Running an online store requires you to wear a wide variety of hats. From product creation to marketing genius, sometimes you feel like you have to do it all.

What if there was a tool that made your life easier? WooCommerce helps to simplify the creation and running of ecommerce stores.

It’s one of the top WordPress plugins and among the top ecommerce platforms. It’s packed with powerful features that help you do far more with your store.

1. Professional Style

Looks are important when it comes to online stores. Would you really want to shop on a site that looks more like a poorly designed personal blog? No. You wouldn’t trust it.

One of the reasons 28% of all ecommerce stores use WooCommerce is the plugin helps them to create a professional looking store. Not only does it help a site look more professional, but it provides you with all the features a shopper would expect, such as shopping cart management, an easy to use checkout process and easy to browse product pages.

2. Free To Use

While large businesses might have plenty of money to invest, small businesses and startups aren’t usually that lucky. WooCommerce was created to help everyone create an online store to be proud of. The basic plugin and features, which are ideal for smaller stores, are completely free.

The best part is if you need to upgrade, you don’t have to purchase everything. You only pay for the extra features you need.

3. Secure And Compatible

It’s no secret that WordPress is often a target for cybercriminals. However, WooCommerce has a dedicated team that creates regular security and feature updates. Add this to the regular security updates for the WordPress platform and you have a secure online store.

Along with security, WooCommerce is compatible with numerous themes and plugins. To prevent any annoying theme conflicts during updates, WooCommerce even has their own set of themes to ensure you don’t lose site functionality during updates or upgrades.

4. Built-In Analytics

Analytics are crucial for any business, physical or online. However, far too many businesses complicate analytics or don’t gather data at all. With analytics tools and plugins, you mainly get data about page views, bounce rates and other details about your website.

With WooCommerce, you get data about your products and conversion rates. For instance, if you have five featured products on your page, do you know which one gets the most clicks? Which one converts best? Which leads to further sales of other products? What about how far shoppers go into the checkout process before abandoning their carts?

Analytics help you better understand your conversion rates and execute improved marketing strategies. The best part is all of these is built into WooCommerce. You don’t need yet another plugin to help you gather data about your sales and products.

5. Customise For All Needs

While all of the above is great, WooCommerce shines most when it comes to customisation. The sheer amount of customisation might seem overwhelming at first, but once you’ve explored your options, you’ll love it.

It all starts with customising how your store looks. After all, you want your products to stand out and a unique storefront is a large part of that. Some of the other notable customisation options include:

• Offering a variety of payment methods
• Creating your own checkout process
• Changing product layouts and inventory pages
• Adding random sales at a moment’s notice
• Incorporating numerous extensions to work with other services
• Choosing where to ship
• Offering any type of product, both physical and digital

There’s very little you can’t customise. The idea is to help you create the ideal store for your needs. This is part of why WooCommerce has become so popular. It fits every business in every industry. With a few tweaks, your online store looks just like you want and incorporates the features you need, such as automatically calculating taxes, managing inventory and displaying your products so shoppers want to click to find out more.

Are you building an online store? Contact me today to learn more about WooCommerce and how to use it to create the best possible ecommerce store.

Image: Glenn Carstens-Peters

It’s the goal of any ecommerce site – increasing online sales, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

You’ve probably tried different marketing methods and offered discounts. The results still aren’t as impressive as you would like.

While it might sound like a simple solution, WordPress plugins could be the solution to your sales problem. The right plugin makes your site easier to manage and better for your customers.

Why Your Sales Are Down

Before diving into which plugins to use, let’s take a look at why your sales are down. You have great products, but visitors aren’t converting into customers.

One of the problems might be that visitors forget about your site. Most visitors won’t make a purchase immediately, but instead, they’ll do a little research first. If you offer a limited time discount in exchange for their email address, you’re able to contact visitors long after they’ve left your site and remind them to come back.

Another issue stems from complicated or unsecured checkout processes. The easier it is for a visitor to make a purchase, the more likely they are to follow through instead of abandoning their carts.

Finally, your site may not be showcasing your products in the best light. Videos, images and engaging descriptions are what persuade customers to buy something. Think about it like this. Would you be more likely to buy clothing online with multiple images from different angles or a single small image? You’d want to see multiple images before making a choice.

