WooCommerce: How to Choose the Right Theme

WordPress truly powers the web. With over 75 million active websites currently using WordPress, it’s no wonder it’s such a natural choice for so many online businesses. When it comes to eCommerce, WordPress makes it exceptionally simple with WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is the go-to eCommerce solution for WordPress. It’s easy to install, free to use, and full of customization options that make it easy to design your own eCommerce store quickly. With thousands of easy-to-use themes, how do you know where to begin?

It’s worth being strategic when you choose your WooCommerce theme. The right theme is easy to use, enticing to your audience and helps build your brand.

Before you invest your time and money in a theme, make sure you know exactly what to look for. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to choose the right WooCommerce theme for your site. 

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WooCommerce: 132 Themes at ONE Subscription

If you want to create your ecommerce business from scratch or freshen up your WooCommerce theme, today’s topic might catch your attention.

I want to share with you the new ONE subscription service for designers and developers. ONE is a service from TemplateMonster, which provides access to lots of themes and tools for design and development for a fixed yearly payment.

ONE is a service that works on a paid subscription. You don’t have to worry about credits and download restrictions. This approach gives you the opportunity to experiment with different templates before making a final decision – and if you don’t find what you need, there is also a 14 days money back guarantee.

Thanks to the subscription, you can access not only themes and templates, but also pluginsgraphic elements and even PowerPoint templates. There are also lots of Elementor templates and many different themes for ecommerce like Magento, OpenCart and, of course, WooCommerce.

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WooCommerce: Send Email to Admin Every 3 Hours (Cron Job)

This snippet consists of many WooCommerce tasks: setting up a “WordPress Cron Job” (i.e. schedule a hook that runs on a specific time interval), getting the WooCommerce completed orders from the database, and finally sending a simple email to the store admin.

Complex, but as usual you can simply copy/paste and re-adapt it to your unique specifications. For example, I’m using it to send a survey email to each customer who has placed an order. There are thousands of applications, so this is just the start. Enjoy! Continue reading WooCommerce: Send Email to Admin Every 3 Hours (Cron Job)

WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

We talked a lot about safely updating WooCommerce. The same applies to WordPress core, other plugins, themes… WordPress is such a delicate piece of software that you should ALWAYS know what to do before actually doing it 🙂

Sometimes, website managers feel great about clicking on that “Update Now” link in their WordPress dashboard. It seems – and it is – so easy. Problem is, they’ll likely break the website.

The best way of doing this properly is to run the updates (as well as custom code, plugin tests, design changes) on a “staging environment“, which should be provided by your hosting company.

Either way, those “Update Now” links are too dangerous. Only you (the developer) need to know that – while it’d be better if the other users who have access to the dashboard didn’t see anything and concentrated on WooCommerce orders or WordPress post and content editing.

Clearly, there is a way to disable the update notifications on a per-user basis or, even easier, to only have 1 user (possibly you) see these. The snippet is a little complex, but there is a lot of literature online – this is the one that worked for me! Continue reading WooCommerce: Disable Update Notifications @ WordPress Dashboard

WooCommerce: 27 SEO Tips (For Non-Techies)

I had the pleasure to speak at WordCamp Milano 2018, and I had a blast! I believe the topic was pretty interesting, so you all deserve a long post recap with actionable tips and screenshots to understand basic WooCommerce SEO (video of the presentation will be available soon).

The following WooCommerce Search Engine Optimization tips are mostly non technical, and are aimed at WordPress and WooCommerce users who never heard of “schema”, “long tail”, “301” and “hreflang” (although if you did, please have a read anyway, make sure to post a comment and contribute to this post with your expertise).

The thing is – SEO is never going to die. Besides, Google & co. constantly improve their website ranking algorithms. This means what you learned 5 years ago in regard to SEO might not work today, and what you learn today might not work in 2 years time… you get the point.

In this blog post, we will analyze and study 27 evergreen SEO factors for WooCommerce websites. These should be applied (or not applied, as there are many “not to do” tips as well) to your ecommerce website at all costs if you believe you deserve better ranking (who doesn’t?). And as they’re evergreen, they’re likely not to go away for a few years at least 🙂

So, let’s get started!

