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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: 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.

WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Do you intend to create an online store? Cannot pick between self-hosted WooCommerce and cloud-powered BigCommerce? Don’t worry, you are not on your own.

The only way to truly determine which of these two eCommerce solutions is more suitable, is to compare them side by side – we will take a look at their features, price, convenience of use, cost, support, security, customization, and many other factors.

In this article, we’ll help you determine which ecommerce solution more appropriate for your business requirements. Self-hosted or cloud? Subscription or free in theory? Customization or integrations? Huge or small community? There are lots of questions you may have.

So, are you ready for the battle of WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce? Let’s get started.

WooCommerce: 10 Crucial Issues That Should Be Fixed Right Now

I just spent the last 3 days in Porto with another 2,300 WordPressers at the first in-person WordCamp Europe since Berlin 2019. I had a blast, held a nice (yet long) workshop, spoke to many, but got tired too soon.

Later on, I realized that that tiredness was something more serious – in fact I tested positive against COVID for the first time in my life, and I’m now in self-isolation hoping it won’t last long… Another 7 days without my kid – send help!

Anyhow, what really struck me at WCEU 2022, and based on various chats and some data that I’ll share below, is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is in trouble.

A nicer way to put that? WooCommerce is not moving forward as fast as it should, and unless some key issues are addressed right now, in a few years time we all may pay the consequences.

Please note, this is not a rant. It’s a proper analysis, full of actionable information.

@ WooCommerce team - if you're reading this - my plan is to give you constructive feedback and tell you what the community (really) thinks, needs and wants, so that you can get a better picture of the current situation. I know you've already started working on this, so this is just a recap/reminder and a way to get the whole community realigned.

In this post, I will share my worries, my fears, the current WooCommerce issues, some data I collected at WCEU 2022 and then a list of actionable solutions that may be implemented in order to clear the backlog and get back on track – asap. Enjoy!

WooCommerce Fastest Themes in 2022

Speed is an essential factor that directly impacts the conversion rates, business revenue, sales, and customer experience.

Akamai’s research suggests that even a 100-millisecond delay in the page speed impacts conversion rates by 7%, while a 2-second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. Thus, even a few milliseconds of delay can cost your store thousands of dollars – let alone dissatisfied customers, poor SEO ranking, and bad online reputation.

Hence, page loading speed is the essence of an excellent customer experience and building a successful online presence.

Where possible, you want to eliminate unnecessary page loads, especially when it comes to the checkout process. Otherwise, you risk cart abandonment. That is the main reason you should use a checkout window, accessible straight from product and cart pages.

While the speed of your WooCommerce store depends on multiple facets – such as your web host, image, media files, and the code of your store, the theme you choose also plays a significant role in ensuring faster store speed.

Calculating your store’s page speed and making sure you choose the right WooCommerce theme that checks all the boxes can get frustrating and overwhelming considering the plethora of options you can choose from – especially 1300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest.

So, in this article, we share the top WooCommerce themes you can use, along with a few factors to look for when picking a suitable theme for your store. But first, let’s understand what makes a WooCommerce theme slow or fast and how to calculate the speed.

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 Sell Craft Beer Online

If you sell craft beer, one of the things you can do to increase your sales is setting up an online store where you can sell your beers. Through an online store, you can easily meet the demands of your customers and even deliver the beer to their doorsteps.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, many businesses including craft beer businesses could not meet their targets with regards to sales. Their selling activities were affected because they could not deliver beers to restaurants and pubs (they closed down), could not sell to their customers directly, and most shops and stores were closed down.

Selling online and making sure that customers get their beers was the only way left for them. Even though the world has opened up, online shops have picked up and every business needs them for success. So, how do you get started?

WooCommerce: How to Build a One-Product Website

Crocs started by selling just foam clogs, and now they’re a billion-dollar company. Casper earned millions selling only mattresses, while Sara Blakely became one of the youngest self-made female billionaires with Spanx, which sold only underclothes initially.