Three Changes To Make Right Now

The first big change you need to make is offering a way for visitors to sign up for emails. This is how you stay in contact with visitors and continue to make sales. Opt-in forms that are easy to exit work best. TemplateMonster increased signups by 600% after adding an easy exit signup form. Of course, you also need to offer value in your emails, such as discounts and items related to what they’ve viewed on your site.

The second change is simplifying and securing the checkout process. You need a few simple steps and a valid SSL certificate to encrypt customer data. Your checkout process also needs to offer multiple ways to pay, such as credit card or online payments, such as PayPal.

The final change is to optimise your product pages. Better descriptions, 360 degree videos or images of products and zoomable images help boost sales.

Increase Sales With WordPress Plugins

Increasing online sales might sound complicated, but WordPress plugins make it easy. For best results, use an all-in-one ecommerce plugin that also works with other services, such as email newsletters. These plugins help take care of all the major problems listed above.

The most popular by far is WooCommerce. It currently powers 39% of all ecommerce stores. The plugin makes it easy to manage your store, offer secure checkouts, accept various payment types, and it integrates with other services.

WP eCommerce is the second most popular ecommerce plugin. While it’s not quite as feature rich as WooCommerce, it works well for simple ecommerce stores.

If your ecommerce site only offers digital downloads, Easy Digital Downloads may work best for you. It offers powerful reporting, easy integration with other services and makes it easy for customers to make and receive their purchases.

Among these three, most stores still choose WooCommerce since it’s already compatible with a variety of other services, such as PayPal and MailChimp. Think of a WordPress plugin as your secret weapon to increasing sales online. When it’s easier to manage your store and easier for customers to interact with your store, sales increase.

Boost Your Sales Now

It doesn’t matter what type of marketing you use if your online store isn’t powered by a reliable WordPress plugin. When you want to make a great impression on visitors and keep them coming back for more, you need a store that offers everything a visitor wants, such as smooth checkouts, easy email signups and great ways to views products. You could do it all manually or rely on a plugin to do the heavy lifting for you.

Ready to implement a WordPress plugin to improve your ecommerce store? Contact StuartMedia today to see how to get started. 

Image: Crew

Understanding your visitors’ behavior is key to knowing how to market and even revamp your website.

With an analytics plugin for WordPress, you’re able to learn where your visitors originate from, how long they’re on your site, which pages perform best and much more.

You can use all of this data to improve your content, see which calls-to-action buttons work best and where to concentrate your marketing efforts. If you want to get the most from WordPress, try one of these analytics plugins.

Piwik

For those who prefer open source software, Piwik might be the perfect analytics plugin for you. It’s open source and self-hosted, just like WordPress. It’s similar to Google Analytics, but all data is stored by you versus being stored on a third party server. Piwik also offers a cloud hosted solution for a monthly fee if you don’t want to have to host it yourself. It’s highly customisable and ideal for sites of all sizes.

Google Analytics By Yoast

If you already use Yoast, you might want to consider Google Analytics by Yoast. As the name implies, the plugin integrates with Google Analytics. Yoast provides both a free and premium version based upon your needs. The built in dashboard makes it easy to see what your visitors are doing and where they’re coming from. You’re able to set up specific reports to quickly see just the data you need most.

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator is another way to integrate Google Analytics with your site. It supports advanced code tracking to track everything from page interactions to Google offers. You can choose to show your visitors some of your page stats or you can choose to hide all data. Either way, you have access to an easy to use dashboard for tracking data on every page of your site.

WP Statistics

If you’d prefer not to use Google Analytics at all, WP Statistics has you covered. It’s an ideal way to track data without relying upon a third party. All data comes from WordPress and the plugin provides a detailed dashboard for you to view all data. It’s easy to export data to create your own custom reports and even email the data to yourself or others. It offers just as much data without needing to connect to Google Analytics like many other plugins.

Jetpack

Jetpack isn’t just an analytics plugin, but that is one of the features the plugin offers. If you’re trying to minimise the number of plugins you use, Jetpack might be a good choice. It may not be quite as detailed as some of the other analytics options on this list, but it provides concise stats without adding any extra load burden on your servers. It’s the combination of analytics with numerous other tools such as visitor engagement, security and site customisation that make this plugin stand out.

Clicky Analytics

Clicky Analytics is another major alternative to Google Analytics. The plugin automatically installs the Clicky Web Analytics code on to your site’s pages. The dashboard widget displays detailed statistics and information to help you understand where visitors are coming from, how long they’re spending on your site and much more. Some features of the plugin, such as video analytics, do require a premium account with Clicky. The best part of this plugin is all data is in real time so you can quickly tell if any changes or marketing efforts are paying off immediately.

