A 7 major Mistakes To Avoid When Developing Your WordPress Ecommerce Site in order to get best out of your ecommerce site .
You must have noticed the name of WordPress at the very end of the majority of websites now, that’s because from just a blogging tool WP has transformed into a platform offering options for creating entire business websites, blogs of any category, E-commerce sites, and membership sites.
It has become a personal favorite for many website developers as this content management system provides a wide variety of plug-ins, themes, templates, fonts, texts, colors, etc all depending on what you want to design, but again mistakes are prone to happen here as well and this blog will train you to “To Avoid 7 Mistakes When Developing Your WordPress E-Commerce Website”
Many E-commerce websites have been created here because of the WooCommerce plug-in, which gives your site a professional shop look.
Feel free to look at a few of the following e-commerce websites made on WordPress
Root Science:
Root Science is an organic, high-performance skincare brand, drawing inspiration from the founder’s home country of Iceland, whose products are formulated with the most nutrient-rich botanicals from around the world having cleansers, toners, exfoliants, serums, masks, eye care, and more as products.
The secret of success behind this eCommerce site is that they are using WordPress and WooCommerce featuring a sleek and modern design. The website also has a blog loaded with helpful information to help its audience boost their skincare routines and they use targeted popups to grow its email list.
Roberto Coin:
The man is a luxury jewelry designer, who named the brand after himself only. He sells stunning bracelets, necklaces, earrings, pendants, and rings.
The web development is further done by WooCommerce and WordPress features an elegant design, auto-playing, shoppable editorial content, and more.
Vic Firth:
A popular and established brand in the music industry, that sell mainly drumsticks but also alternative implements such as brushes, as well as marching percussion, keyboard mallets, and more.
Their WordPress and WooCommerce-powered site features their extensive products including selection guides to help users find exactly what they’re looking for, an education resource library, video lessons, an Instagram feed to showcase their community, and more.
Why do companies and brands prefer constructing their businesses in the WordPress E-commerce category?
According to Inspirenix, the websites online use this medium because
- Open Source Platform:
WordPress is an open-source platform. This means anyone can modify the source code and redistribute the software. It’s designed for people to contribute their ideas to improve the platform.
- Easy to Use:
Using WordPress is no rocket science that allows you to manage your content effectively. It means that it can be used for building websites, adding design to your website, and updating and editing your content as well.
- Numerous template options are available
The number of templates offered by WordPress for building your site is one of the most meaningful benefits of WordPress as you can use its templates for E-commerce sites that capture your brand’s distinctive style, allowing you to develop your own special E-commerce site.
- The WordPress Community Offers Support
Since WordPress is free and open-source software, which means there are WordPress communities around the world that are committed to its growth and development. WordPress lovers contribute to the source code and keep the software up and running.
However, being such an amazing platform to offer your services, entrepreneurs still make mistakes but take it easy as everyone does make blunders, and such flounders further provide you with learning so that you become extra vigilant in the long run and can also give suggestions to other beginners.
- Usage of Poorly-Coded Themes:
Coded themes are the first and most important thing to look at because it builds the foundation for your SEO efforts, and to be frank, most themes are useless in this regard.
Irrespective of the facts that your theme is custom-built, purchased from a theme vendor or downloaded for free from the WordPress warehouse, there are a few acute details you need to evaluate to ensure it will not put you at a disadvantage, including
HTML Validation:
Invalid HTML can cause rendering issues, which affect both users and search engines. You can lose visitors when this happens because your website doesn’t display and/or work properly for them and be prepared to rank poorly. After all, search engines can’t properly read your page and understand the content on it.
There are cases where some errors may not be worth fixing from an ROI (Return on Investment) perspective.
It’s also important to keep in mind that you may not be able to fix some errors because they may be coming from something you can’t edit to make the work better, such as bottom-line functionality in some themes or plugins.
In cases like this, if you are coming across severe errors that are causing interpreting issues, it may make more sense to start from scratch and rebuild from the ground floor.
HTTP Requests:
When we install and activate themes, many of them bring along an odd number of scripts, images, fonts, and other types of files, which interrupts the page’s speed causing it to load more slowly.
The ‘What nonsense is this?’ part is that many themes load these files unnecessarily. Instead of loading files only on pages where they are used, many themes load them on every page, testing the user’s patience as it also results in a significantly slower load speed.
Indeed the speed of the page is critical, both for users and for SEO.
There’s no particular number to aim for, but obviously, fewer is always better from a performance standpoint especially if your website loads slowly. Take your own mobile as an example, whose speed for instance gets affected by thousands of images and videos in your storage so imagine the irritation caused by this wastage.
Excessive DOM Size:
This may sound incredibly technical, but it’s actually pretty simple. It just means we need to ensure that the HTML for your WordPress site is as efficient as possible.
While that may seem trite, efficient HTML code can play a huge role in how well a site performs because each element has an impact on memory usage, style calculations, and layout reflows.
A large DOM tree can slow down your page performance in multiple ways,
Network efficiency and load performance:
A large DOM tree often includes many nodes that aren’t visible when the user first loads the page, which unnecessarily increases data costs for your users and slows down load time.
