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10+ Tips To Optimize Your WooCommerce Store For Best Results

10+ Tips To Optimize Your WooCommerce Store For Best Results

There are over 4 million WooCommerce stores out there (as per the WP repository). It alone powers up more than 30% of all e-commerce stores (according to Wikipedia).

Along with that, there is also a massive increase in people making online purchases. Retail sales in online shops have increased by around 42% from 2014 to 2018 (according to statista.com).

But still, there are many WooCommerce store owners who are facing challenges to reach their targeted sales goal.

In this post, we will discuss how to overcome those challenges and boost your sales.

First of all, you need to create a proper WooCommerce Product feed in the most optimized way. Then you can focus on optimizing your store by following the instructions below.

1. Make Your WooCommerce Store Simple Yet Useful

Easy and Simple Website

While making a WooCommerce store, you have to keep in mind that your site needs to be as much user-friendly as possible.

The first thing you need to ensure is that the site doesn’t look too complicated. Use a simple, but standard theme that is compatible with WooCommerce.

Keep the search procedure for products one step ahead of your customer. Include an AJAX search engine with advanced filter options to help customers narrow down their search to a handful of products.

Add the feature of displaying recommended products similar to the prospects’ search history.

2. Prepare Your Store For Holidays

Holiday Store

During holidays/festivals, people all over the world are in a joyous mood. They are hopeful to see something exciting in your store.

More people find leisure time and usually make more purchases online during the holidays. Statistics show that during holidays, online sales increased by 15.5%.

It is wise to take advantage of it and increase your sales by exclusively modifying your WooCommerce store just for the holidays.

Try altering the colors and designs of your store in a way so that your customers get the message that you are ready for sales and making their holidays better. For example, you can set up a colorful holiday banner highlighting your biggest sales offers during this time.

If you add some exciting offers to your WooCommerce store during special occasions, it will surely boost your sales. You can offer discounts on products that highlight the occasion. For example, a discount on Santa Hats during Christmas.

You may also provide other special discount offers. For example, you can announce a 10% discount on any $250+ purchases made. Or create bundles of multiple products and offer a discount on the subtotal. Some companies offer free shipping during the holidays.

Holidays are also a golden opportunity for you to introduce new products and engage in campaigns to enhance your market.

Take it seriously and start your holiday plans now! (Click here to learn about more ways to get prepared for holidays.)

3. Ensure User Security

User Security

With the increasing number of eCommerce stores, it has become essential to maintain high security.

Prospects use confidential data such as debit/credit card information online and it is very important to make sure their data is secured and not misused.

Make sure to add SSL certificates to your store or else search engines will mark the site as ‘unsafe’, which will definitely discourage your prospects from staying on your site.

You can do a few more things to keep your store more secure. Give a strong password for your WooCommerce store admin panel so that hackers cannot find their way in. Make sure to keep regular backups of your site.

Also, keep all your plugins and themes updated at all times to maintain site security. Limit the number of administrative roles to as little as possible.

4. Speed Up Your Online Store

Speed Up Your Online Store

On average, visitors do not like to wait more than 3 secs for your site to load. Hence a slow site can be a reason to lose potential prospects on your site.

Monitor your site’s loading speed on a regular basis. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insight & Pingdom help you keep track of your site’s speed.

One factor affecting your site’s speed is images. Images are vital contents of your store. But heavier images will take more time for your site to load.

Make sure to optimize your image sizes to a moderate dimension where it is not too heavy and at the same time can give you a good resolution.

Normally, an image doesn’t need to be larger than 150kb for a large full-width preview. Your image size should be smaller than that.

Learn about more ways to speed up your site.

Once you have tried the basics and your site is still slow, it is best to consult with your hosting provider or professional developers. But don’t ignore it.

5. Implement Up-Selling And Cross-Selling

Upselling & Cross-selling

Up-selling and cross-selling give you the option to make your customers aware of the additional products in your store that they might not have encountered yet.

Up-selling encourages a prospect to purchase a comparatively higher-end product than the one in hand. Cross-selling suggests the prospect buy products or accessories related to the product he is interested in.

In eCommerce marketing, these two practices are very highly effective. They are focused on adding customer value which can prove to be useful or related to their lifestyle.

The process is very short and easy. You can add products to your cart page that you wish to promote or suggest on your own.

6. Learn When to Send E-mails And When To Stop

Email and Newsletter Notification

Email marketing is a great way to spread the word about your products and offers to users.

Once a user has subscribed, you can send e-mails to the users regarding any new offers or exciting news you may have regarding your store.