Can you guess what all these brands have in common? It’s that they started off by selling just one product, built their entire brand around it, and yet became successful.

Today, most eCommerce businesses sell multiple products – because of the presumption that the more products you offer, the higher chances of converting visitors and making a sale. But from managing operations to inventory, a store with many products comes with its own problems.

On the other hand, selling just one product can streamline your store’s operations and make inventory management and handling orders easy.

It allows you to focus all your energy and resources on creating, marketing and improving a single product. If done correctly, this can help you build a significant brand value – as people will start associating your store with your flagship product, making you an expert in your market and helping you stand out from your competitors.

Given its benefits, creating a one-product store is an excellent idea – all you practically need is the right product for your customer’s needs and a solid, easy-to-navigate website.

Lucky for you, this article will help you with the latter, taking you through all the steps of creating a fantastic WooCommerce website for your one-product store.

Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: How to Generate Invoices For Free

Running an online store is no easy feat.

You have to take care of order management, inventory, customer relations, production, marketing, and so much more.

A simple business process like invoicing doesn’t seem like it will take too much of your time, but it often ends up doing so.

That is why your best bet is to automate invoice generation. That way, you can attend to the revenue-generating activities that will let you take your business to the next level.

If you run a WooCommerce store, you know it comes with many useful functionalities but not invoicing automation. But the good news is you can choose from many great invoicing plugins available to do the heavy lifting.

We’ve done the legwork and prepared a list of free WooCommerce invoicing plugins you can use to put your invoice generation on auto-pilot.

WordPress: Growing Your Plugin (Part 1: Website + SEO)

If you build it, they may come – but not in as great a number as they would otherwise.

I have seen WordPress developers reach as many as 10,000 active installations without spending a single minute on dime marketing. However, on every occasion that I hear such a story, I pause to wonder: how big would this theme or plugin be if the developer behind it thought about distribution?

Maybe their product spawns a company and they become the next YITH or Yoast, toasting after a major acquisition not thought possible in their wildest dreams.

The first hurdle to overcome as a developer is the fallacy that your product is tainted by even the slightest speck of marketing, as if it was a glass of unadulterated, pure spring water sourced from the streams of Mount Olympus.

The WordPress ecosystem is not the plains of Dion – it’s more like the dregs of Romulus. More and more, it is guaranteed that you will face competition from the optimates, the big guys who come in the form of hosting providers, prolific WordPress development companies, super plugins, site builders, etc.

The best themes and plugins don’t always win in the face of superior brands and warchests. In fact, the more disillusioned among us would say that they rarely do these days.

The good news is that the best themes and plugins can win, even if their developers are unknown and resource-constrained. But it all begins by bringing the horse to water. After that, if the product is good enough, the horse will drink. If it does not drink, there is more development to do.

WordPressopoly: WordPress Acquisitions Are Not a Game Anymore

“Is there a Monopoly version of WordPress yet?” – Cory Miller.

There is now, Cory, at least in png form.

The WordPress ecosystem, and the unwalled WooCommerce garden contained within it, is experiencing a wave of consolidation, so much so that a webpage dedicated to tracking acquisitions now exists.

Yesterday, LiquidWeb/StellarWP acqui-hired LearnDash LMS.

A few days ago, WooCommerce acqui-hired SomewhereWarm, the team behind some of the most popular WooCommerce marketplace plugins.

On September 8, 2021, Jetpack acquired Social Image Generator, which is a WordPress plugin that does what it says on the tin.

On August 30, 2021, Automattic acqui-hired Frontity, to further develop Gutenberg and full site editing.

The list of acquisitions is never-ending. And this wave won’t stop.

So, what’s really happening, and why?

WooCommerce: WooExpert Roundup

There are currently 28 WooExperts according to WooCommerce, which defines WooExperts as “hand selected high quality experts that understand our products”.

These are web development and design companies with deep ties to the WooCommerce team, enabling them to stay updated on best practices and new trends in order to lavish their clients with a world-class WooCommerce development experience.

