WordPress isn’t just for blogging. Many big brands use WordPress ecommerce to run their websites.
WordPress offers powerful and customizable solutions for businesses of any size from small start-up retailers to multinational enterprise companies.
Looking for inspiration to build your online store with WordPress? Keep reading to see the top reasons big brands use WordPress, along with five ecommerce WordPress examples.
Why Big Brands Use WordPress
WordPress runs nearly half of the websites on the internet. What makes the content management system so popular? As an open source ecommerce platform, WordPress offers benefits and flexibility that proprietary website builders and ecommerce platforms cannot.
Benefits of using WordPress include:
Cost. WordPress is free. You only pay for WordPress hosting and any premium themes or plugins. Proprietary web platforms often require annual or monthly subscriptions. They also limit the number of visitors, transactions, or user accounts.
Ease of Use. WordPress is easy and fast to set up, especially if you purchase a managed WordPress hosting package. The learning curve for WordPress isn’t too steep either. Most people can figure out how to update a WordPress site with minimal training.
Control. With WordPress, you maintain complete control and ownership of your data.
Customization. Since WordPress is open source, enterprises can modify the code as needed. WordPress is infinitely customizable. Even if you’re uncomfortable with modifying the core WordPress code, you can still customize your site with plugins.
Themes and Plugin Options. Because of WordPress’s popularity, the platform has one of the largest markets for premium themes and plugins. With so many choices, WordPress users don’t have any problems picking the perfect theme or finding a plugin to activate a certain feature or complete an integration.
Community. WordPress has a robust and active user community. User communities help companies in two ways. First, when troubleshooting an issue, you can find a solution on a support forum or YouTube channel. Many developers and agencies create quality content and tutorials to help you learn how to use WordPress. You can also find tutorials from the Hostdedi team on this blog, including how to set up a WordPress store. Second, an active community helps with recruiting. The larger a platform’s user base, the easier it is to find and hire developers.
Scalability. WordPress and WooCommerce offer limitless possibilities. Assuming you have quality hosting and plugins, you shouldn’t experience problems with scaling WooCommerce for enterprise-level sales volumes.
5 Ecommerce WordPress Examples from Big Brands
WordPress’ versatile platform powers everything from food blogs to major news sites. Here are five examples of big brands using WordPress ecommerce. Each of these sites uses the WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce enables businesses to add ecommerce functionality to any WordPress site.
1. Dr. Scholl’s
People around the world recognize this iconic foot care brand. For more than 100 years, Dr. Scholl’s has provided shoe inserts and other treatments. The brand added an ecommerce function to their existing WordPress website with the help of WooCommerce. Now customers can easily find and purchase the best products to help alleviate their problems.
2. Nalgene
Originally developed for plastic pipette jars for science labs, Nalgene quickly grew into one of the most popular outdoor brands. Their BPA-free water bottles continue to increase in popularity as consumers look for more sustainable and eco-friendly products. Nalgene’s WordPress ecommerce site lets buyers view their wide selection of products and even customize bottles.
3. Airstream
Best known for their shiny aluminum travel trailers, Airstream also sells campsites and other accessories directly through their website. So while you’ll still need to go into a dealership to buy an RV, their WordPress-powered site offers a selection of camping gear, T-shirts, and home goods for the inside of your trailer.
4. JOCO
Like Nalgene, JOCO cups and containers increased in popularity as consumers looked for environmentally friendly options. JOCO products contain no plastic and come in various colors. Their clean and easy WordPress site lets customers preview all the different options.
5. Wienerschnitzel
You don’t actually have to sell anything on your website to utilize WooCommerce’s platform. Hot dog fast-food chain Wienerschnitzel uses WordPress and the WooCommerce ecommerce plugin to highlight their menu items and provide nutritional information.
A Better and Faster Way to Set Up WordPress Ecommerce
Setting up a WordPress ecommerce website doesn’t require hiring a team of developers or spending hours writing code. With StoreBuilder by Hostdedi, you can launch your store in as little as a day.
Just answer a few simple questions about your business, and StoreBuilder automatically sets up a WooCommerce site. You don’t have to worry about installing WordPress and then configuring WooCommerce. StoreBuilder does the work for you.
StoreBuilder installs and activates all the plugins you need to build a beautiful and functional store. The Hostdedi ecommerce experts vet each plugin to ensure they work flawlessly for small to enterprise-grade businesses.
StoreBuilder also includes a selection of premium themes to ensure your site looks as good as the ecommerce examples above from big brands.
One thing all of the examples from big companies have in common is they didn’t start out dominating the market. Building a business takes time. WordPress is an excellent platform for new or early-stage companies because the platform can grow with your business.
StoreBuilder, along with Hostdedi’ hosting services, can support your business as your online store grows. It’s the easiest way to open an online store with WordPress.
