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WooCommerce: Preparing Your Site for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are just around the corner. Is your WooCommerce site prepared? I hope so!

While time is running out, there are a number of things you can do to get ready. In this post, we’ll cover eight of the most important ones.

The potential of a Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal shouldn’t be underestimated. Indeed, many eCommerce sites report that a significant percentage of their annual revenue comes from sales during this brief period of time.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that nearly all businesses run a BFCM sale, which means that anyone who doesn’t have an offer is missing out.

Before we jump into the eight important things you can do, a final note: failing to prepare may cost you a serious amount of missed revenue. Amazon, for example, stands to lose $13.22 million per hour of downtime! While that’s an extreme example, it is a reminder that downtime should be avoided as much as possible during once-a-year sales events.

WooCommerce: How Hosting Impacts Scalability

Scalability is a vital factor to consider when setting up your WooCommerce store. It refers to the ability of your website to handle increased traffic and transactions as your business grows.

Essentially, it’s about accommodating growth without hampering site performance or user experience. If you foresee significant growth for your online store, scalability has to be one of your primary considerations from day one.

Hosting plays an integral part in ensuring scalability because as demand surges, server capabilities must keep up too. A scalable hosting solution will mitigate potential problems related to heavy traffic, and can upgrade resources accordingly to ensure smooth operation at all times.

If you’re a WooCommerce site owner and you are concerned about how well your setup can scale, read on for a rundown of the main aspects that matter when it comes to hosting, and the choices you have available.

WooCommerce: 11 Performance, Security, and Scalability Tips

WooCommerce websites need to be operational at all times: they must load quickly, be secure, and handle large traffic spikes.

Achieving this can be a daunting task without the right strategy and expertise, particularly when dealing with a high number of visitors, as a single problem can result in hours of downtime and lost sales.

In this article, our special guest Martin Ronfort, founder of Dr Tech, will share an overview of the strategies and processes that you can apply to your WooCommerce store and grow with ease

At Dr Tech, in fact, they manage thousands of WooCommerce stores – ranging from small businesses that are just starting out to stores with millions of requests and significant marketing campaigns – and deal with all the technical aspects such as hosting, loading speed, security, updates, backups, uptime, and scalability.

Let’s go, Martin!

WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Shopify and WooCommerce are top of mind for any business owner considering ecommerce for the first time. These ecommerce platforms are convenient and easy to use; however, each comes with its own pros and cons.

While Shopify offers ecommerce infrastructure as a service, powering 1% of all websites, WooCommerce is open-source and grants users more flexibility, powering 4.9% of all websites.

So, while each platform comes with its own strengths and limitations, choosing the one that suits your needs and provides the features you require is important. Here are some of the key factors you need to consider when determining the right platform for your business:

Ease of use
Budget
Payment methods & checkout experience
Scalability
Integration options

In this article, we’ll cover the essential factors mentioned above to help you determine which ecommerce solution is best suited for your business requirements. But first, let’s begin with a quick overview of both ecommerce platforms.

WooCommerce: How to Safely Update Via Staging

When a new version of the WooCommerce plugin is released, and the WordPress dashboard starts sending you notifications that it’s time to update, this question comes always to mind: “Should I update WooCommerce right now, wait a little longer, or stay on the same version unless something breaks?“

Well, updating WooCommerce is ALWAYS a big risk – potentially you can break your live website and miss out on traffic and sales. This can happen every time a significant update is released – many store owners don’t update their stores because they feel the hassle is not worth the effort.

But updating WooCommerce is definitely a good idea for the long-term. The main cause of WordPress hacking is because of out-of-date plugins and themes. And this is where staging environments come in.

A staging website is a clone of your existing live store. It’s completely separate and it doesn’t affect your live store in any way. Staging is also called “testing environment” or “sandbox”, while your live site is usually called “production environment”.

Staging gives you the benefit of 1-click-cloning in a few minutes, updating and testing WooCommerce without worrying about breaking your actual live website, and finally “pushing” the changes to the live website (a.k.a. overwriting the live environment), so the functioning is 100% guaranteed.

WordPress: 5 High-Impact Ways to Speed Up Your Website

My name is Emanuel and I am co-founder of Templ.io which is a high performance, managed WordPress host built on Google Cloud. I have 10+ years experience working with WordPress and often help our clients optimize the speed of their sites.

In this article, I have gathered 5 high-impact and sometimes overlooked ways that you can use to speed up your WordPress website.

As you probably already know, having a fast website not only helps to improve the user experience of your visiting your website, but having a fast site also helps convert more of your visitors into customers as well as improve your search engine rankings.

But before we get into the actual tips, I want to share some general guidelines. Understanding the fundamentals To better be able to optimize the speed of a website, it is important that you have a basic understanding of the technical fundamentals of how a website is served to a visitor.

There are basically 4 factors that determines the speed of your website, namely:

The size of the page
The number of requests
Whether it is cached or not
If not, how long does it take for the server to generate the page using PHP+MySQL

So, to improve the speed of your website, there are essentially 4 things you can do: reduce page size, reduce the number of requests, enable caching and keep your code simple (read: use as few plugins as possible). Now that we have got that out of the way, let’s get into our 5 tips on how you can make your WordPress site faster.

WooCommerce: WooCart Managed Hosting

In this blog post, I’ll review some of the more important features of WooCart. WooCart is a new hosting provider that fully specializes for WooCommerce. Compared to WP Engine, Flywheel, or SiteGround, WooCart doesn’t offer WordPress hosting at all. It’s a focused package for WooCommerce store owners.

Core difference between managed WooCommerce hosting and other hosting is convenience. In managed hosting everything is bundled up together. You don’t have to worry about any technical issues.

In non-managed hosting you have to manage cPanel, install WordPress, install WooCommerce then check the resource usage and if there is any issue you have to contact customer support, which is most of the time occupied with lots of things, have a scattered focus, and no specialized knowledge.

Whereas in WooCommerce managed hosting, the team’s focus is only on WooCommerce. That gives you an idea of why they can offer better service. WooCart allows you to spend your valuable time on marketing your store and not fixing technical issues.

WooCommerce: How to Improve the Speed of my Store?

This is a guest post by Simon Tomkins of CommerceGurus – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

The speed of your WooCommerce store is incredibly important when it comes to converting visitors into customers. Research has shown that even a one second delay can result in 7% of lost orders.

If your WooCommerce site is making $1,000 per day, that one second delay in load time could potentially cost you $25,000 in annual lost sales – not small change! If you are the lucky owner of Amazon, a one second delay in 2017 could have meant a $178 billions * 0,07 = $12.5 billions loss in net revenue…

Once again, a slow WooCommerce website is costing you money.

I spent a great deal of time researching website speed and performance optimization before creating our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme. Some of the statistics are staggering:

73% of mobile users have abandoned a site due to it taking too long
47% of people expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less
79% of people who encounter a performance issue won’t return again to buy

So, a slow WooCommerce site means unhappy visitors and the loss of potential revenue to competitors.

And today we’ll briefly see what you can do to speed up your WooCommerce website – these are proven performance optimization tricks that can have an immediate impact on your sales conversion rate 🙂

WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

As a WooCommerce user, WooCommerce blogger and WooCommerce developer I often hear this question: “What’s the best hosting platform for a WooCommerce website?“.

Well, first and foremost, there is no “best” hosting for WooCommerce (and WordPress in general).

There are so many choices out there that defining the “best” is impossible. Besides, if there were a “best” hosting provider, there would be only one hosting company left in business.