Net, and braintree. These payment gateways give your customers a better experience and improve cart abandon rate. Also read: create magento 2 payment module.

Woocommerce may require some coding knowledge if you’re to get the most out of it, but you can get started with assistance. There are five steps you’ll need to take to start hosting your online store with woocommerce. The only prerequisite is that you have a wordpress site for your business. Choose a hosting site from bluehost, siteground, pressable, and wordpress. Com sign up for an account on the woocommerce website, and either use a pre-installed solution with one of the previously-stated hosts, auto-install it through your wordpress site, or download the zip file next, download the woocommerce plugin and install/activate it through wordpress.

2. Clean Up Your Site Code

We often joke that the less sexy websites sell the most products. Think about it. Apple’s website gets more and more simple and streamlined every day. Therefore, it loads ultra-fast and is super lean and clean. We’d even argue that a lean, clean woocommerce site is not only much more scalable as it’s not weighed down by extra code and functionality that’s not necessary but very sexy. Simple is often better when it comes to website design. It will pay off in performance, especially as you start to scale. Take a look at amazon as another example. Amazon has a very rigid coupon system for a reason – speed, performance, and subsequent user experience.

5. Set Up a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Pantheon is the only woocommerce hosting platform to include fully managed and free https certificates deployed via a global cdn (content delivery network). Secure infrastructure and carefully configured access to resources are also best practices we follow around safeguarding data.

A cdn is an assemblage of web hosting servers that are distributed across the globe. This network is created to host and distribute the static content of your wordpress website such as images, css, javascript, videos, music and more. A global cdn sends assets from a location closest to your users which speeds up the overall load time and reduces the load on your server. With that, more simultaneous users can be supported which results in more pageviews and more revenue for your woocommerce site.

It can get quite irritating when a website takes too much time to load! your customers may not have the patience to wait and that’s exactly why your website needs to be optimized at all times. To ensure you achieve this, the w3 total cache is one of the best add-ons available that improves website performance and reduces load times. It provides a transparent content delivery network to quickly transfer the assets needed to load the internet content. It even improves your web page rankings on the search engine. You need w3 total caching on your website as it leads to 10x improvement in overall site performance.