Conclusion

No WordPress site is complete without an analytics plugin. The one you choose mainly depends on your needs and preferences. Different dashboards, available statistics, reporting tools and even cost are all things to consider when choosing the right one for you.

Need an analytics plugin for your site, but aren’t sure where to start? Contact StuartMedia for help with your choice and installation. 

Image: Blue Mountain Media 

WordPress plugins are the ideal way to add functionality and improve performance to WordPress sites.

While there are thousands of free and premium plugins available, I have my own list of favorites. From clients’ sites to my own sites, I’ve used all of these on a regular basis.

Each adds something useful to the site. From ecommerce tools to improved SEO, each is designed to make the sites I develop even better.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms provides a drag and drop interface for creating basic and advanced forms. It’s easy to build and customise forms to meet any site’s needs. You can even create your own fields and schedule how long a form is displayed.

Takeaway: If you’re building forms for WordPress, this plugin has you covered. It’s used on millions of sites for a reason.

WordPress SEO By Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular plugins for optimising posts and pages. SEO can be confusing, but this plugin makes it as easy as filling in a few blanks. It double checks your content to ensure it’s optimised. It doesn’t just focus on keywords. It also creates XML sitemaps, provides meta and link element control and improves RSS feeds.

Takeaway: Don’t try to manage SEO fully on your own. Let this plugin give you the help you need for a more optimised site.

WooCommerce

Run a full ecommerce store with the WooCommerce plugin. You can manage inventory, accept payments, create sales reports, run marketing campaigns and much more. The long list of features provides everything you need for your store. Plus, there are hundreds of extensions available to boost the power of the plugin.

Takeaway: No WordPress ecommerce site is complete without this plugin. It currently powers 24% of all ecommerce sites.

Jetpack

Jetpack offers a wide variety of features for WordPress sites. My favorite features include WordPress.com Stats, Publicize and Sharing. The first provides detailed stats without degrading site performance. The latter two make it easy to automatically share posts and provide one click social media sharing.

Takeaway: Use just the features you need to optimise and learn more about your site. Plus, it doesn’t harm a site’s performance.

WP Migrate DB Pro

Migrating WordPress sites can be time consuming and difficult. WP Migrate DB Pro helps save valuable time so clients’ sites are moved quickly. It gives developers full control over the migration process, including backing up the database.

Takeaway: Reduce the stress and hassle of migration. Use this plugin instead.

Automatic Domain Changer

Automatic Domain Changer does exactly what the name implies. It’s a life saver for ensuring a smoother migration from one domain to another. The plugin detects domain name changes and updates all your WordPress tables to reflect any changes.

Takeaway: This is another must have plugin for WordPress migrations. It helps prevent annoying domain errors during the process.

Custom Sidebars Pro

Custom Sidebars Pro gives you full control over customising exactly how, where and even when widgets appear on a site. It integrates with the widgets area in WordPress to make it easier to manage complex widgets across the entire site.

Takeaway: Using this plugin gives you far more control over widget customisation. It also makes managing the look and feel of widgets even easier.

Easy Add Thumbnail

Easy Add Thumbnail automatically adds the feature image ID to posts, including old ones. It doesn’t actually change anything in your database. This removes the need to manually set it for every post. It’s ideal for any themes that don’t automatically add thumbnails for featured images.

Takeaway: Adding the thumbnail meta key for old posts takes hours. This plugin does it quickly and prevents you from forgetting to do it on future posts.

W3 Total Cache

A cache plugin is a must for optimising WordPress site performance. W3 Total Cache can boost page loading speeds by up to 10x when it’s fully configured. This helps improve a site’s rank and visitor satisfaction. It helps improve server performance and handles compression for optimal bandwidth savings.

Takeaway: Visitors expect sites to load quickly. This caching plugin gives site the extra speed boost they need to prevent visitors from leaving due to slow loading pages.

Post Thumbnail Editor

Some WordPress themes create thumbnail cropping chaos. Post Thumbnail Editor provides an interface to manually fix the random sizing and cropping issues of thumbnails on WordPress sites. This allows you to create a more uniform and professional look for thumbnails across the entire site.

