Why You Should Be Using WordPress for E-commerce
Do you know that the total number of active websites is approximately over 1.3 billion? According to a survey by Netcraft, around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now. In reality, about 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress, which is still huge in numbers.
For many, these numbers can seem overwhelming. With so many eCommerce platform options, here’s what you need to choose WordPress for your eCommerce store.
Why WordPress?
WordPress is significantly beneficial for building eCommerce websites due to the plenty of pre-made themes available to design an online storefront.
It also costs many plug-ins that help in adding complete functionality to the eCommerce website from product display to the shopping cart and check out process.
One of the powerful features to choose WordPress is its flexibility. WordPress platform gives complete control to users over how the eCommerce website should appear and how it works.
With this, users can decide to include any other pages-like blogs, and forums if needed in the later stages.
WordPress is free to install, deploy, and upgrade; it cuts down deployment time and development costs.
The best thing about WordPress is that users can make use of the WordPress platform and avail these features without paying ongoing fees.
All you need to pay monthly charges for hosting the website and domain registrar. Plugins and themes are just one-time purchases.
Above all, the essential considerations for choosing WordPress as an eCommerce platform ultimately depends on the business’ specific needs.
So, we’ve compiled some reasons that will help you choose WordPress for your next eCommerce platform.
8 Reasons: Why You Should Pick WordPress for eCommerce Website
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Open-source & Cost-effective
Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org are absolutely free to use. WordPress.org is a self-hosted version where users can control more of the website and take advantage of advanced plugins such as Yoast SEO, The SEO Framework, SEOPress, and Rank Math SEO.
WordPress is cost-effective, whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or prefer to leave the experts’ website design. If you don’t want to do this manually, try WordPress for building an eCommerce website, which is started for less than $100 – the cost of a domain name and a good theme.
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Customization
Undeniably, everyone knows the popularity of WordPress; it meets everyone’s specific requirements. There are already pre-made themes that users can choose from or design their custom ones.
An alluring theme keeps users interested. The more life your eCommerce website has, the more traffic it will get.
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Payment Option
WordPress supports many different payment gateways from PayPal to Google Pay. With several trusted eCommerce payment gateways, make sure to find the one you are willing to use and trust for your own eCommerce business.
Plus, it would help if you made sure that the payment gateways will be accessed easily by customers.
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WordPress is Highly Scalable & Stable
Speaking about ‘scalability’ means how well WordPress adapts to your website’s growth over time.
A full CMS (Content Management System) is robust enough to either stay or expand to your requirements’ required size and scale. It’s also worth noting that your web host plays a significant role in your site’s scalability.
For example, when a user signs up for a small shared hosting plan to run a simple blog, then it runs smooth as long traffic numbers stay low.
However, websites get slower down when there’s a surge of traffic. Therefore, you need to invest in WordPress to get scalability when it comes to high traffic.
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Offers several plugin options
eCommerce site requires plugins to function since website traffic and online sales depend largely on plugins. WordPress provides many options for these plugins, such as customer reviews, product inventory, payment options, etc. Also, integrating inventory management software can greatly improve your supply chain management, helping you not only to prevent stockouts and overselling but also to streamline the entire process.
The eCommerce plugins for WordPress are Shopify, WooCommerce, Cart66 Cloud, WP EasyCart, Easy Digital Downloads, and Jigoshop eCommerce, which are much needed by any eCommerce website to function its greatest capacity.
They also provide the users with an easy, smooth ride, and satisfaction online shopping experience. WordPress includes many options, but one of the best plugin options is – WooCommerce. This is one of the most preferred plugins, easy to use, free and simple to maintain on a website.
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WordPress Community Support
It’s cleared that WordPress is a powerful tool that provides access to users to all the options they could want while building a website.
However, setting up a basic blog on WordPress is not hard, but running a successful eCommerce website takes some work.
There are several options and possibilities to sort through, and you might run into some technical or conceptual information you are unfamiliar with.
In case it would happen, then it would never be difficult to find help. WordPress is a vast community that is always evolving and learning together, as we’ve already mentioned above. There are several members out there who are willing to help newcomers.
Check out some options for learning and getting advice if you, as a user, new to WordPress:
- This is an official WordPress support website.
- Structured and online courses are at places like WP Apprentice and Lynda.com.
- Some dedicated YouTube channels are WPBeginner and WPCrafter.com for non-techies.
- Support forums for particular themes and plugins, e.g., WooCommerce forum.
- Stack Exchange and other similar Q&A forums.
- Expert Tips are also available.
Community support for WordPress is readily available. If you are in doubt, having a problem, or want to know the answer to a question, you can google it. Someone will surely have an answer or a helpful tutorial.
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Security Options are easy to find
Once you have picked up your theme and plugins, it’s time to start setting up your eCommerce site. During the process, you need to keep one requirement in mind: security.
Any basic website can benefit from necessary security measures; however, you’ll want a more comprehensive solution for eCommerce websites.
An online store consists of personal user data and records of financial transactions. This information should be well-protected.
Since 2003, WordPress has been around, and it’s gone through so many versions and had a large and dedicated community, which is specifically devoted to perfecting it.
The development team also continues to focus on finding new ways to enhance WordPress security features to ensure that it’s in safe hands for the future perspective.
While WordPress core is highly secured, there is certainly more that you should do to boost security. Thanks to the WordPress community, it has created everything that one can desire to ensure the safety of the website and your customers’ personal information.
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Mobile Friendly
WordPress is a mobile-friendly platform, which is great if you consider that mobile devices generally do over 79% of online shopping. The share of mCommerce is expected to rise to 72.9% by 2021.
Making your website applicable to your online shopper is critical, and being mobile-friendly is just the way to keep on top of it.
Winding-up
An eCommerce website for business’s perspective is one of the important assets that your business will ever have.
In this digital era, having a high-quality eCommerce site is absolutely essential to grab more customers and success. WordPress is undoubtedly an outstanding option for building a great eCommerce website.
If you have never used WordPress before, it’s straightforward to use and tons of tutorials on YouTube. It also provides good customer support.
Once you have your eCommerce site done with WordPress, then you’ll realize how much traffic your site starts generating. If you want to create a high-quality website with premium content, you’ll surely get outstanding results.
Want to share your thoughts? You can comment below!
Hardik Shah Author
Hardik Shah is a Tech Consultant at Simform, a firm which provides app development services in Denver. He leads large scale mobility programs that cover platforms, solutions, governance, standardization, and best practices.
