Launching a WooCommerce site

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that turns any website into an ecommerce powerhouse. In itself, WooCommerce is a very clumsy solution. Out of the box, it has a look and feel that is at least a decade old. However, with the addition of other plugins, WooCommerce can become a robust, sophisticated platform that does ecommerce every bit as well as Shopify or any other competitor. In fact, there is simply nothing that is done in ecommerce that is not possible in WooCommerce.

Shopify is currently the dominant competitor to WooCommerce and if you are reading this, you are probably evaluating primarily those two solutions. Here is a summary of the pros and cons of each:

Pros:

• Built on the very stable and respected WordPress architecture.
• Inexpensive. WooCommerce itself is free and your costs should be limited to hosting and a handful of plugins.
• 100% customizable. Anything you see on a WooCommerce site can be customized. This gives you a huge competitive advantage.
• Full control of the infrastructure and code base. You are not at the mercy of a company that pushes out new “features” that are actually bugs.
• No “big brother” oversight or restrictions.

Cons:

• Requires far more technical knowledge. Requires you to have web hosting, manage a code base, do updates, and proactively monitor for problems. Security is also more complicated.
• Less integration with other software. Since Shopify is more dominant, they have more integrations available.
• The administrator area is clunky.

Pros:

• With very little technical knowledge, you can open a credible web store in just hours or days.
• All hosting, code, updates, and security concerns are handled for you.
• Somewhat customizable through an extensive collection of plugins.

Cons:

• Fairly expensive. (There are monthly fees plus other fees for processing credit cards.)
• Limits on what is customizable.
• Shopify exerts lots of control over merchants. Some products cannot be sold on the Shopify platform at all, and others are severely restricted. In some cases, merchants get their stores turned off either fairly or unfairly, sometimes for reasons outside their control.

Frankly, a lot of DTC and ecommerce businesses should pick Shopify. There are lots of reasons why it is attractive, especially for companies without technology as a core competency. But, you should consider WooCommerce if this describes your company:

• You want to provide a premium, off-the-beaten-path ecommerce experience such as tools for product recommendations or customized products.
• You have someone that is technical and able/willing to take on the responsibility of maintaining the WooCommerce site. (See needed technical skills below.)
• You are looking for competitive advantages and need more than just a run-of-the-mill ecommerce experience.

If you have read this section and decided you want to move forward with WooCommerce, keep reading to learn the major steps to get launched.

This is not going to be a step-by-step guide with screenshots of every setting in WooCommerce. There are plenty of places you can go online to get that kind of information. We are rather going to be more focused on the big decisions you need to make.

Your web hosting company rents you either a server or more typically, a part of a server and ensures that the server is connected to the internet. Your website is run from the server and your data is stored there.

Compared to Shopify, you will find this kind of web hosting to be quite inexpensive. You should probably start with a VPS (or shared) managed hosting service specifically designed for WordPress/WooCommerce. These kinds of host plans give you a small piece of a server and are more than sufficient for most ecommerce sites. Even if you have hundreds of products and thousands of orders/month, start with just a VPS.

Unless you are very comfortable with the technology, make sure that the hosting you get is managed. It costs you a bit more but gives you access to experts at the web hosting company who will help you get started and troubleshoot problems for you.

A perfectly capable VPS hosting solution for a smaller site costs less than $100/month. If you need a more powerful solution, it might cost a few hundred dollars/month. Most hosting companies offer multiple options at different levels of disk space/CPU/RAM and make it really easy to switch between them. If your site is running slow, it is easy to upgrade to a more powerful VPS.

At some point, you might outgrow all the VPS options and need to move to a dedicated server. This typically happens when you are getting many thousands of orders/month. It is no more challenging to run a dedicated server than a VPS.

While we choose to not make recommendations for web hosting companies, we use KnownHost. Google “managed vps woocommerce hosting” and you will find many other options.

Once you pick a web hosting company, work with them to get WordPress installed on your account and then install WooCommerce. At this point, you may also need to import data such as products, customers, and orders.

Importing data

Getting data imported into your WooCommerce site can be intimidating, but is generally fairly easy. You can import everything you need from common CSV files.

There are three types of data that you probably will want to load:

• Products
• Customers
• Orders

Let’s talk about these imports one by one.

Products

WooCommerce natively gives you the ability to import products from a CSV file. No plugin is required and the process is straightforward, assuming you build a file with the necessary data.

If you have products with variations (such as shirts with multiple colors), become very familiar with WooCommerce variable products before you start this process. Variable products in WooCommerce are not intuitive in the beginning.

Customers

Customers should be imported into WooCommerce as “Users”. In WordPress, the term “User” can have different roles and one of those roles is “Customer.” When a customer creates an account on a WooCommerce site, they are added as a User with the role of Customer.

