Seeing the full potential of WooCommerce
Known as the world’s most popular content management system, WordPress powers an almighty 43.3% of websites on the internet. WooCommerce is currently used by 8.7% of all websites, maintaining its historic position as market leader for eCommerce solutions.
While WordPress started as a blogging platform almost twenty years ago, it has evolved into something much more powerful.
At its most basic, a website builder and content management system, the platform is consistently praised for its ease of use while being flexible enough to create a range of multi-purpose websites.
WordPress has shown just how versatile it can be, not least through the commercial potential it offers businesses through the highly customisable, scalable and extendable eCommerce solution, WooCommerce.
500+ sites are built each day using WordPress while only 60-80 per day are built on platforms like Shopify and Squarespace, as reported by Kinsta.
But what exactly does WordPress and WooCommerce do? What are the top features? How can you make it work for your business… and who’s using it, anyway?
Who’s using WordPress to build enterprise websites?
Out of the top 10 million most visited websites online, WordPress is the CMS of choice for 38.2% of them.
When people think of WordPress, some may believe it’s designed for small to medium-sized business websites. There is a myth that WordPress is not powerful enough to handle large corporations and renowned global brands. But it is exactly that — a myth.
The New York Times, Spotify, TechCrunch, The White House, BBC America, and the Facebook Newsroom are just some of the global organisations with their sites built on WordPress.
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Who’s using WooCommerce to build online shops?
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce platform.
Building an online shop using WooCommerce means your store can be developed, customized and extended by development teams, making it a powerful plugin that allows you to sell own products, subscriptions or memberships online.
Just like WordPress, it is open source, and it is scalable. An enterprise solution, it is the eCommerce platform chosen by many global brands, such as:
All Blacks
The most successful international sporting team over the past 100 years, New Zealand’s national rugby union team use WooCommerce to sell replica team jerseys, training kit, and supporter gear, shipping to fans all over the world.
Integrating with the team’s back-office systems, the online store meets the team’s technology requirements as a major retailer.
Chaka Khan
Musician, singer, songwriter, and activist with a professional career spanning almost five decades, Chaka Khan uses WooCommerce as a digital home.
It was a good choice; engagement and click-throughs on her site increased 300% in a little over three years (not bad, but with more than 70 million records sold worldwide and ten Grammy Award wins, we’re sure Chaka Khan expects nothing less!)
Positive News
The first media organisation in the world dedicated to quality, independent reporting about what’s going right, Positive News is the magazine for good journalism about good things.
As a client of Atomic Smash, we developed Positive News’ WooCommerce store to enable them to sell their magazine in addition to publishing news online every day.
Evolve your eCommerce store
Talk to us about conversion rate optimisation and how we can get your WooCommerce store working harder for your business. Email piers@atomicsmash.co.uk
Cool things you didn’t know about WordPress and WooCommerce
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Owned by nobody, enhanced by anybody
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Platforms to power any type of website
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WooCommerce is always improving
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Extendable with or without plugins
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Structures that make SEO simpler
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Cool WooCommerce features
Owned by nobody, enhanced by anybody
WordPress is open-source software and the platform isn’t restricted under copyright or trademark. It is available for anyone to download and modify, meaning that it’s being constantly developed and updated by experts all over the world.
Platforms to power any type of website
WordPress is super adaptable for many different types of websites, the functionality is achieved with plugins, themes and continuous development.
There are many different types of website that can be built and powered by WordPress including:
- Business websites that demonstrate expertise and generate leads, for example the WordPress site for our client ForrestBrown
- News sites handling a large amount of content, like the site we built for our client Positive News
- eCommerce shops that enable direct-to-consumer purchases, such as the WooCommerce site we are evolving for Elizabeth Shaw
- Membership sites or community hubs, such as the one we produced for our client Alpine Garden Society
- Education sites, including eLearning, top tier colleges and universities, like the WordPress site we are improving iteratively for our client The Medic Portal
What else can WordPress handle? Lots…
- Personal sites for self-promotion, blogs or online portfolios
- Job boards, business directories or affiliate websites
- Interactive or Q&A websites like Quora
- Government sites — even the White House
- Sites that share global live data, such as AccuWeather
WordPress and WooCommerce can also be used to go beyond profit, and create communities for people of common interests to share ideas, as well as to market services and products to clients.
With the capacity to design large, complex websites for various organisations, the sky’s the limit with WordPress.
WooCommerce is always improving
One of the best things about WordPress and WooCommerce is the global community-based support.
