Every business owner loves to see the business flourish be it online or offline.
But somewhere they make mistakes which cost them their prosperity. One such mistake occurs when mishandling your WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce is a tool, designed by WordPress with elegant themes and efficient plugins, to help you sell products online.
According to WooCommerce, with 51M+ downloads, it powers over 28% of all online stores and the number can be changing with time.
But, most of the times, many store owners miss some important points and make huge mistakes with their WooCommerce website design.
Today, we will roam our eyes to the possible mistakes that happen in WooCommerce Development that can charge the business thrice the cost of its development.
1. Forgetting a Staging Site
First of all, for my fellows to whom staging site is an alien, it is a complete reflection of your live website which is built to test the site before making it live. It helps you test the themes, plugins, and custom codes and rectify any errors found.
For the online stores, it is quite essential to have created a staging site to keep the site’s back safe.
Many times at 21Twelve Interactive, which is one of the Best E-commerce Magento and WooCommerce development company, we come across the client issues where websites have lost orders due to the negligence of the staging site before making the store live.
At those times, we see our clients suffering because of the money and the time it costs to them in resolving that error.
This error can substantially be avoided if a staging site is developed with a proper help by hiring a WooCommerce Development Company which is highly recommended as staging site has got your WooCommerce store’s back.
Anything foul with your online store cannot be tolerated as it can directly affect your business.
2. Working on an outdated WooCommerce version
When owning an online business, keeping it updated must be on #1 on your to-do list. WooCommerce is a framework with a very active update release cycle and while possessing one, you need to be active with the updates too.
While running an outdated version can make itself and your business exposed to all sorts of attacks. It lacks the latest security features, which can bring lots of cyber-threats to your online store.
Also, an outdated version won’t help you provide the best User Experience to your users. It cannot provide all the usability that the framework can offer with the updated version. And ultimately, it leads to an unhappy user experience, which you would definitely not prefer to accept.
While people think that old version helps them to use the third party plugins and themes, the truth is something else!
First, if WooCommerce experts do not update the version and ensure the compatibility with the update within a short while after the release, it opens the doors to all the risks discussed above.
Secondly, WooThemes and most third-party developers support the current version of WooCommerce and one version back. It means that running an older version than those will not help you get the official support for the plugins and themes.
3. “Security can be checked later.”
Can security be checked later? Well, the answer is a big “NO”!
These are the days when people go for a thousand checks to see if they are updating their crucial information on a secure platform.
If by any chance, the site seems to be missing on the security, it is likely to lose the credibility of visitors; turning to loss of the customers.
Thus, good website security is a prime factor to be considered to increase the customer’s confidence in buying from your online store.
This makes it necessary for the store owners to keep the security updated before anything else.
There are ways to achieve the security highness on the store, such as making key areas secure, like “My Account” area, checkout process, and payment page area, with an SSL certificate.
Furthermore, if your site is not HTTPS enabled, it would be marked as non-secured as per the update from Google Webmasters. Which says, if your site collects crucial information like passwords or credit/debit card credentials, the whole site needs to have HTTPS enabled.
4. Not checking System Status Report:
When developing an online eCommerce store, there are possibilities of getting the misconfigurations to happen in the system.
Misconfigurations, which are so common with WooCommerce, can cause a big hazard to your WooCommerce system.
So to avoid that, WooCommerce team has included a System Status Report within the plugin listing several useful points on information about the site, versions of the plugin, active themes, PHP version, web server version and lots more.
This helps the owners notice the issues easily as the details causing trouble to your system is colour coded with red. Also, every red will have an explanation following it about what the problem is.
Not checking on to this report can make you miss on many resolutions which later can cost you a huge amount of time, efforts and money.
Also, hiring a Woocommerce development company helps you get trained in all these aspects making you independent enough to take the basic care of your store.
5. Did not set the selling locations:
WooCommerce has come up with a feature “Selling Locations” allowing you to set the targeting countries of the sale. You can set them in the ‘General’ tab under ‘Settings’.
You can also restrict the countries available on ‘Billing and Shipping Address’ forms on the ‘Checkout’ page. You can get it done in the ‘Shipping’ tab under ‘Settings’
You may end up receiving orders from countries which may seem like Jupiter and Mars to you if you miss out setting specific locations.