If you already have a customer list, you can import the customers easily from a CSV file into WooCommerce using this plugin.

Orders are also imported from CSV files using this plugin. Make sure your products are imported correctly before you try to import orders.

Choosing a theme and initial page creation

If you are following this setup, you have purchased a hosting plan, installed WordPress/WooCommerce, and imported your products, customers, and orders. Now, you are ready to get started building out the site. The first step is picking a theme.

There are thousands of WP themes on the market and most of the reputable ones are sold on themeforest.net. There are many good themes that pretty much all work the same way with no clear standout, so you have choices. Here are a few things to look out for:

• Is the theme just a WordPress theme or specifically for WooCommerce? Look for a theme that styles the WooCommerce-specific pages for you (account, cart, checkout, and product pages). Look at the demos of these pages.
• Is the theme responsive? Make sure that it looks great on a mobile device.
• Is the theme widely used and widely reviewed?
• Is the theme supported? (Look at the theme’s comments and reviews pages on Theme Forest to get an idea of how active the developers are.)

We use a popular theme called Flatsome. While it may or may not be the best WooCommerce theme on the market, it checks all the boxes above and is the one we know inside and out. Again, you can probably obsess a bit too much about themes; all of the good ones work the same way and you can build beautiful sites with any of them.

Themes usually are sold for a one-time inexpensive price. Buy one and install it on your site.

Once you have the theme installed, it is time to start building the static pages for your site. These are the one-off pages like your home page, contact page, policy page, etc. These pages should be easy to build using your theme’s editor or the WP Gutenberg editor.

You also need to go through the theme’s settings to do the initial configuration of the site. There will likely be hundreds of settings that affect the way the site looks. Go through them carefully.

Plugins are extensions of the WordPress and WooCommerce code that extend/modify the core functionality. There is a repository of thousands of free plugins that you can easily install from inside your WordPress admin area. However, keep some general things in mind about these plugins:

• Some plugins get abandoned by their developer. They may still work, but it is not a given that they are going to work forever. You can usually tell whether a plugin is abandoned by looking at its last update date.
• Some plugins appear to be free but most of the important functionality is blocked until you upgrade for a fee.
• Some plugins are so poorly written that they just don’t work well.
• Some plugins are dangerous because they have security holes.
• Some plugins will slow down your site because they have bloated code.

Be cautious of free plugins found in the repository. If you use one, make sure it has great reviews and good support. We strongly recommend that you only use well-known, well-used, and well-maintained plugins that have a great reputation (based on reviews).

The best plugins are usually found outside the repository and they are not free. Many of the important plugins you may need are found at WooCommerce.com. The WooCommerce business model is to give away the core functionality of WooCommerce for free and charge for plugins. Usually, these plugins are inexpensive ($50-$200/year). Even if you buy a few dozen of them, you are probably only looking at a few thousand dollars/year, which is quite modest compared to Shopify.

Let’s talk about the plugins you probably need. We will lump them into groups.

You need a plugin to process credit cards (and/or Paypal). Your merchant processor will help you pick the correct payment gateway for WooCommerce. You may also want a separate payment gateway plugin for Paypal. We recommend you buy these plugins from WooCommerce.com.

You may want a plugin or two to help with site security. Wordfence is a popular option. We will talk more about security later.

The out-of-the-box search functionality in WooCommerce is awful. There are many much better search plugins including our favorite, Fibosearch.

One very legitimate knock on WooCommerce is the design of the cart and checkout pages, which frankly are awful out-of-the-box. Your theme should restyle those pages, but if you still don’t like them, you can elevate the checkout experience to Shopify levels with plugins like FunnelKit.

Use a form plugin like Gravity to collect user information such as newsletter subscriptions or questions/comments on a contact page.

We will talk about speed later, but you may have plugins that speed up your site. Caching plugins like WP Rocket or Litespeed are popular, but there are also plugins for database optimization, image optimization, and more.

Again, out-of-the-box product review functionality in WooCommerce is awful but can be replaced with a plugin like Judge.me.

If you want to add a live chat option to your site, it is easy with a chat plugin like Live Chat (and many others).

Pixel Manager Pro is an easy solution for adding tracking and pixels to your site for the various advertisers that use them (such as Google and Meta).

Very often, services you use may want to integrate with your site through a plugin that they have you install. Examples might include your shipping solution and bulk email service. You will probably end up with a handful of these plugins.

Weglot and Translate Press are two popular plugins to help you translate your site easily into multiple languages.

Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin and is designed to make SEO strategy easy.

There are many other plugins you may choose to use such as plugins to add sophisticated shipping options, coupons, memberships, affiliate programs, and much more. It would not be uncommon to have 30-70 plugins running on a typical WooCommerce site.