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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 🙂

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WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

The most efficient way to turn your restaurant / food business into a money-making machine is to cater to your customer’s needs better than you do now. Supposing you have a modern interior design, tasty food, friendly atmosphere, professional personnel, etc… what else can you do for your business?

You need a bombastic online presence. You need to – maybe – rebuild your restaurant website. Thankfully, if you don’t know much about web design, it’s not a big deal. No need to do anything from scratch nowadays (we entrepreneurs value our time and effort, right?).

If you want to enable online food ordering, sell restaurant gift cards, turn your takeaway into an optimized online booking system, or give online users the freedom to build their custom pizza, it’s time to switch to a WooCommerce theme.

By picking one of the 15 themes described in this article (oh, by the way – here’s the full list of 50+ restaurant WooCommerce themes you can pick), you can immediately take advantage of the most popular ecommerce plugin (WooCommerce) and its free or premium extensions to increase your food business sales and profitability. Continue reading WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

WooCommerce: Multi-Vendor / Marketplace Solutions

Building the next Amazon is everyone’s dream.

Allowing sellers to use your online platform to reach wider audiences without holding stock, investing in shipping and warehousing and – let’s be honest – with a few dollars budget… is actually possible in WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce Multi-Vendor/Marketplace scenarios are many – not a surprise. And sometimes, a plugin is all you need to build an Etsy-alike website. Not bad for a small investment – you can focus on the marketing while the WooCommerce plugin does the rest.

However, building a full website, no matter its project specifications, is never easy. Many WooCommerce and ecommerce entrepreneurs underestimate how much work, caution, attention, patience and money are needed to develop an online marketplace.

Nothing is free – if something looks doable with a $79 plugin you also need to consider the cost of time, outsourcing, marketing and third parties (such as picking a reliable hosting).

Anyway, today we’ll take a look at some of the best plugins for turning a WooCommerce website into a multi-vendor marketplace, as well as a simple PHP snippet that might just be enough for you. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?

Well, get ready for a 2,700+ words article: becoming a WooCommerce expert won’t take you just a couple of days.

A few months won’t be enough either.

If you want to join that very small group of advanced freelancers and agencies that exclusively work with WooCommerce clients and charge top dollar, if you want to become a WooCommerce authority and build a successful career, if you want clients to come to you as opposed to you chasing them, well – you need to digest and assimilate what I’m about to tell you.

In this (long) article I will help you understand what is advanced WooCommerce, and then break this down into 5 simple steps.

Five makes-a-lot-of-sense steps you should follow in order to complete your journey.

So, want to become a WooCommerce ninja? A WooCommerce wrangler? A WooCommerce guru?

Well, despite I dislike all those ninja-like “terms”, let me tell you a thing or two. Then, join me in the comments and let’s keep the conversation going. Continue reading WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?

WooCommerce: What is it? Is it Free?

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to sell products or services from their website.

It is one of the best WordPress eCommerce plugin for building and growing an online business. Upon launching it became hugely popular due to its flexibility and simplicity.

It is a dominating force in the global eCommerce platform and accounts for 42% of the total market share. That means over 42% of all online shop uses WooCommerce to run their business.

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WooCommerce: “uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize” Error

upload-max-file-size wordpress

You may have seen this error at least once, if you have used WordPress. When installing a theme, plugin or uploading a image or file, you may find this dreaded message on your screen.

Well, it has nothing to do with themes or plugins. The issue is with your server settings which limit the maximum size for uploaded files.

It’s a common error and it can be easily fixed. This error message is an indication of that the file you are trying to upload is larger than your web host allows (WordPress default file upload size is 2 MB).

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WooCommerce: How to Fix the “Cart is Empty” Issue

For some reason, sometimes you add products to cart but the cart page stays empty (even if you can clearly see the cart widget has products in it for example).

But don’t worry – it may just be a simple cache issue (and if you don’t know what cache is that’s no problem either) or a theme / plugin “conflict”.

The WooCommerce Cart page is extremely delicate; it displays dynamic content based on cookies and PHP sessions, is coded with PHP but also JS and Ajax, requires to be excluded from cache and is subject to problems in case of out of date software.

So, here’s your “Empty Cart” troubleshooting checklist you can follow without any technical knowledge.

I also recommend you read through the (many) comments, because many developers shared what worked for them too. Good luck!

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