Several people believe that scaling WooCommerce is next to impossible. This is not accurate. WooCommerce provides scalability that makes it flexible enough to accommodate various products. Hence, WooCommerce enables you to start and grow your online stores to any size you wish. The performance of your WooCommerce store, as well as user experience, are not altered by scaling at all.
1. Factors That Influence the Scaling of a WooCommerce Store
While scaling is one of the key features of WooCommerce, there are three points you need to take into account before scaling.
- Traffic
One of the foremost elements that affect online store performance is the amount of traffic it encounters. So if the products you sell are incredibly popular, your product pages need to be customized to make it easy to handle the huge amount of traffic.
- Server Hardware
Choosing the right hosting provider is crucial to the growth of your online store. It can make or break your business. Before settling on your website host, you need to ensure they offer features such as an SSL certificate, support for a CDN, and caches, which are a necessity for enhanced performance. Your WooCommerce store can be scaled without any glitches if your hosting provider is top-notch.
- Website code
WooCommerce plugins must be updated regularly for your WooCommerce store to scale and run at optimum capacity. You should check for plugins and theme updates in your WordPress admin space routinely.
2. The Metric of Scale: Add to Carts per Minute
To begin with, trace your present volume and then attempt to predict the scope of growth in this area. You need to ensure your sales data is part of the analysis to get a complete understanding of the metric. You need to regularly keep a tab on the number of customers that Add to Cart. This analysis should include a daily, weekly and monthly report, especially to contrast normal sales days with product launch ones.
3. Choose the Right Hosting Provider
The crucial element to make your WooCommerce store a success is managed WooCommerce Hosting. All of your files, including images and code, are saved on the hosting server. It also makes your site easily accessible for your customers.
Your hosting provider plays an incredibly important part in the growth of your online store. Hence, you must make the right choice that offers the following features.
- Scalability
When it comes to your online store, you need to think long term. Even if your store is on a smaller scale right now, it will grow and need more resources. So you need to consider your hosting needs based on potential expansion. You should ensure that your web hosting provider allows you to upgrade your package and increase server resources as your WooCommerce store grows. Cloud hosting solutions are highly recommended in such cases due to their customizable resource allocation.
- Guaranteed uptime and sufficient security
Security, as well as uptime, are the pillars of running a successful WooCommerce website. The amount of time your website is up and running is known as uptime. While the site can be down on certain occasions, these instances should be a rare occurrence. More than 99 percent uptime should be a requirement when you choose a website host.
An SSL certificate guarantees high security that enables your users to make safe online payments on your store. Along with these, a firewall, malware scanning, and software security should also be provided by your hosting provider.
- Support and Maintenance
Most people often opt for the lowest priced hosting. However, poor services can be one of the many downsides that tag along with a lowered cost. The more money you shell out for a better hosting plan, the more amount of support you will receive from your service provider.
You should check the reviews thoroughly before committing to a hosting provider. The customer support they offer must be reliable and be available 24/7 through different channels like phone, email, and live chat.
- Leveraging a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A majority of web hosting companies provide their entire user base with site content. Being placed across the world avoids putting you through the annoyance of downloading videos, images, CSS, and assets from your website. Alongside this, the network also serves users. Therefore, there is an increase in uptime. Assets are also delivered at a faster rate. In case you have a global audience with a ton of files and are getting ready for a rise in traffic, CDN can a boon to smoothen your road.
Conclusion-
WooCommerce provides enormous scalability that makes it extremely useful in contrast to other eCommerce platforms in the eCommerce market. It can be customized at a highly affordable price and provides a lot of flexibility. WooCommerce is the perfect platform for you to start your business at an economical cost.