The speed of your site affects your conversion rate and overall customer satisfaction. Out of the box, do not expect your WooCommerce site to be fast, but with some work, you can make it scream. This is one area where you can easily surpass Shopify.

There are two kinds of pages on your site:

• Cacheable: These pages do not change very often. Examples include your home page, your product pages, and other static pages. Because these pages do not change, they can be cached into memory and served to site visitors very fast.
• Uncacheable: These pages either change often or change for every visitor. Examples include the account section, the cart, and checkout. You cannot cache these pages into memory. If you did, you might, for example, end up showing one customer’s cart to another customer!

You should be able to serve cached pages very fast. In many cases, navigating these pages should feel instantaneous, or at worst, have a load time of a second or less. You can accomplish this with plugins like WP Rocket and Litespeed.

These types of plugins are pretty intimidating, and we do recommend you get an expert involved in the beginning to get everything set up correctly.

You may also need to do advanced setup such as javascript deferral, image optimization, CDN utilization, and CSS optimization. Again, use an expert if you find yourself over your head.

Uncached pages will never be as fast as cached pages, but it is not as important that they be fast. Your customers expect it to take a few extra seconds to place orders or do other complicated things on your site.

That being said, uncached pages can be quite fast if you put some effort into speeding them up. Here are some tips:

• Evaluate the constraints of your server/VPS. Are you running against memory constraints or maxing out your CPU? If so, you may need to upgrade.
• Are you keeping your database optimized? Have you tuned the database settings? Again, get an expert to help you with this. A good rule of thumb is that you should be loading as much of your database into memory as possible. There are settings to help you do that.
• Use Redis (or another object caching strategy). These kinds of tools will help load certain commands into memory to speed them up.

All the orders you take and all the customers you add will grow your database over time. And, as your database grows, your site’s uncached pages will probably slow down. Keep an eye on this and make adjustments as necessary.

In spite of the challenges that WooCommerce sites (and all ecommerce sites) face, you do not have to settle for slow page loading, nor should you. Keep an eye on your speed and make it a priority to stay fast.

If you have a VPS or dedicated server on the internet, it is going to be attacked. From the moment you are live, hackers will sniff around looking for holes to exploit. If you are running a WordPress website, hackers will attack it directly as well.

If you are smart, you will take security very seriously. Before we talk about solutions, let’s talk about typical ways hackers try to gain access to your server and website.

• Password sniffing: Attempts to guess your password by brute force, by using your passwords that have been leaked to the dark web, or by elaborate sniffing strategies such as malware (keystroke logging, etc).
• SQL/script injection: Exploiting holes in your website that expose your data.
• Plugin vulnerabilities: Exploiting insecure code in your plugins to gain control over an entire site.
• Other server vulnerabilities: Exploiting open ports and other potential weaknesses in your server setup.

We personally have been hacked a few times over the past twenty-five years. Two of the hacks were tied to poorly-coded plugins. The other hack was due to a disgruntled contractor sharing our secrets to the dark web.

Here are some ways to protect yourself:

• Get Imunify360 (or a similar tool) on your VPS. This software costs about $10/month but will protect you from almost all of the attacks listed above. It not only protects you in real-time from attacks but also scans your code looking for malware and other weaknesses.
• Be wary of plugins, especially free ones in the repository.
• Keep the list of people with access to your server very tight. Disable developer accounts as soon as can.
• Do all other common sense security measures including 2FA, difficult passwords, regular password resets, etc.

While a Shopify website is not immune to hacking, a WooCommerce site is undeniably more susceptible. While worries about security should not ruin your life, a bit of slight paranoia is appropriate.

Advanced customization

WordPress and WooCommerce code is written in PHP and is designed in a way that makes it very easy for developers to modify.

How can it be modified? In about any way you want. You can do very simple things or very complicated things. The sky is the limit.

Here are some examples of things we have done:

• Sophisticated product recommendation tools.
• One-step reorder processes.
• Enhanced site search capability.
• Customized messages in checkout to increase conversion.
• Easy refund requests functionality from the customer account.
• Automatic account creation when an order is placed.

The list goes on and on. This kind of customization is what can set your site apart from your competitors. it can make a Shopify site seem very plain and simple in comparison.

If you are a developer, don’t be afraid to start customizing. Create a child theme (that extends your main theme), read some online guides, and get started. Provided you are not modifying core WP/WooCommerce files, you can’t really mess things up too bad. In a worse case, just delete your child theme and start over.

If you don’t want to take on this kind of customization yourself and do not have anyone else with the technical capacity to do it, hire a subcontractor on a site like Upwork that specializes in WordPress development.

FAQs about WooCommerce