So you want to take your business online or reviewing your options and are looking at the best way to do this, you’ve heard of Managed WooCommerce and here you are. At this point, there are two big decisions you need to make:
- What platform are you going to use
- What is the best hosting for your store
Once you have decided what you are going to be building your eCommerce store on and have the best hosting for your needs the rest is fairly straightforward – just add products, set some prices, a sprinkle of automation and a dash of digital marketing and BAM! You will have a fully functional online store.
In this article we are going to be discussing the advantages of WooCommerce and why you need to utilise Managed WooCommerce in order to build on a solid foundation.
Why choose WooCommerce?
The best matric to tell you who is the leader in the eCommerce space is to know what majority of stores are built on and with 41% of all online stores using WooCommerce there is a clear winner.
The first thing you need to know is that WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress (arguably the best eCommerce plugin) so your website is built on WordPress and you use WooCommerce to manage your online store.
There is a good reason for this:
- Pricing | In short, WooCommerce is free. Pay for premium add ons to build out the functionality you require.
- Flexible | Being built on WordPress you know your store is cross-browser and cross-device compatible and with the right theme, of which there are thousands, you can make your store look the way you want it
- Supported | As WordPress and WooCommerce are open source, this means there is a large community which provides all the education, tools, resources and features you need for your store.
- Scalable | WordPress is the strength here with its easy to use interface, speed, security and ability to be modular which means you can grow and add more features as you grow.
- Compatibility | No other platform comes close to being able to integrate with other marketing, sales, service and accounting platforms and software to supercharge your store
If you’re looking to run an eCommerce store you can’t go wrong with WooCommerce as it is a fantastic choice. We have built several WooCommerce Stores in the past and the pricing and flexibility are your two biggest advantages.
What is Managed WooCommerce?
Managed WooCommerce refers to the type of hosting you use to host your eCommerce Store. Instead of just getting a basic server from which you can host your website, you can get a managed solution whereby you are able to build a eCommerce that is optimised for a great shopping experience and not just a great website experience.
Liquid Web explains below what is Managed Commerce Hosting and why this is more important than you might realise.
Advantages of Managed WooCommerce Hosting
The biggest advantage of Managed WooCommerce Hosting is having everything in one place and getting access to some powerful features that will supercharge your store so that you can have the peace of mind knowing your store is being built on a solid foundation.
Some of the features WooCommerce Managed Hosting enables you to get:
- Peace of mind knowing your store is being optimized for speed, security and conversion
- Automatic image compression to ensure fast loading speeds
- Automatic segmentation and analytics to analyse what is working and not working and where you can increase conversion
- Automatic cart abandonment to bring visitors back
- Dynamic resourcing to ensure each user has a great shopping experience
eCommerce Optimization
Optimisation is one of those things that normally gets forgotten or is never done properly. Mainly because most people don’t know where to start or how to implement it correctly. If visitors are having slow loading times you can kiss them goodbye as there is nothing more frustrating than a slow website, this is validated with the analytics that show slow loading times lead to visitors dropping off.
Minimise the risk of your website crashing
With Managed WooCommerce Hosting you know that if you have a rush of visitors to your online store, and they are all adding products to your cart and checking out, that your server won’t crash and you will lose out on potential sales. This is a common feature of a shared hosting plans which while cheaper can struggle with a sudden increase in traffic. So while you should be having a rush of income – instead you have a rush of drop offs because your server can’t handle it.
Driving decision through data
My favourite saying is: if you can’t measure it, how do you know it is working?
Data, data, data I must have data! This is probably the most under rated you can have access to and use – Reporting. The more you know about your customers and what is working and not working the more you will know what you need to change and how to optimise your store for conversion. With Managed WooCommerce Hosting you get real insights into your customers and their actions, far more than you could get with just Google Analytics for example.
Support when you need it
Get specialised WooCommerce support when you need it. It’s a pretty straightforward concept; with standard website hosting you get standard website support. With Managed WooCommerce Hosting you get access to an expert team of WooCommerce specialists. Stop wasting time trying to solve technical issues and get the right support.
Already have a WooCommerce Store and want to learn how to speed up your store?
What you need to do is check out this webinar on How to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store.
Why we recommend Nexcess’s Managed WooCommerce Hosting
Before recommending anything we make sure we have done the research so that we can give you the best solution for your requirements. After researching and testing different hosts, when it comes to Managed WooCommerce Hosting there is a clear industry leader in our books and that is Liquid Web’s Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting.
The reason we say this is:
Performance
Nexcess has some of the highest performance grades in the industry and in a few of our tests it always produced Performance Grades of over 90%.
Security
You get a free SSL certificate to encrypt your store in order to get clean URLs, keyword indexing, product schema, custom metadata and sitemaps. Coupled together with malware monitoring and bad-bots filtering your site is protected with a host that blocks 3 million attacks daily
Integrations
With partnerships with major platforms you can start adding new features to your store such as abandoned cart with Jilt a ecommerce marketing platform that allows you to automate abandoned cart campaigns to maximise your conversion.
Sacability
Nexcess Managed WooCommerce Hosting can scale as you grow. Nexcess helps you choose the best hosting package for you from just $20 a month. They even assist you in showcasing how many orders you can get and which hosting you should get based on that. Minimise your expenses to maximise your opportunities!
Getting started
Start as you mean to go on. Ensure that you have the freedom to build the store of your dreams and have all the functionality you need with the ability to scale all built on a solid foundation.
The first step is to sign up on a Managed WooCommerce Hosting plan which we recommend you do with Nexcess by clicking here
You can start with a Free Trial if you want or use the coupon “GetOnline” to get 25% off for 3 months.
You can then start building your store by installing themes and plugins to provide you with all the functionality you need for you store. Once you have your framework you can then add all your products, configure your payment and delivery settings and get selling!
Read our other blog posts to see how you can utilise other platforms to market your products from your store.
Disclaimer:
We are a big advocate in Liquid Web’s products and services and as such we are a Liquid Web affiliate.