This post provides a brief overview of the services that each of these WooExperts specializes in as well as individual company profiles, portfolios, and contact links.

Even though most of these companies have one or more office locations, many are distributed a là Automattic.

Since I know many in the audience are developers, do note that more than a few of these companies are actively hiring. Alternatively, if you already have a dog in the fight, check out the Becoming a WooExpert page if you think your company has what it takes to become a WooExpert.

WooCommerce: Bulk Delete Orders / Products Super Fast

There are times when you have thousands of WooCommerce orders, products, categories, tags, coupons, customers or custom fields and the “Bulk Edit > Delete” option in the WordPress dashboard is simply not cost- and time-effective.

Maybe because your website goes down as it can’t process that much information at the same time, or maybe because you’re on a low budget and can’t afford to hit “delete” 100 or 1000 times by hand.

Thankfully, WooCommerce information is stored in the WordPress database, which means we can access it, write a “SQL DELETE statement”, and bulk delete anything you like, in seconds. Of course, and you will find warnings below, NEVER DO THIS on a live website as I can’t guarantee this won’t have any side effects.

So, have fun!

WooCommerce B2B: How to Set Up a Wholesale Store

The ecommerce sector is seeing incredible growth, year after year, with no foreseeable end in sight. The same is true for B2B ecommerce, yet there aren’t many good platform choices available for small-to-medium businesses that want to sell wholesale. There are several SaaS solutions on the market, but these are costly, closed-source, and mostly oriented towards larger businesses.

If you are a business owner or developer, WooCommerce is a solution that’s free, versatile and powerful.

Elementor: How to Make an Online Course Website

Almost any blogger who wants to scale his personal brand (and revenue) is simply obliged to look at online courses.

The Elementor Page Builder plugin is attractive because it does not require knowledge of the code or additional programming languages.

This article is a brief tutorial on how to create an online courses website using Elementor. We will list the 5 steps required to create a WordPress website for selling online courses.

Thanks to the WooCommerce plugin, you can then easily set up an online store, and use different templates to make this store attractive in terms of design.

So, if you are going to make your online courses website with Elementor, where do you start?

WooCommerce: 6 Tips to Improve User Experience

With the right approach to user experience you can make your WooCommerce website more effective at converting visitors into customers and encouraging existing users to come back to make purchases more regularly.

There are several ways to enhance UX using WooCommerce as a foundation, so here are just a few of the most impactful options available to you.

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.

WooCommerce: How to Clone/Migrate (Step by Step)?

Maybe you don’t have staging, and you need to clone your WooCommerce website elsewhere to test updates or new functionality (because you’re not doing that on a live website, right?). Maybe you need to migrate an existing WooCommerce website to another server. Or, like me, maybe you need to copy an entire WooCommerce website on a fresh subdomain in order to write this step-by-step tutorial!

Either way, the free Duplicator plugin, available on the official WordPress.org repository, is your best friend. Whether you need to duplicate, clone, migrate, copy or even backup your WooCommerce website, Duplicator is the most straight forward system to achieve that.

Of course, is not super simple and this is why you’re reading this step-by-step tutorial about duplicating WooCommerce websites (including helpful screenshots). Hope this is helpful to those of you who need to achieve a complex and delicate operation (cloning/migrating is ALWAYS a delicate thing) within few steps.

All you need is an existing WooCommerce website, the Duplicator plugin, an FTP client (or File Manager) and access to the server where you will create the new subdomain and blank database. All the rest is handled by the plugin, so here’s the tutorial you were waiting for.

WordPress: Fix “No Update Required” @ WP Admin

It happened to me today while updating to WordPress 5.3, so I thought of sharing the fix with all the people who are going to have this problem now and in the future.

Honestly, I should have thought about this better – but it’s an early Saturday morning and maybe my brain is still asleep.

I kept getting always the same error, even after 10 refreshes and attempts, even while trying to use /wp-login.php or /my-account to login as opposed to /wp-admin. And when you get the same behavior no matter how many times you refresh or try again… well, it should be easy to understand why!

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.

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