Takeaway: Automated thumbnail sizing tools don’t always work as expected. Use this plugin to fix any issues left behind.

Conclusion

I don’t just use these on clients’ sites. I also use them on my own WordPress sites: Retro Race Cars and The Startup Pitch. Professional developers utilise these plugins and many others to provide the best sites for their clients. It’s important to have a developer set up these plugins to ensure a site receives the most benefit.

Thinking of using any of these WordPress plugins on your own site? Contact StuartMedia today to see which ones are best for your needs. 

Image: Rob Davies

It’s great to give readers something for free, but membership sites give visitors something more valuable.

Building a membership business doesn’t have to be complicated. WordPress has everything necessary to create professional membership sites.

Boost revenue and sell valuable resources straight through your WordPress site by adding in a few extra features and plugins.

Membership Site Basics

Membership sites allow businesses to sell digital content and services. Members can sign up for a set period to access restricted areas of the site. You can change permissions on the site to allow for varying membership levels on a single WordPress site. Payments are accepted through your site via your desired payment method, such a PayPal or credit card. Non-members are only able to access free content, such as blog posts or product announcements.

Takeaway: Membership businesses are extremely popular and offer an easy way to increase business profits. Site visitors are eager to sign up to gain exclusive content and services. WordPress developers are highly knowledgeable on how to set up both basic and advanced WordPress member sites.

Types Of Membership Sites

While there are really  no restrictions to the type of membership site you create, the majority fall into five different types. Each has its own benefits. The one you choose to create depends on solely on what you wish to sell and offer to members. The most common types include:

• Courses – Sell access to educational courses complete with exclusive course materials, lessons, videos and even forums for students to interact.
• Periodical Content – Sell access to regularly uploaded content such as articles, tutorials, podcasts, videos and ebooks. This is the most common type.
• Evergreen Content – Sell access to previously created content a little at a time once a member signs up. This requires creating a larger content base to before signing up members.
• Downloads – Sell access to special members only downloads such as software, ebooks, videos and more.
• Community – Sell access to a moderated community for members to discuss topics related to your business. This requires an existing visitor base to create a thriving a community and the business will need to be involved in the community discussions.

Each of these types can be set up for a pre-defined period or lifetime. You can also restrict access to different levels, such as only offering certain downloads for standard members and additional downloads for premium members. Businesses can customise these membership types as much as they want to fit their business model.

Takeaway: Take the time before setting up a membership business to decide what you want to sell, create the necessary material and developer a membership structure. This makes building the site much easier. Plus, if you hire a WordPress developer, they’ll have an easier time turning your vision into reality.

Using Membership Plugins

One of the easiest ways to build a membership business with WordPress is by installing plugins specifically designed for this purpose. These plugins add all the membership features you need without drastically re-designing your site. They add features such as password protected material, membership levels, discounts, shopping carts, course creation and much more. Some plugins are free while others require a one-time, monthly or yearly fee.

Each membership plugin has its own unique feature set. Choose a plugin that includes all the features your membership site will need. If you can’t find one that does it all, hire a WordPress developer to build a custom plugin for your WordPress site. Most WordPress member sites utilize one of the following six plugins:

• Membership – Available in a free lite version and fee based pro version. It offers forums, protected areas, membership levels, resource areas and more.
• S2Member – Available in different licensing structures. The highly configurable plugin offers protected content, integration with Amazon S3/CloudFront, accept payments, add discounts and more.
• Paid Memberships Pro – The plugin is completely free, but will cost $97 for additional support from the developers. It offers all basic membership features and even provides trial membership options.
• Restrict Content – A free version is available, but the pro version is what most businesses need. It offers payment features, protected content, membership levels, discounts, reporting and more.
• MemberPress – Requires an annual fee and offers unlimited membership packages and levels. It’s similar to Restrict Content, but business may prefer the extremely user friendly interface.
• WP eMember – Requires a fee and offers unlimited membership levels, automated member setup, multi-site licensing and much more.

Takeaway: Numerous membership plugins are available. If possible, try a free version or demo of plugins first to see if the features fit your needs. Of course, custom plugins are always an option.

Conclusion

Membership business sites are easy to create with WordPress. You don’t need a special site. You can run your normal site and membership site through the same WordPress installation.

If you’re ready to build a membership based business through WordPress, contact StuartMedia today for everything from developing the site to custom built membership plugins.

Image: Robert S. Donovan