Runtime performance:
As users and scripts interact with your page, the browser must constantly recompute the position and styling of nodes. A large DOM tree with complicated style rules can severely slow down rendering.
Memory performance:
If your JavaScript uses general query selectors such as a document.querySelectorAll(‘li’), you may be unknowingly storing references to a very large number of nodes, which can overwhelm the memory capabilities of your users’ devices.
Many themes use excessive HTML elements, often nested several levels deep, and this quickly destroys performance.
We see this with page builders, but we also see it at the theme level because most developers focus more on the visual appearance with little regard for the efficiency of code.
- Using Page Builders:
Page builders are used for adding more creativity to your site as these work in the user’s favor by easily allowing them to edit the content, but even their excessive usage becomes a mistake. Why blunder? The problem is that they also create a lot of bloated code, add unnecessary HTTP calls, and often, introduce HTML errors that you can’t find a solution to. Not a single page builder exists that produces clean and efficient code.
- Extra Plug-ins:
One of the best features that WordPress offers is the different plug-ins which again serve different purposes like animations, songs, templates and etc. Some of the best ones are as follows
- Hubspot
- WooCommerce
- WPForms
- All-in-One SEO
- Yoast SEO
- Jetpack
- Elementor
- W3 Total Cache
- Smush
- Borderless
- Akismet Spam Protection
- Weglot
But everything that glitters is not gold as even experimenting with many plugins gives birth to troubles like there’s a wide range of development quality in these plugins. Similarly, in the case of themes, many plugins are poorly coded, which slows down the load speed and introduces HTML errors to your website.
Often, these plugins also load a bunch of unwanted scripts, CSS files, images, and fonts, which further degrades speed and creates a poor user experience.
Then due to its hassle-free application, many people make the mistake of adding too many plugins.
This creativity in return interrupts the speed of your websites to load more slowly no matter how nicely each one may be coded because it still requires processing power to execute the functionality they provide and to include any external files they load.
- Choosing the Wrong Platform
Keep in mind that two types of WordPress exist; one is WordPress.com, which is a blog-hosting platform and the other one is WordPress.org which is a self-hosted open-source medium, so be vigilant while selecting the one that will turn out to be the best for your e-commerce.
- Pay Only for What You Need
Starting your own website will ask for a domain and the majority of the renowned domain registrars force you to buy and avail of services that are not even required for your setup. Instead of wasting money on useless services just pay for what you need by skipping these offers and focusing on your website to grow and be successful.
- Change the Default Username
The cyber-world is a dangerous place, where hackers are always active in misusing your hard work, therefore it is advised to change your username and protect your password by strengthening it using a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters to give a hard time to hackers from spoiling your website.
- Inappropriate Theme
WordPress caters to you with a wide range of themes for different categories; here also understand which themes work best for your e-commerce site. Otherwise selecting the inappropriate theme looks like a misfit resulting in drawing people away and you definitely don’t want such a loss!
- Permalinks Structure
Selecting the right permalink structure is very important for your website as if you change them later after going live can have a huge impact on your website’s traffic. What’s the use of choosing the wrong structure which pushes people away?
- Default Demo Content
After installing WordPress, lots of developers do not bother to change/remove the default content that comes along with the installation. This gives Google to index a chance to index them which is indeed not a healthy practice at all.
- The Right Plugin
A very common error is ignoring the right plugin as that only affects your website’s speed and performance, therefore we suggest you opt for the correct plugins for a faster-loading e-commerce site.
- WordPress Update
When we do not forget to update our mobile applications then why do you ignore WordPress updates? It gives you updates regarding plugins and themes on a regular basis that definitely need to be taken seriously, otherwise, why are you even expecting WordPress to give you the desired results and speed?
Check your e-commerce site today and look if WooCommerce needs an update or not!
- Use Categories and Tags Properly
WordPress has the feature to categorize content with tags. Most web developers forget to use categories and tags in an organized manner or just ignore it.
- Being Inattentive Towards Website Speed and Performance
It’s your venture and you are not paying attention to the website’s speed and performance. How unfair is that? Kindly open the site and identify the mistakes or be ready to shut the entire store.
- Not Optimizing Media
When you take a picture with your iPhone or Android device, the image will generally be significantly larger than it needs to be for use on your website.
These large, high-resolution images are great for printing, or even for cropping a smaller section to be displayed at full size without losing image quality. But if uploaded directly to your WordPress media library, they will often be stored as full-sized, unoptimized images.
Some themes will automatically resize uploads based on a set of dimension pairs to help eliminate this issue. Many do not, however.
- Omitting an XML Sitemap
While everyone can benefit from having an XML sitemap, this is especially important on larger websites because it helps search engines find and scramble all of your pages. Particularly the ones that may be buried deep with few links pointing to them.
Surprisingly, this critical feature is not yet native to WordPress, so you will have to rely on a plugin.
- Overlooking Security
It’s important to point out that there is no way to make your website completely secure. But by taking steps to harden your security, you’ll deter most hackers, with the rare exception of those who are specifically targeting you.
We hope that the blog managed to clear your doubts regarding the mistakes you have to avoid now and now you will do a much better job in developing your WordPress E-commerce site.