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.

Continue reading WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

WooCommerce: How to Customize Storefront Theme in a Few Clicks

If your WooCommerce website runs on Storefront theme (same as Business Bloomer), then you probably know it doesn’t come with a lot of customization options.

For developers like me, Storefront theme is ideal: it comes with many “hooks”, so that it’s easy to remove, move or add layout elements within a few lines of PHP.

But for those who do not develop or have no intention to waste time troubleshooting missing commas or fighting with FTP clients, well, there’s a plugin for that. And it’s developed and maintained by WooCommerce itself, so you can’t go wrong with the purchase and you’re guaranteed to have a fully working, up to date piece of software for the long term.

So, here’s a quick overview of what the plugin does. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Customize Storefront Theme in a Few Clicks

WooCommerce Customization Masterclass: WordCamp Dublin 2017 Slides & Video

I had the pleasure to co-organise the very first WordCamp Dublin this year. We welcomed 26 amazing speakers, 250 attendees, incredible sponsors and enjoyed a great venue and tasty food.

Just because organising, MCing, managing speakers and writing website content were not enough, I also decided to run a 45mins workshop titled “WooCommerce Customization Masterclass” and I have to say I received great feedback despite the lack of voice, sleep and energy (thank you)!

I spoke briefly about WooCommerce customization, my WooCommerce visual hook guides, the difference between snippets and plugins and finally demoed a few snippets to add, remove and move WooCommerce content to/from the Single Product Page.

Continue reading WooCommerce Customization Masterclass: WordCamp Dublin 2017 Slides & Video

WooCommerce: Display Cart Item Subtotal With Coupon Discount

This is a nice follow up from last week’s snippet “WooCommerce: Slashed Cart Subtotal if Coupon @ Cart“, where I showed how to display original/discounted cart total on the same totals table row.

This time, I want to let users know the original and discounted cart item (product) amount after a certain coupon is applied. Who knows – this might improve your Cart U/X 🙂 Continue reading WooCommerce: Display Cart Item Subtotal With Coupon Discount

WooCommerce: How Top Brands Design Product Category Pages

eCommerce Category Description

Selling on the web is a highly competitive game. There is no shortage of both customers and competitors. Big companies crush little companies every day. But that doesn’t mean smaller websites doesn’t have any chance.

Smaller companies can beat larger companies if they focus on the right things. For that, you always need to look for opportunities and act smart when it comes to promoting your brand and products.

Leveraging search engines is one of the cheapest ways to bring customers to your website. For that, you need to make sure you are fulfilling the search query. Since Google is always looking for the best fit & best experience for users based on their query.

Category pages or product listing pages are key hub pages in any E-commerce store. Products tend to come and go but categories stay. So it’s better to build up your category pages.

For example, if you are selling necklaces, you have more than one necklace for sure. So rather than 5 necklace pages competing for the same Necklace terms, optimize the category page for necklaces while optimizing the products for specific necklace style (e.g. Crystal Necklaces). Your primary focus should be ranking your category pages for specific key terms.

Most online stores neglect their category pages and organize them in a way that it does more harm than good. If optimized correctly they can bring in good traffic for top level keywords and reap the rewards for months.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How Top Brands Design Product Category Pages

WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

Recently I was on a coaching call with a client and the “Free Sample” challenge came up. Client has 400+ products on the website and had no intention of adding a free variation to each product manually.

So, I promised to myself I was going to study a different approach. And today you get it for free – nice! Needless to say, a comment and a social media share are much appreciated. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

WooCommerce: Get Product Info (ID, SKU, $) From $product Object

I’ve been wanting to publish this guide for a long while. As a WooCommerce development freelancer, every day I repeat many operations that make me waste time… and one of them is indeed “How to get ____ if I have the $product variable/object?“.

For example, “How can I get the product SKU“? Or “How can I get the product short description“? Or maybe the product stock level, shipping class, tax class, price, regular price, sale price, and so on… hopefully this article will save you time.

Of course, not always you have access to the $product global – but you may know the $product_id. In this case, you can use the wc_get_product WooCommerce function to calculate the $product object – you find this case scenario below.

Other examples might be the order or the cart page. Once again, in here you don’t really have a $product available, so you have to loop through the order/cart items and “get” it. After that, you can then calculate and get any piece of information you require out of $product. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Get Product Info (ID, SKU, $) From $product Object

WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce.com is dropping its 50% extension renewals, and moving to a 100% renewal business model.

I found this out at WCEU 2017 and then via WP Tavern. Unfortunately, this announcement is not on WooCommerce blog, on its social media channels or even Automattic.

And yes, this is retroactive – we are now all paying 100% renewals. So, let’s see what I think about this “still not official” news. Continue reading WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce: See What’s Inside the Cart Array (print_r)

So many times I needed to “play” with Cart contents in order to modify the default behaviour (such as removing a columns, hide the sale price to prices, hide an item, etc.).

There is a great PHP function that always helps – it’s called print_r and you can use this to “see” what’s inside the cart array, so that you can return certain information in a message for example.

A bit advanced, but as you grow your WooCommerce coding skills, you will use this a lot 🙂 Continue reading WooCommerce: See What’s Inside the Cart Array (print_r)

WooCommerce: “Buy One Get One” (BOGO)

Case scenario: if you add a product ID to cart with a specific, you want another product automatically added to cart (Buy One Get One, or “BOGO”).

This second product should have price = 0 if you wish to completely give it away, or maybe a set sale price. It should also be set to “hidden” because maybe you want to hide this free product from the shop and only gift it when the first one is added to Cart.

Also, if you remove product 1, the gifted product should go away from the Cart too. So here follows the PHP snippet of course!

Continue reading WooCommerce: “Buy One Get One” (BOGO)

WordPress: Top 20 “Customizer” Frameworks

Customize WooCommerce colors

WordPress Customizer allows users to tweak their website and let them see a live preview of the changes. It uses the WordPress Customize API introduced in WordPress 3.4. You can easily access the WordPress Customizer interface from Dashboard -> Appearance -> Customize.

Customizing WordPress themes for end users was starting to become a nightmare. There was no unified approach to customizing a theme. Each developer chose what they were comfortable with.

WordPress contributors wanted to introduce a default editing experience. So, on 2015, April 22 it was made mandatory to all WordPress.org themes to use Theme Customize API for theme options.

Continue reading WordPress: Top 20 “Customizer” Frameworks

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Working for Yourself

I’ve been working online while travelling throughout South America for almost 3 months so far and I’ve had a lot of time to think about solopreneurship. After 5+ years as a sole trader, it’s now the right time to write my thoughts. I really hope to give you at least one idea, one tip you can take away.

I would love if you could spend some time to think about it, and leave your comment below to tell me what your thoughts are.

Continue reading 10 Things Nobody Tells You About Working for Yourself

WooCommerce: 85 Free Plugins for Every Challenge

free woocommerce plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular WordPress plugin for adding eCommerce or cart functionality to a WordPress website. According to recent research by aheadWorks, WooCommerce now accounts for 26.5% of the total eCommerce market share. And recent acquisition by Automattic indicates that it has a great future ahead.

WooCommerce is well known for its huge flexibility and vast customization options. There are hundreds of WooCommerce plugins or Extensions available for extending the functionality. If you want some recommendations in this direction, check out some of the best free WooCommerce plugins (sorted by number of active install).

Continue reading WooCommerce: 85 Free Plugins for Every Challenge