Every successful online business has a well-structured and effective website. A good website can open the door to a large customer base available for you to market and sell to. WordPress is a well known open source content management system. In this article we’ll take a look at WordPress as a platform for ecommerce.
Why Choose WordPress?
If you’re already a WordPress website owner considering expanding your online business presence, WordPress makes it easy. Many themes and plugins have been developed specifically for ecommerce websites, bringing increased functionality and useful features to your customers. We’ll take a deeper look into themes and plugins in a moment. Another great feature about WordPress is that it is open source, so if you need to do a quick bit of coding to fix something, you can. Now let”s take a look at themes and plugins.
WordPress Themes
Simply Google the term “WordPress themes for ecommerce” and you’re sure to find many pages of free and premium themes. Themes are templates which come packed with intuitive features, which vary depending on the theme. Themes can save time because they function as the foundation of a website; all you need to do is figure out your color scheme, logo placement, and other content, and decide which theme features to use.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. Plugins can accomplish anything from helping you with your SEO ranking to catching and eliminating spam comments. A good plugin should be flexible and updated regularly. Just like themes, plugins can be found very easily. At the time this article was written, WordPress recorded 31,000 plugins downloaded. Some of them are free, while others require a one time purchase. Find out which ones are recommended and affirmed for an ecommerce website. Our personal favorite is Woocommerce.
Is WordPress A Complete Ecommerce Solution?
We’ve seen that WordPress makes running an online store easy with the use of plugins and themes, but does this make it a complete ecommerce solution? Well, like any technology there are good things and bad things. We’ve already discussed some of the good, now let’s take a look at the bad. WordPress is very popular which makes it a big target of hackers, and for ecommerce websites, security is very important. There’s also a chance that as your plugins and themes become updated, as well as WordPress itself, you might experience some compatibility issues which could result in a ruined website, if only for a few hours. However most of these types of problems can be easily fixed by deactivating and then reactivating your plugins.
Conclusion
Now with all that in mind, let’s answer the question: Is WordPress a complete ecommerce solution? WordPress is a free, open source platform that allows you to extend its functionality beyond what comes in the box to augment your website. It’s easy to add, maintain, and update products and set up a blog to promote your services and connect with your customers. As long as you keep in mind the security and possible compatibility concerns, you should have a great ecommerce platform with which you can use to grow your business and sell your products. We personally recommend a WordPress/Woocommerce setup to any potential client that is looking for an ecommerce platform.
[av_hr class=’default’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ av_uid=’av-iko43′]
[av_hr class=’invisible’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ av_uid=’av-fmrm3′]
[gravityform id=”1″ name=”List Sign-up Form” title=”false” description=”false”]
[av_hr class=’default’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ av_uid=’av-9e4f7′]
You must be logged in to post a comment.