Then again, keep in mind that e-mail marketing also requires proper market analysis. You need to understand the latest trends and demands of prospects and then decide on whether it is the right time to reach out. Prioritize email deliverability and use something like DKIM check to prevent your domain phishing and spamming.

Plus, the products you offer in your e-mails should be relevant to the prospect’s search history or popular products in your store.

However, sending too many e-mails and newsletters can irritate your customers. So it is wise to keep it to a minimum unless you have a good email marketing campaign running. For example, do not send more than 1 e-mail a week. But if you have a week-long discount offer, you can shoot e-mails probably thrice a week.

Make sure to send emails with proper purpose; do not spam.

And if your product is a WordPress plugin, then Promote WordPress plugins with relevant marketing tactics.

7. Make The Product Title Relevant

When it comes to managing your products, choosing a good title is important. Often, vendors focus on much-complicated areas rather than the title itself. But, a proper title is vital in catching your prospect’s attention.

Look for similar products on Google and find out how they are named. Try to understand why they are getting more attention and ask yourself several questions like,

  • What do you like/dislike about your competitor’s product names?
  • Are the titles too long/ short/ direct/ memorable?
  • Do they follow proper keyword research?
  • Are they SEO optimized and how?
  • How do they fit titles for each category (Branding, Purchasing, Packaging) of items?

Do proper research on these basics, before going into details.

Once you have a good idea about these products, you can then plan to decide what you can apply to your products and what will get them more traction.

Check several times if your content follows proper keywords or not. Take help from online keyword checker tools(such as kwfinder) if needed.

Research is always good and helps you identify what you are missing.

It will also let you understand your strong points over your competitors. For example, you might even find your competitor’s title too long or too short.

Conduct research and work optimizing your product’s title, descriptions, and other data to get more customer attention.

8. Implementation of GTIN is a Must

GTIN Compliance

The common trend in the online market is, most of the WooCommerce site vendors are resellers. If you are one of them, then GTIN is important data to look at. GTIN means Global Trade Item Number.

Here’s how GTIN is important:

  • Google’s algorithm takes GTIN into consideration. Through this, the advertisement of your product feed is pulled from the supplier’s catalog. And then placed in the auction with other resellers of similar products.
  • Once you get your listing into Google’s Product Listing Ad, you will be getting quality leads for your site. Thus resulting in better CPC and boosting your ROI.
  • You will be able to get placements with search queries like “Top” or “Best”, portraying your products as the better ones.

Hence it is only logical to include GTIN while managing your product feed.

9. Make Your Site GDPR Compliant

The current popularity of online stores influences thousands of prospects to make online purchases every second. People are inputting sensitive data (such as their banking information) on eCommerce sites which may be stored in the database.

The more the data, the greater the possibility of a data protection breach. Thus there will be a major tantrum if the information is stolen or misused.

To prevent millions of users from falling victim to these kinds of disasters, GDPR was introduced on May 15, 2018, requiring all the organizations in Europe, that hold data of internet users, to provide a high level of protection and offer explicit control to users on their personal information.

If an organization fails to comply with the rules of GDPR, possibilities are it will be fined administrative fees of up to € 20 million.

Although GDPR is a law in many countries in Europe, this can also affect offshore businesses where GDPR is not mandatory.

Any business all over the world, that is willing to collect information from a European prospect, must comply with the GDPR rule.

Make sure your store is compliant with the GDPR laws if you don’t wish to miss out on prospects from Europe.

10. Use Effective Description

The product description is very important to create awareness among prospects about your products. You may follow the instructions below to make your product description more effective.

i. Keep it Short & Simple

Try to keep the description within 300 words, but then again, this really depends on the product. But don’t make the description long unless it is really necessary.

For uncommon products, keep in mind that the prospect reading the description may or may not know of the product. Hence you need to construct a description that is both readable and useful.

ii. Mirror the product information from the manufacturer’s website

Try to match specific details in your description to the product description of its actual manufacturer. This way, the users will find the information more relevant and credible.

iii. Don’t Deceive Your Customers

Be honest about the product description. Avoid creating biased positive features or stop exaggerating about your product.

If you provide false information, you might boost some sales initially, but in the long run, it might just have a negative effect.

You will miss out on getting recurring customers as they will not visit your site again after being deceived

People may give negative reviews and discourage others from visiting your WooCommerce store.

Other good products on your WooCommerce store may be overlooked and your overall sales profit will fall soon enough.

11. Color Attribute Optimization

Color Attribute

A single product can have different colors. You need to follow precise filters so the users can narrow down their search results. Use Color Attributes to describe the color of your product.

Major merchant shops will deny your product if there is a mismatch between the product’s actual color and the information given on the landing page.

