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November 2017’s Best Magento, CMS, and Design/Development Content

Tis the season! We hope you’re ready for the holidays and your site is fully optimized for the coming rush. Still unprepared? Check out this month’s roundup. Get to it before the weather turns frightful! If you’re looking for the same great articles the rest of the year, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.…

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Own Your eCommerce Platform With Magento Or WooCommerce

Etsy Alternatives: Own Your eCommerce Platform With Magento Or WooCommerce

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

Since it was founded 12 years ago, Etsy has grown into the leading marketplace for handmade and vintage items. Thousands of creatives and makers have built businesses on Etsy. But there’s a risk in relying exclusively on Etsy to market and sell products, a risk that’s common to all platforms of its type. You don’t control the platform and you don’t set the rules. Ultimately, all platforms are managed to serve the interests of their owners and the investors, a situation that often creates tensions and conflicts with users of the platform.

This is a problem for eCommerce merchants and publishers alike, who eventually find the constraints of their chosen platform limiting. As Etsy seller Lisa Jacobs found:

“As I started to grow, though, I came up against some limitations. What makes sense for Etsy as a whole (all shops look alike and are run the same) started to irritate me.”

Owning the platform you use to sell gives you control over your eCommerce business. When you control the platform, you decide what your store looks like and how it functions, how products are displayed, the extensions you install, and the promotions you run.

Alternatives to Etsy

The best way to reassert control over your eCommerce store is to choose an eCommerce application hosted on specialist eCommerce hosting. The application provides the eCommerce functionality and the hosting provides the bandwidth and infrastructure. Platforms like Etsy combine both aspects of online retail, but by keeping them separate store owners gain more control and the ability to migrate to a different hosting platform or eCommerce application should the need arise.

It’s best to choose a specialist eCommerce hosting provider to ensure that your store benefits from the optimal hosting environment and superior performance.

Magento

Magento is a dedicated eCommerce application capable of supporting everything from small stores to the largest enterprise retailers. Many of the biggest independent eCommerce brands choose Magento because it provides everything they need to build a world-class eCommerce experience. Magento itself includes a comprehensive set of features, and Magento retailers can extend their store with any of thousands of free and premium extensions.

Magento is available in two versions: Magento Community Edition, which is free and full featured, and Magento Enterprise Edition, which is suitable for larger stores and includes additional features and support.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce plugin for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. WordPress is flexible enough to provide an uncompromised eCommerce experience with WooCommerce, and if you’re already familiar with WordPress, you’ll have no problem getting to grips with WooCommerce. Almost 30% of eCommerce stores run on WooCommerce, and it has a large ecosystem of extensions that add enhanced functionality.

Etsy is a solid platform for new eCommerce retailers, but if you need more control and flexibility than Etsy can provide, Magento and WooCommerce on world-class hosting provide everything you need to build a stunning, mobile-friendly, and flexible online retail store.

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eCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce

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What Makes A Theme SEO Friendly?

SEO-Friendly WordPress Themes: What Makes A Theme SEO Friendly?

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

WordPress themes can make a big difference to the search engine optimization of a WordPress site. For the most part, any well-written theme is SEO-friendly, including the majority of free themes. In fact, some of the best-selling premium themes aren’t so great for SEO because they’re overloaded with features and offer poor performance.

Choosing a theme solely on its purported SEO capabilities isn’t wise. There are many other factors that should influence your choice of theme, but once you have settled on the ideal theme for your project, it’s sensible to consider whether it’s going to provide the best foundation for future search engine optimization.

Performance

As I have already implied, the performance of a WordPress site is taken into consideration by Google and other search engines. All else being equal, a faster site will rank better in search engine results than a slower site. Many factors contribute to site performance, including WordPress hosting, caching, and the use of a content distribution network, but the front-end provided by a theme can cause performance problems, especially if it’s poorly performance optimized and has excessive page weight.

Before you choose a theme, run its demo page through performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools to get a sense of how much attention its developer has paid to performance optimization.

Validity

Although code validity is less important than many other factors, it’s beneficial to choose a theme that is coded well and that is guaranteed to load properly on browsers and search crawlers. You shouldn’t expect perfection, but it’s worth taking the time to run themes through a code validator.

