Setting up a successful WooCommerce store is now easier than ever. But, with so many different ways to grow your store it can sometimes be hard to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. That’s why we’ve created this list of some of the best ways you can improve your WooCommerce store.
Utilize Brands, Categories, & Tags
Brands, categories, and tags are all incredible ways to help sort and organize your products.
Brands
If you are selling products from multiple different brands in your store, or offering products that aren’t your own, showcasing brands in a great idea.
This makes it easy to browse and filter your products on your store, and also makes it easier for you to manage your inventory.
WooCommerce Brands is a plugin that allows you to create brands for your WooCommerce store. You can also assign a name, description, and an image to each brand.
Categories
Categories are an incredibly simple and effective way to help make your products more discoverable, improve your SEO, and better organize your store. One of the most common mistakes people make when first designing their WooCommerce store is not adding categories and subcategories to their products.
Categories and subcategories allow customers to sort items during their search, giving them a shortcut to exactly what they’re looking for in your store.
Category pages are also a great way to boost your SEO. The more specific pages you have with long tail keywords the likely customers are to discover you on search engines. For example, while having a category for “Pants” is great, having subcategories for “Jeans”, “Sweatpants”, and “Slacks” gives you an even better chance of ranking.
Tags
Tags are another way to help your customers find what they’re looking for and give more relevant information about the products.
Some people fall under the impression that tags on WooCommerce work similarly to hashtags on social media. This is not the case. Tagging products with relevant keywords is another tool for you to use to help organize your store and improve the shopping experience for your customers.
Invest in High-Level Security
WooCommerce is a secure platform but having additional security measures is essential to ensure your site is as secure as possible. The best methods for enhancing your WooCommerce account security are to:
- Use a strong password and enable 2-factor authentication for your WooCommerce login
- Install an SSL certificate and check the ‘Force Secure Checkout’ option in the advanced settings
- Use a reputable security plugin such as Wordfence, Jetpack, Sucuri, or MalCare Security Plugin
Back Up Your Data
Regularly backing up your site is a necessity. A malicious attack or software error could cripple your website for days or weeks if you aren’t prepared for it. Regularly backing up your website means you can quickly and easily get your store back up and running.
For more information on backing up your site, visit How to Easily Back Up and Restore WooCommerce.
Optimize Images
Product images are a major element of your WooCommerce store. You want them to be high quality and professional, but if the image files are too large they’ll slow your site down.
Optimizing your images involves reducing the file size to be as small as possible while still maintaining the quality of the image and adding relevant alt tags to your images.
Image optimization helps to greatly improve your SEO, boosting your store rating. There are many plugins you can use to optimize your images, both free and paid.
If you already have an SEO plugin installed for your site you should not download an additional one to do image optimization, any SEO plugin will include image optimization software.
Utilize Videos
Product videos are an often under utilized tool that can take your WooCommerce store to another level. Product videos give your customers a better idea of what they’re buying and gives your products more credibility.
You can use product videos to:
- Showcase your products
- Film unboxing videos
- Create product demonstrations
- Show off product features
Streaming services such as YouTube make the videos easy to access and visually pleasing. Featuring your videos on YouTube also allows you to feature as many videos as you’d like without storing the video data on your site and slowing your store down.
Write Amazing Descriptions
Compelling and appealing product descriptions leads to faster conversions and may convince visitors to make a purchase. Additionally, adding relevant keywords to your product descriptions can help your products show up on more searches and boosts your store’s SEO and credibility.
Product descriptions should be well written, keyword rich, and informative about your products.
If you’re struggling to improve your product descriptions, you can utilize customer reviews to write descriptions that better connect with your audience.
Discounts & Deals
Daily Deals
Offering new deals on a regular basis encourages your customers to check your store more frequently and make additional purchases. You don’t have to be putting out your “daily deals” every day of the week. But frequent, short-term sales can be a fun way to increase traffic to your site and boost sales.
Bulk Discounts
Bulk orders help you decrease the cost of shipping and handling. Offering discounts on bulk orders encourages your customers to buy more at once and decreases your overhead costs on the sale. One of the most popular ways to give customers bulk discounts is to offer free shipping on orders over a certain spending threshold.
Promotion Slider
Adding a slider to your store is a great way to advertise your promotions. A promotional slider displays all of the promotions It allows your customers to view all of the discounts that are available on your store without having to navigate away from the products page.
Stock Status
Including the stock status on your products can save your customers a lot of frustration. If a customer is trying to make a purchase, only to find out that the product they’re wanting is out of stock, it can make the checkout process time-consuming and difficult. Making the stock of your products clear to your customers can improve their shopping experience and allows you to only feature products that are in stock and ready to ship.
Customer Reviews
Customer reviews and testimonials are highly beneficial to your WooCommerce store. They improve your SEO, helps to build a sense of trust with potential customers, and improves your credibility. To ensure that customer reviews are enabled on your site, go to your WooCommerce settings and under the Products tab check the box next to Enable reviews.
Encouraging your customers to leave reviews is a great way to increase the number of reviews you have in your store, and can improve the quality of reviews you receive. Keeping your reviews high-quality and from real people is essential for your reviews to be a good source of credibility.
Optimize the Check-Out Process
A complex checkout process is a significant barrier to conversions. Keeping your checkout process as simple and streamlined as possible will prevent you from losing customers due to a confusing or difficult checkout process.
One-click checkout options are the best way to get your customers checked out quickly.
Add Wishlists
Providing an option to save items on a wishlist allows customers to save items they wish to buy at a later date. It also allows your customers to share their wishlists with others to buy the products for them. You want to make sure the wishlists on your store are easy to add to and shop from. Depending on the plugin you use to add wishlists to your store, you can also provide options such as creating multiple lists, deleting or moving items off of wishlists, and even selecting different privacy settings when sharing wishlists with other people.
Utilize Upselling and Cross-Selling
Upselling
Upselling encourages customers to purchase a comparable, higher-end item to the one they’re currently viewing. For example, when selling t-shirts, you could upsell products that are more expensive and made of a better material.
Cross-Selling
Cross-selling is the practice of encouraging customers to buy related or similar products. It’s similar to being asked at a fast food restaurant if you want fries with your burger. If you’re selling a scuba mask, you could cross-sell products such as diving fins or wet suits.
Speed Up Your Site
The faster your site is, the better. Speed is a major component of SEO and conversions. If your site doesn’t load in less than 2 seconds, more than half of your visitors are likely to click away and go somewhere else for the products they’re looking for.
There are many ways to improve your site’s speed. The best way to optimize your site if you’re a beginner with WooCommerce is to install an SEO plugin that will work on optimizing your site and improving your site speed for you.