Which may later result in you apologizing to the customers for being unable to deliver the products to their place and refunding the money collected, sometimes losing extra on the processing fee.
A better option can be called out by keeping an eCommerce Development Company on your side to avoid all these hassles and get it done as desired.
6. Jumping over the Backups:
There may be some unknown reasons but people oversee taking backups which is not at all a saviour.
If you have an online store, security and backups NEED to be the highest on your priority list.
No matter what method you use, but it is essential to take backups of your WooCommerce store daily and retaining them for at least 7 days.
There are businesses those still run their online stores, without taking backups, successfully with a good number of customers. For such businesses, all it may take is one dreadful security incident to sweep off everything. That thought itself is like a nightmare.
Nowadays, you can find millions of WordPress backup options those are free; also, the ones that can provide you support with a payment structure for a specific period. One such good option is to hire a Woocommerce development company to assist you all with it and take the pain for you.
One more aspect of the WooCommerce development services is eCommerce platform migration.
We all know how fast and developing this online business has become. The module that produced millions for your business previous year may not be the best player this year.
It is very essential to be on the top of the update cycle if you wish to pursue in the competition and win every day. Some updates are like a plaything which can be made easily but some need be taken a keen eye on them in order to get it done properly.
So, e-commerce platform migration comes with a good option as you have to preserve all your hard work while accepting the change. These are the times when you should hire WooCommerce developer to help you with the platform migration.
Platform migration can affect the SEO ranking, daily visitors count, website traffic and most importantly – the company revenue. It also is a pain sometimes to go through the list of top eCommerce development companies who can assist you with this task.
But, nothing to go on the pills because of this stress. This Woocommerce development company India, USA is up with the WooCommerce development and customization services to safely migrate your store from one platform to another.
If migration is something that recently came upon your mind, I would suggest you to remember avoiding the following mistakes.
7. Making the Store live without Validation and testing
Platform Migration is an important aspect but not the only parameter to be looked after.
It comes with lots of things to be checked after the completion of the migration process in order to manage the new portal effectively.
But most of the times, people make a slip by throwing the new website live before properly validating and testing its efficiency.
This is one of the vital processes to validate and test the set-up, framework, plugins, customised codes, and overall functionality of the new WooCommerce store well before making it live.
If you would have kept an eCommerce website development company by your side during the migration process, they will make all the parameter checks and validation before the site live so as to avoid any major problems such false updates on the live website, etc.
8. Cost cutting on professional SEO help
Your store’s SEO performance is the significance of the health of your eCommerce store.
Many wounded store owners go for the SEO renovation after facing the damage to their previous SEO ranking.
Any changes must not be affecting your business health; thus, it is a fundamental step to hire WooCommerce experts to take care of your SEO while migration.
As my team here deals with many WooCommerce websites in India, USA, we know how important SEO rankings stand for an online business and hence, pertaining to the fact, we have our hands trained for all the sorts of SEO help a business may require.
9. Giving a surprise to your customers, all of a sudden
We may like magic tricks, but some may become tragic ones for the business.
It is when you when you launch your new website without informing your customers of the change.
They are your hard earned customers who maintained a long-term relationship with your business, loved your products and services. They are familiar with your website and like its functionalities.
It becomes your moral responsibility to make your customers aware of before launching the new website, explaining to them your plans and the reason to change along with the advantages and benefits they can get from that platform.
You need to have a trained team to make that effort for you by your side. You can also hire a WooCommerce agency who is expert in this.
10. Migrating platform without a Professional development company’s help
Out of many, one of the most pinching effects is the decrease in the sales number after the website migration.
This pain can be avoided if you choose to work with a faithful and a Best E-commerce Magento and WooCommerce development company with the proven history in the development skills.
Remember, not all WooCommerce developers can restore SEO Ranking, Google authorities, daily visitor counts, website traffic and the profit.
Just make sure that you are working with a WooCommerce agency who is well proficient and cautious of the risks so as to keep your store on the track and flourish even more with good business numbers.
Conclusion:
We read about a few possible mistakes; these are ten, there can be even more behind the bushes to harm your business. You are ought to take all the anchoring steps that will hold your business profits intact and help them grow.
Better it is, whenever you think of moving to an online store newly for your business or if you have an online store but thinking of the platform migration, give a shout out to this Woocommerce development company India, USA who is proficient and able to sweat out to retain your business profit the same way as you are.