Q&A on ‘How to scale your WooCommerce business for the holiday season?’
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What does it mean to ‘SCALE YOUR WooCommerce BUSINESS? Scaling refers to effectively increasing the capacity of your store without affecting the performance of the website and user experience. With your WooCommerce business taking flight with time, you must be prepared to keep up with the upcoming challenges and expectations. Coming to the scalability of WooCommerce- there is a myth that WooCommerce fails when it comes to scaling a small business. Quite the opposite, WooCommerce is flexible enough to incorporate the requirements of a large scale store. Alongside an unmatchable developer community, it is the ‘best option’ to carry any big business of any size.
This Q&A article here will help you dig deep and understand WooCommerce better for shifting your business on a bigger scale.
Understanding how to scale WooCommerce.
understanding WooCommerce scalability
Que- Is WooCommerce actually scalable?
Yes, absolutely. Woocommerce is continuously upgraded for you to handle the changing dynamics of your eCommerce. The upgrades are carried out for both performance and adaptability, simultaneously. Also, you can diversify your WooCommerce products on multiple marketplaces using WooCommerce integrations.
However, various non-WooCommerce aspects such as – the plugins, theme codes, hosting platform of your website etc. need to be considered as well during the scaling process.
Que- When is the right time to scale my WooCommerce store?
Any eCommerce store owing 5000+ or 10,000+ orders or products is categorized as a ‘Large Scale’ eCommerce. A store might have only 100 products but might be receiving over 10,000 orders or a store might hold 10,000 products receiving 20,000 orders; in any case, the business is put under the ‘Large scale’ banner and requires upgrades to maintain the proper functionality from time to time.
Factors influencing the scaling of WooCommerce.
Factors influencing WooCommerce scalability.
Que- What are the factors that influence the scaling of my business?
Along with a number of factors influencing the scaling process, let’s count the crucial ones here:
Traffic: The most important aspect affecting the performance of any online website is traffic. For example, if your store sells popular hot-selling items, you might consider optimising the product pages for more visitors.
Website Code: Your WooCommerce store will only run (and scale) well if you keep your WooCommerce plugins up to date. Therefore, always check your WordPress admin area to see if any new themes or plugins have been released.
Server Hardware: One of the most common blunders made by WooCommerce store owners is selecting the wrong hosting provider. Choose a hosting option that includes crucial performance-oriented features like SSL certificates, caches, and CDN support to ensure that your WooCommerce store scales smoothly.
Que- Considering the factors affecting the scaling process, is it easy to scale WooCommerce?
Well absolutely. WooCommerce is designed for sellers with a non-technical background as well. Providing huge flexibility, stable and cost-effective foundation- the platform is set to bring in more impressions and conversion rates to your business.
Getting the metric of scaling WooCommerce business.
Que- What role does ‘hosting’ play while scaling the business on WooCommerce.
The hosting server decides how much traffic your website can handle. Select the package based on the following:
- Does your host prioritize the speed?
- Get reviews from the customers about the website’s performance.
- How much bandwidth and disc space does your website require?
- Does your server go down often?
Hence, perform in-depth research of a hosting company’s reviews, particularly their customer assistance, before making a decision.
Que- Do I need to update my WordPress as well for it?
There’s no doubt that a WordPress website can scale to meet the demands of large-scale, high-traffic websites. Rather than focusing on WordPress’s core software as the be-all and end-all of scalability, it’s more vital to concentrate on elements specific to your website, such as themes, plugins, and customizations, as well as appropriately scalable hosting.
WordPress is a versatile platform. The sky’s the limit if you eliminate any bottlenecks and provide your website with adequate hosting resources. When it comes to gear up your WordPress instance for more traffic, here are the most typical areas to pay attention to.
Que- How to prioritize the website functionality to decrease the loading time?
Make sure your website loads quickly and operates well by using the following tools:
Firstly, consider tracking add-to-cart is possible with the WooCommerce Google Analytics addon. Get a decent indicator of your server performance per minute with the add-to-cart addon.
Secondly, Google Chrome comes with a performance analysis tool that reveals how long it takes for your business to load and breaks down which elements take the longest.
Also, consider website speed testing tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Tools let you evaluate the performance of each page and give you recommendations on how to optimise load time.
Lastly, create realistic scenarios to load test your site by simulating the traffic, client numbers, and behaviours that your store anticipates.
Que- How can I use cache for this procedure of scaling my website?
Caching is the process of temporarily storing a copy of your website in order to provide it to your visitors more quickly. It will load properly the first time a site visitor hits on your home page. When users return, however, they will see a pre-loaded, stored version of the page, reducing the amount of work their browser has to do. However, you must correctly configure caching, or you will wind up doing more harm than good.
You can securely cache: on your WooCommerce site. Pages like your About, FAQ, and Contact pages should be static and content-heavy.
Now, because the Cart, My Account, and Checkout pages display information that is unique to each user, it is critical that you exempt them from caching.
Que- Is it advisable to use CDN for better functionality of the WooCommerce website?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a global network of servers. It retrieves assets from your websites, such as images, videos, and CSS, and provides them over a different network. As a result, the burden on your server is reduced, and your site loads faster.
Additionally, CDNs provide your website from the closest location to each individual site visitor. If a visitor views your website from Tokyo, for example, a CDN will serve it from the nearest server, which could be in Hong Kong, rather than one on the other side of the planet.
Scaling the business beyond performance.
Que- Do I need certain/specific plugins to help me scale better?
WooCommerce provides plugins to assist you in scaling your online store at every stage.
WooCommerce’s adaptability is unrivalled. Hundreds of developers in our open-source community are constantly improving the platform from many angles. Regardless of the stage of your business, it offers bespoke solutions that meet the needs of your eCommerce site. Here are some addons that can assist you with scaling:
- Bulk Stock Management is the management of large quantities of stock. From your WooCommerce dashboard, you can manage your stock in bulk and print stock levels. You can order products by name, ID, SKU, or stock quantity, and filter them by kind, stock management status, and stock status. Setting inventory quantities for numerous products at once is simple, making stock management a snap.
- Scanventory – Inventory Management on the Go. Do you want your warehouse inventory to be in sync with your online store? Scanventory offers exactly that, and it does it all from your smartphone. It allows you to update products and generate product labels directly from your WooCommerce dashboard.
Get Ced experts to scale and secure your store for better business.
Que- Is offloading functionality from the store helpful?
Consider outsourcing certain areas of your business so WooCommerce can concentrate on performance and conversions. Image optimization, marketing automation, accounting, customer care, and A/B testing may all be offloaded to make your website’s server function faster.
Scale and secure your business with CedCommerce WordPress services-
Do you have a business that you want to scale for better performance? Provide excellent service to the customers visiting your website and make it a hassle-free experience for you to handle a large number of products and orders you will receive in the store.
Along with scaling your business Ced experts will help you unlock new opportunities to sell on eCommerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Walmart and more, simultaneously. Optimize your feed management, streamline and synchronize your orders all from a single dashboard with CedCommerce featured marketplace integrations.