Skilled developers, designers, scientists and bloggers all over the world are invested in this technology and committed to making it faster, stronger, more functional, more secure, accessible, reliable, and high performing.
At Atomic Smash, we live by the Always Evolving model, meaning that your website is never finished, it is continually improving.
Extendable with or without plugins
A plugin is a piece of software that “plugs into” or extends your WordPress or WooCommerce site. With plugins you can add features like contact forms, live chat and membership areas.
Plugins allow you to create nearly any type of website, from eCommerce shops to portfolios to podcast sites and gaming portals. They add new functionality and extend current functionality to your site.
The beauty of WordPress and WooCommerce, however, is that you can choose to use plugins or not. With a development team on hand, you can add or extend functionality without the use of plugins too, which can contribute to a faster and more performative site.
Structures that make SEO simpler
Hubspot reported that 64% of marketers actively invest in SEO, and it is no surprise that improving SEO and growing organic presence is important for most marketing strategies.
WordPress has a good reputation for providing a rock solid foundation for SEO. There is functionality to add various types of content to create a complex and insightful blog that can be formatted, categorised, tagged and organised in a way that search engines easily understand.
Don’t overlook the importance of optimising a WordPress or WooCommerce site for speed and performance, while ensuring it is accessible. These are important areas to focus on and will contribute to your overall SEO rankings.
There is also an extensive range of search-engine friendly plugins to help you analyse keywords and content, allowing you to use optimised content as a discovery tool for growing your organic search traffic.
Get your site loading faster
Work with Atomic Smash to optimise your site so it loads faster, a major factor for improving usability, conversion rates and search engine rankings alike.
Cool WooCommerce features
Unlike other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce is well suited for businesses that have complex needs.
No limits to platform customisation
Edit any part of your site – the opportunities for customisation are endless and unrestricted. That means your homepage, product pages, layouts, call-to-action buttons to send products to cart. It can all be designed to suit your brand and meet your goals and ambitions for the site.
Bringing together content and commerce
It’s quick and straightforward to publish content because WooCommerce is built on and deeply integrated with WordPress, giving you full potential to harness a content strategy that promotes your products and builds an even stronger brand. Its content management features and supporting drop-and-drag editing functionality is market leading.
Create products and checkouts anywhere
You can embed anything from your products to your checkout anywhere using shortcodes, which means your marketing campaigns can be strategically lined up for encouraging conversions.
Product search is made simple
You can make products easy to find by using descriptive tags and attributes like colour or size, as well as by filing your products into categories, tags and attributes, helping your customers find what they want quickly and up-selling relevant items. You can also use product sorting and filtering to help customers view by popularity, newness, rating, price or attribute.
Validate your products with ratings and reviews
Share five star rating and feedback directly on product pages to let your happy customers do the selling for you.
Speak your customers’ language
Options to use the location, currency, payment methods, language and measurement units that your target customers understand, making them feel at home within the realms of your WooCommerce store.
Unlimited products, variations, images and galleries
You have no limitations on the number of products you want to add to your site and you can add any number of photos to show them in their best light. Unlike some other eCommerce platforms with limitations on product options or variations, WooCommerce has no limits.
Why you’re not getting the most out of your WooCommerce site
If you aren’t seeing the results you want, it would be amiss of us to claim we know why (not without some discussions and a chance to look under the hood). However, here are few reasons why you might not be maximising the opportunity of your online store:
- You’re not utilising plugins or perhaps you’re overusing them, which can slow your site
- Your website isn’t fully optimised
- No enhancements or customisations have been made
- Not enough time is being spent reviewing customer experiences
- You are not working with the right WooCommerce agency
Your website becomes stronger as you continue to analyse, adjust and tailor the experience of your audience, all of which WordPress and WooCommerce enables.
Take an iterative approach where you can move from solving problems to making proactive improvements.
Takeaways
In a nutshell, WooCommerce holds endless possibilities. The platform is extendable and customisable, so it can be used for a multitude of websites.
Investing in your WooCommerce store is an investment in your business, encouraging consistent and reliable growth.
- Scalable and extendable, enhanced by anybody
- Powers sites for leading household names
- Completely customisable and extendable, without limitations
At Atomic Smash, we get digital platforms performing at their very best. As a certified WooExpert agency, we are officially endorsed by WooCommerce.
Work with us
Our approach is to keep evolving and developing sites, always striving to get better results. To find out how we can support the growth of your digital platform, get in touch with our team.