In a competitive business world where everyone is always looking to improve, choosing the right e-commerce platform should come after careful, thorough research. Some of the factors to weigh up are cost, ease of use, the features on offer, and the needs of the business and its line of work. A tool like WooCommerce can be an ideal choice if you want to build a powerful, effective online shop.
Who should consider WooCommerce as their e-commerce platform?
WooCommerce is a popular plugin for building online shops on the WordPress platform. Its success, however, doesn’t guarantee the success of your e-shop. For that, you need to invest in several things, such as advertising, SEO and a properly built WooCommerce e-shop.
What is WooCommerce and how does it work?
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin in the WordPress world. With this tool you can do everything, from creating an online shop on WordPress and adding products, prices and offers to managing your customers and invoices. The WooCommerce e-commerce platform is extremely flexible and offers lots of solutions and add-ons that work smoothly with your WordPress site. The best part? You don’t need to be a professional developer to use it! There are plenty of great themes and plugins that can quickly solve your problem, for free or at very low cost.
WooCommerce usage statistics, 2023
According to the statistics recorded for WooCommerce use in 2023, use of the software has grown in line with the growing use of WordPress for building websites and online shops. This steady growth shows that WooCommerce is one of the leading tools for building and managing e-commerce on the WordPress platform. The statistics collected for 2023 show that most new websites created that year chose WooCommerce as their main e-commerce platform, since it is easy to use and easy to adapt to each owner’s needs when building an e-shop. With more than 5 million active installations and 194,934,627 downloads, it holds 23.43% of the market. A few more remarkable figures:
- WooCommerce is downloaded at least 30,000 times a day from WordPress.org.
- Of all e-commerce websites on the internet, 12.96% use WooCommerce.
- If all WooCommerce shops made up a single country, its revenue would be higher than that of 35% of the world’s countries!
- In 2022, WooCommerce shops had roughly $15.8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV).
- The WooCommerce plugin available on WordPress.org supports 66 languages.
WooCommerce’s top features
WooCommerce is a flexible, powerful plugin for building online shops on WordPress. Let’s look at the main features that make WooCommerce an ideal choice for selling online:
- Flexibility: WooCommerce lets you manage a wide range of products, whether physical goods, digital products or even services.
- Customisation: With support for hundreds of themes and plugins, WooCommerce lets you fully adapt your online shop to each business’s needs and look.
- Easy integration: As an extension of WordPress, WooCommerce fits neatly into your existing website, giving a smooth experience to administrators and users alike.
- SEO features: It benefits from WordPress’s strong SEO capabilities, helping shops optimise their presence in search engines.
- Security: It offers built-in security features and regular updates to protect the online shop from threats and vulnerabilities.
- Multilingual support: It supports multiple languages and currencies, which makes it suitable for international markets.
- Analytics tools: It provides detailed analytics and reports that help owners understand how their shop is performing and make informed decisions.
- Flexible payments: It supports multiple payment methods, so customers can choose the one they prefer.
With these features, WooCommerce is a powerful solution for building and running online shops, helping businesses grow their online presence and increase their sales.
What makes WooCommerce stand out?
WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce systems, giving its users a simple, low-cost way to build online shops. What makes WooCommerce stand out is its innovation and the wide range of plugins available to configure and extend the system. WooCommerce is also fast, which makes it ideal for serving large numbers of customers and handling more demanding orders. Another reason online shop builders prefer WooCommerce is the large community behind it. This community is made up of thousands of developers who share free advice, and every e-shop owner can choose the professional they want to work with.
How many products can I have in WooCommerce?
WooCommerce can handle an unlimited number of products, but the number of products can affect how fast the site loads. The performance of a WooCommerce site depends on the server specs, such as RAM and CPU. A server can usually handle tens of millions of products, but it is important to choose the right hosting so the site isn’t slow. At WebMate we recommend LiteSpeed servers for WordPress, as they are the ideal choice. Ideally, a category should hold 100-200 products if you have a large product catalogue. Still, in theory there is no limit to the number of products a WooCommerce site can handle.
How many products can I have in WooCommerce
It is important to optimise the site’s performance with caching, image optimisation and by keeping the plugins and files that load to a minimum, so the site can handle a large number of products. We have built shops with 100,000 products without any problems, but at WebMate we recommend WooCommerce for up to 40,000 products, with a suitable dedicated server of course. Finally, an e-shop with 100 visitors a day and 40,000 products is a very different case from one with 4,000 visitors using, say, the shop filters at the same time. The second case obviously needs a much more powerful server.
How do I install WooCommerce?
To install WooCommerce, log in to WordPress, go to Plugins > Add New, search for WooCommerce and click “Install Now”. Once installed, activate the plugin. Follow the setup wizard to configure your shop, adding products, payment methods and shipping methods.
How much does WooCommerce cost?
WooCommerce is free as a WordPress plugin and provides the core features for building an online shop. However, extra features through extensions and themes may cost money. The final cost depends on the extensions you choose and your shop’s needs.
How can I make WooCommerce faster?
To speed up WooCommerce, choose a fast theme, use caching plugins, optimise images, keep the database clean and choose a reliable hosting provider. Also, limit the use of “heavy” plugins and update WordPress, WooCommerce and your plugins regularly.
So, should I build my e-shop with WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a popular, customisable open-source e-commerce platform built on WordPress. It is a free e-commerce platform that is beginner-friendly and easy to use. If you are looking to build an e-commerce website with WordPress, WooCommerce is a good option to consider. Bear in mind that although WooCommerce is free, you may need to pay for extra features and extensions to tailor your online shop, even if you build it yourself. At WebMate we build e-shops exclusively with WooCommerce, creating custom themes for it so we can make full use of its capabilities.
If you prefer video, here is one that explains the advantages of WooCommerce to make your decision easier.
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