12 WooCommerce Best Practices for Building a Profitable Store

If you’re building an eCommerce store, using established best practices increase its chances of success by an order of magnitude.

If you’re not sure what those best practices are, this post will help.

We’re going to use our 30 years of combined eCommerce experience to help you design the most profitable WooCommerce store possible.

We share tips on store optimization and explain –

• Why you need a fast web host
• Why payment options matter
• Why trust is everything

Read this post until the end and you’ll have 12 actionable ideas you can use to give your store the best possible start!

What Customers Look for in an Online Store

First let’s understand what a customer wants to see in an online store.

We used our own experience, both as store owners and customers to come up with this list.

We think eCommerce customers want to see:

• Fast loading pages
• A great mobile store experience
• Clear images and videos of products
• Social proof to help make buying decisions
• A well-designed store that looks professional
• Lots of payment options covering most use cases
• A clear summary of all charges on the checkout page
• Information about price, delivery costs and times on product pages
• Trust badges showing how data is kept secure and the transaction protected

The best practices you’re about to read tackle all these expectations and more!

1. Choose the Right Web Host

Your choice of web host can make or break the user experience.

A fast, secure web host is the foundation of everything to do with your website. You could use the best caching plugin in the world, but if your host is slow, it won’t make a bit of difference.

A good web host will use SSD or NVMe storage and ideally offer caching and CDN too.

Web hosting is about more than speed. It’s also about uptime.

If you’re running a business website or online store, you want it to be functioning when customers come calling. Without at least 99% uptime, you risk that not happening.

99% sounds pretty good right? But that means your store could be inaccessible for 3.65 days per year or 14.4 minutes per day.

That’s too much.

Some hosts offer 99.9% uptime and we would strongly recommend using one if you can.

2. Add Space for Social Proof

Social proof is incredibly important in eCommerce. Everyone reads reviews or checks testimonials to make sure the product matches the hype.

A profitable store needs to work with that.

We recommend adding:

• Store reviews and testimonials on the main store page
• Product reviews and testimonials on the product page
• Reviews of customer service, delivery or general feedback on the checkout page

Use as much social proof as you have to help reassure new customers and provide that extra push towards conversion.

There’s a lot of science behind social proof and it works.

Reviews and testimonials can:

• Increase acceptance for first-time visitors
• Be the final push towards conversion to follow the crowd
• Help convert using our desire to fit in and do what others are doing
• Provide credibility and trust because other customers like your product

We use social proof in all of our stores and find it works incredibly well.

We include reviews, number of reviews, total number of 5 star reviews and testimonials.

We believe each works to help convince the visitor we are a safe bet and our product delivers what it promises.

3. Use the Right WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme and a WooCommerce theme are much the same thing.

They can make or break your store and have a huge influence over how successful it will be.

Put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor.

If the store looks really basic and has few attractive design elements, it isn’t going to put you in a buying mood.

If there’s no search, awkward navigation or there’s too much on the page, you’re probably not going to stay long.

Conversely, if you land on a store page and it looks professional and gives that big brand look and feel, you’re far more likely to trust it and purchase.

That’s what the right WordPress store theme can do.

As the Astra theme is our product, we’re naturally biased in its favor. But read the reviews and try the free version and you’ll quickly see just how good it is!

Explore our WordPress templates.

4. Optimize Checkout

70.19% of visitors to eCommerce stores abandon their carts. 18% do so because the checkout form looks complicated.

An optimized checkout page should do one thing and one thing only. It should funnel the customer through checkout and payment as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

The shorter the journey from product selection to checkout, the fewer carts will be abandoned.

Effective strategies we use in our stores include:

• Offering multiple payment options
• Including trust badges throughout
• Keeping the checkout form as short as possible
• Being transparent about returns and linking to policies
• Using a secure payment gateway provider like PayPal or Stripe
• Making sure it’s always clear what the customer needs to do next
• Always being clear about pricing on product pages, including shipping fees and taxes
• Only asking for the minimum amount of information to be able to complete the purchase

Do all these things and you’ll have everything you need to increase sales and reduce cart abandonment.

Even if you optimize checkout, you’ll still see abandoned carts. It’s a part of eCommerce, but that’s not the end of the story.

You also might want to check out these powerful strategies for minimizing cart abandonment.

5. Ensure Your Store is Secure

Security is critical to the user experience on any WordPress site, but especially for online stores.

If you’re asking customers to provide their private payment information, you need to reassure them it is safe.

Securing your store is essential and should include:

• Using a web host that takes security seriously
• Using industry best practices for data security
• Installing a security plugin to protect your store
• Using a secure payment gateway to handle transaction information

Data security is all about defense in depth. Don’t just rely on your host to manage everything or your security plugin to deliver total security.

Combine your approach, use multiple security systems and take practical precautions to protect customer data.