Google Shopping uses primary colors to determine the varieties of product colors. Although there are many shades of blue, Google may not recognize these unique colors.

In this case, you need to learn how to bucket unique colors into primary color categories.

12. Focus On Visual Marketing

People love it when you give them a more authentic form of description along with good content.

In online shops, prospects cannot see a product physically. This leaves them with complete reliance on the images you provide. This is why you need to be more serious when providing images of your products.

Include more quality images and avoid using unnecessary text on your WooCommerce store. Keep the background of your product photos White and make sure the item gets enough light.

A bad resolution will prevent prospects from getting into the details. It is your duty to make sure that your product photos have high resolution to support zoom in/out.

Provide several photos of the product from many different angles to try and give the prospect an intricate visual.

There are other ways to enhance the popularity of your store’s content as well.

Short GIFs or 3D images are the latest options that are being used and can be very fruitful in engaging with your customer’s overall idea about your service or products.

13. Ensure Refund Policy

Trust and reliability are important when running a WooCommerce store. Hence, having a refund, return, or exchange policy is important.

For example, you may include a 3-day exchange or return policy if not satisfied with the product, and offer a refund in case it is a return.

This will indicate that you are confident about the quality of your products and value customer satisfaction. Thus people will find you more credible and reliable.

14. Team Up With An A.I.

Artificial intelligence is rocking the virtual world out there. Global giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have already integrated artificial intelligence into their services.
According to a survey, A.I. can potentially boost the overall industrious sales rate by up to 38% by 2035.

According to Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet,

Artificial Intelligence

It is high time that we think of the endless possibilities that A.I. has to offer for WooCommerce stores. In fact, many plugins like Akismet, MyCurator Content Curator, and WatsonFinds are already implementing A.I.

One of the best Artificial Intelligence services is chatbots. Chatbots offer live chat services to your store visitors.

They may guide users to their desired products or help users compare one product with another, all on their own. They give immediate answers to the relevant questions users may have.

For your WooCommerce Store, live chat can be the key to your ultimate customer acquisition strategy.

Currently, LiveAgent’s Live Chat Software is one of the most advanced live chat tools you can have on a WooCommerce or WordPress site.

Consider including a chatbot on your WooCommerce store, if not included already.

Conclusion

I believe that your WooCommerce store is a reflection of your hard work.

Your hard work combined with some eCommerce expert tips can help your store grow.

If clarity and proper standards are maintained to optimize your WooCommerce store, you can increase your potential prospects.

Hence, you should focus on keeping up with the race and stand out among your competitors.

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About Author

C S Sultan

C S Sultan

A professional in digital marketing with a passion for WordPress. Loves to discuss about marketing tactics and advanced business strategies. Follow him on twitter @SultanRoyal1

12 Comments

  • Thanks for sharing such great information with us. This information is use full for us. I hope you will share more valuably information about Optimize Your WooCommerce Store For Best Results.

  • This was a very informative blog and I really enjoyed reading it. But I also have a few points regarding it to discuss with you.

    WooCommerce makes it possible to create beautiful websites with a great user experience and manage orders easily. It also has some unique features that extend its functionality.

    Here is the list of tips to improve the speed of Your WooCommerce Store for better performance:-

    1. Clean the database for unwanted or old files
    2. Use CDNs (Content Delivery Network)
    3. Prevent brute force attacks

  • I have gone through your article about Managing a woocommerce store. Managing a WooCommerce store effectively requires a lot of effort, So I have some points to include in your article which is as below.

    1. Regularly update your WooCommerce version
    2. Keep your product descriptions and images up-to-date
    3. Optimize your website’s loading speed
    4. Monitor your store’s performance using WooCommerce
    5. Use social media and email marketing.

    Continually look for ways to improve your store’s functionality and user experience, such as by adding new features, optimizing your checkout process, and enhancing your website’s design.

  • You have mentioned some of the best ways to speed up your Woocommerce store they can be very useful for the readers. But here I tried to cover of the other ways that can also help them, check out them below:
    1. Enable Gzip compression
    2. Use a lightweight theme
    3. Use caching plugins
    4. Optimize your database
    5. Monitor site speed
    These are some of the ways you can speed up your Woocommerce store. To get your Woocommerce store develop that as speed and technology you need to hire company that provide eCommerce development such as Alakmalak technologies they are best at this.

  • Thank you, this is the article I was looking for. Btw may I know what you use for your great and fast website? I’m also planning to create a simple website for my business, but I need a domain and hosting recommendation. I hear asphostportal has a good reputation for that. Can you recommend them or are there any alternatives?

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