Mobile-Friendly

Mobile-friendliness is a key aspect of modern search engine optimization. Google will not rank pages in mobile search results if they aren’t optimized for mobile devices.

Any WordPress theme worth considering will include responsive design, but mobile friendliness includes more than basic responsive design: Flash should be avoided, typography should be of a reasonable size, and pages should not be overly large.

If you want to know whether a theme is mobile-friendly, check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Structured Data Support

Schema.org is a standard structured data format that can be used to give extra information to search engines about the content on a page. Rich snippets on search engine results pages depend on Schema.org markup and so does the display of items on many social media networks. The more information you can provide to Google, the better the display and ranking of your pages is likely to be. If you’re unsure whether a theme supports structured data, ask the developer.

It’s important to understand that although a theme contributes to SEO-friendliness, it’s one factor among many. A great theme is worthless if the hosting is slow or the WordPress back-end is improperly optimized. You may want to consider installing a caching plugin and an SEO plugin in addition to choosing an SEO-friendly WordPress theme. And, of course, you should opt for performance-optimized managed WordPress hosting.

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WordPress

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Eight Exceptional WooCommerce Extensions For Your New eCommerce Store

Eight Exceptional WooCommerce Extensions For Your New eCommerce Store

Photo by qimono on Pixabay

We recently introduced WooCommerce hosting to our range of performance-optimized eCommerce hosting plans. WooCommerce is the perfect eCommerce platform for retailers familiar with WordPress or who want to take advantage of the simplicity and power of one of the most popular online retail solutions in the world.

Just like WordPress, WooCommerce benefits from a large ecosystem of plugins (called extensions in the WooCommerce world) to enhance and augment its basic features. I’d like to take a look at eight plugins I think new WooCommerce users should be aware of. The extensions are a mixture of free, freemium, and premium plugins that showcase the strength of WooCommerce as an adaptable and versatile eCommerce solution.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions adds advanced subscription support to WooCommerce stores. Subscription-based eCommerce is increasingly popular because subscriptions provide retailers with predictable long-term income and increase the revenue associated with each conversion.

WooCommerce Subscriptions offers multiple billing schedules with automatic payments, built-in renewal notifications, and detailed reports.

WooCommerce Memberships

As the name suggests, WooCommerce Memberships provides site-wide membership plans that can be sold, granted to specific customers, and used to create members-only areas of a store.

Google Product Feed

Google Shopping is an effective marketing channel for many eCommerce retailers, in spite of its recent tussle with the EU. For Google Shopping to accurately represent an eCommerce store’s products, store owners must provide a feed of product data to the Google Merchant Center. The Google Product Feed extension is the easiest way to supply Google with the information it needs.

Smart Coupons

Smart Coupons is the leading coupon solution for WooCommerce. As you’d expect, customers are able to buy coupons for themselves or as gifts, and redeem those coupons on checkout. Smart Coupons is also capable of automatically generating coupons in scenarios specified by the store owner.

MailChimp For WordPress

MailChimp For WordPress isn’t strictly speaking a WooCommerce extension; it’s a WordPress plugin that is fully compatible with WooCommerce and is well worth a look for any eCommerce merchants that use email marketing.

MailChimp for WordPress can add opt-in forms and other email harvesting tools to WooCommerce store, and the details will be synced right to your MailChimp marketing lists.

Product Enquiry For WordPress

This is a simple plugin for eCommerce retailers who want to be responsive to their customers’ questions and requests for information. The Product Enquiry extension includes widgets that allow customers to make an enquiry or request a quote. Requests are sent straight to the store’s owner or sales team by email.

Advanced Woo Search

Any store that sells more than a few products should invest in a world-class search experience, and it doesn’t get much better than Advanced Woo Search, which provides fast, accurate, smart ordered search results to your customers.

WooCommerce Discounts Per Payment Method

This is a simple plugin that does one job: displaying and applying discounts depending on the customer’s chosen payment method.

I’ve only looked at a small number of the available WooCommerce extensions and WordPress plugins that can be used to enhance your WooCommerce store. If experienced WooCommerce users have favorites of their own they’d like to highlight, don’t hesitate to give them a shout in the comments below.

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eCommerce, WooCommerce, WordPress

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