Then make sure to tell customers all about it. Use security seals and trust badges to show what you’re doing to protect their data.

Do that and you’ll convert many customers who don’t trust websites.

Read more about securing WordPress and online stores.

6. Connect Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides amazing insights into how your WooCommerce store is performing. You can track everything from how many unique visitors you get, where they come from and how long they stay in your store.

You can also set goals that can count how many people purchase, which is very useful indeed.

Analytics requires time and patience to fully understand. However, that effort is truly worth it as you’ll be able to see deeper into store performance than you ever thought possible.

Read more about WooCommerce and Google Analytics.

7. Ensure the Store Works Fast

According to Cloudflare, a page that loads in under 2.4 seconds experiences a 1.9% conversion rate while a page that took over 5 seconds to load converted 0.6%.

That same study cited a Walmart statistic that found every second improvement in page load times increased conversion by 2%.

Those numbers may not sound a lot, but over time, it is.

Plus, do you like waiting for web pages to load? We don’t and your customers probably don’t either.

People have very little patience or tolerance for slow pages, so speed is essential!

A fast WooCommerce store will be a combination of quality web hosting and store optimization. Both of which you have full control over.

Read more about WooCommerce speed optimization.

8. Use Trust Badges to Reassure New Customers

We mentioned trust badges earlier when talking about optimizing checkout and keeping your WooCommerce store secure. We think they are important enough to cover in a little more depth.

Trust badges are visual reassurance for visitors.

If they can see there’s a money back guarantee, that you use SSL, that your store is protected by Norton or McAfee, they are much more likely to purchase.

These are all things we know happen in the background because we know eCommerce. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your average customer is going to know that though.

That’s why we strongly recommend using trust badges on product pages and your checkout page.

If customers can also check out using PayPal or a secure payment provider, they are going to be even happier completing the purchase!

9. Offer Multiple Payment Options

Talking of payments, the more options you provide the more likely a visitor is to buy.

We all prefer different ways of paying.

Whether that’s PayPal, debit card, credit card, digital wallets or Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), if you cover them all, nothing is left to chance.

If there are other payment methods available in your region, include those too.

Think AliPay or WeChat Pay for Asia, Klarna or Blik for Europe, Discover or Apple Pay for the US and you won’t go far wrong.

Many WooCommerce payment gateways handle multiple payment types so offering choice isn’t as difficult as you might think.

10. Optimize For Mobile

Mobile use now outstrips desktop, with mobile web access now hitting just over 58%. If you don’t optimize your WooCommerce store for mobile users, you could be alienating over half the web!

That figure is why we worked so hard to ensure the Astra WordPress theme works flawlessly on mobile.

Not only does it work for that 58%, it also meets Google’s Mobile First requirements.

Use Astra and you could not only keep mobile users onside, you also benefit from mobile first SEO benefits too!

If you use a different theme, make sure it’s fully responsive and test it out on your phone before going live.

It’s better to find out a theme doesn’t work yourself rather than customers tell you!

Once you’re up and running and you’re earning, you could even turn your WooCommerce store into an app!

11. Use Lots of Product Images and Videos

We don’t just eat with our eyes, we shop with them too. That’s why we recommend using lots of high quality product images and videos wherever possible.

Here’s why:

• 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos to make purchasing decisions
• High-quality product photos had a 94% higher conversion rate than low-quality photos
• 22% of returns are due to the product looking different in person
• Product pages with photos received 95% more organic traffic than those without
• 90% of online buyers say that photo quality is the most crucial factor in an online sale

(Source)

If we cannot see the product in person, images and videos are the next best thing.

That’s why we strongly recommend learning a little photography and using a good camera or phone to showcase products.

Don’t forget to optimize product images so they don’t slow your store!

12. Implement Abandoned Cart Recovery

If over 70% of store visitors abandon their shopping cart, we need to do everything we can to recover as many of them as possible.

The remote nature of eCommerce limits what we can do, but there is one effective way to recover abandoned carts.

Use a cart recovery tool.

Cart recovery tools send automated emails on a defined schedule to try to lure back people who added items to their cart but didn’t purchase.

They depend on the visitor being logged in or providing their email address, but if you can capture that, they can be very effective.

Read more about abandoned cart recovery.

Take Your WooCommerce Store Forward

All the WooCommerce best practices on this page will get your store off to a great start, but what next? What else can you do to take things further?

Watch this video to see the 10 best WooCommerce addons you can use to take your store to the next level:

WooCommerce Best Practices for a More Profitable Store

There are no guarantees of success in any business. But, if you follow these WooCommerce best practices, you’ll give yourself the best chance of making a profit.

We use many of these in our own stores and they can be incredibly effective.

Basically, the more you can do to make the customer journey as fast and as enjoyable as possible, the better for them and your bottom line!

Do you have any tips for new WooCommerce store owners? Use any of these best practices and have comments? Tell us about it below!