Not all of us were Scouts, and even fewer of us are always prepared. When it comes to building our ecommerce sites, there’s always something we forgot, can do better, and most importantly: learn. A lot of store owners only worry about their site at the last minute — shortly before the holidays and major commerce events.
In this article, we’ll talk about ecommerce best practices that can help your store succeed all year long.
There are many tips and tricks to improve your ecommerce site. You can:
Keep a close eye on your inventory and vendor relationships
Audit content regularly
Optimize your organic promotions
Use alternative marketing strategies and ecommerce channels to build brand awareness
Let’s talk about why it’s important to monitor your online store and keep it current with these ecommerce best practices.
Technical Ecommerce Best Practices
1. Pick A Great Hosting Provider
Maybe you found a great deal on hosting during Cyber Week. Maybe you’ve been with the same one for years. Are you using the best platform for ecommerce? Don’t wait till Halloween to get a scary surprise.
Check in on your site performance. You want hosting that is secure, fast, and has great hosting support if things go wrong. You also want a provider that doesn’t kill your site if you hit your limit. Look for an option like Hostdedi, which autoscales to meet your needs when you get a big traffic surge.
Look at complaints from customers. Are they happy with the experience your site provides? What can be done about it? Is it a simple fix, or is your hosting provider just not cutting it?
Check reviews, look up testimonials, and determine whether or not your current provider is meeting your needs. Is your site slow despite optimizing? Finding out your unlimited plan is feeling a little limited? Paying upcharges for everything or pushed into products you don’t want or need? It may be time to look for a new provider.
Psst. Your digital ecommerce experts have OPINIONS about the best option.
2. Test Early and Often
If we could shout this from our rooftops to everyone with an ecommerce store, we would. Testing is a SUPER important ecommerce best practice.
We like Webpagetest.org and Google Lighthouse, but there are plenty of tools and options out there. Good tools give you insights and lead you to resources that will help you fix problems, not just report on them.
Whether you’re looking at your waterfall, security scores, or test case results, knowing what’s wrong is just as important as fixing it. You can gauge whether or not you can handle it yourself, or hand it off to your developers. You’ll be able to tell exactly what is maxing out your resources, where your security has holes, or whether some of your site elements aren’t working properly.
Why do you need to know that? It can prevent your customers from completing purchases. When it comes to online stores, hiccups cost you revenue.
Running tests on your site can help you nail down the specific reasons your site is running slowly. Maybe it’s a plugin you’ve installed, maybe it’s gigantic image files that haven’t been compressed, or maybe it’s a security issue. Whatever it is, optimizing your site is important for a LOT of reasons.
For starters, site optimization helps you rank better in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Search engines like Google take into account a lot of factors while scanning sites. Your site performance, SEO friendliness, and site structure are among the things they look at while putting sites in the most relevant order for people searching the web.
A site audit takes time. Going through all your content (or code) is time consuming. Giving yourself (or your web developers) enough runway isn’t just considerate, it’s smart. A rush job is frequently not a thorough job.
If you’re doing this ahead of time — or better yet, regularly —you’ve got a way better chance of securing potential customers. The easier it is to find you, the easier it is to buy from you.
We’ve got a ton of resources about SEO optimization for your ecommerce site, including these great articles and eBooks:
4. Update Everything, Backup Regularly
Hostdedi customers don’t have to worry about keeping things updated and backed up. With fully managed hosting, we take care of all that for you. It’s one of the reasons we’re one of the best platforms for ecommerce.
Keeping up with the most up-to-date versions means you have access to the newest features. Bugs are fixed and it improves your compatibility. All of this helps provide a better experience for current and potential customers. Simply put, staying current is one of the most important ecommerce best practices.
Don’t forget to backup your site, either. When you’re on your own, it’s on you to fix or delegate the job, and there’s nothing more important than a safe and functioning version of your site.
5. Check Out Your Checkout
In a brick and mortar store, everyone hates the cart with the wonky wheel. In an ecommerce store, if your cart doesn’t work … you’re not making the sale.
Check for errors and bugs with your cart regularly. If you’re a Hostdedi customer, WooCommerce Automated Testing will check this nightly.
Ensure any plugins you use aren’t causing problems — and check with your payment processor. Are there errors? Has the API changed? Do you have disk space issues causing you to be unable to record orders? Knowing sooner is way better than later.
Business Ecommerce Best Practices
6. Know Your Inventory and Supply Chain Issues
What’s in stock should always be a priority, but it is heavily focused on during the holidays because people tend to want their gifts delivered on time. We all know that since the pandemic started, supply chain issues have been a bigger problem than ever.
Knowing what you have and keeping tabs on what your site says you have prevents unhappy customer interactions. This is true all year round. You should always have eyes on inventory management.
Going into your WooCommerce dashboard and checking the numbers listed against what is actually in stock ensures customers can’t overbuy — and you won’t have committed to an order you can’t fulfill.
This is a great time to enable the “backorder” option, so customers are aware if there’s a wait on a product they want. Make sure you plan sales or other promotions around times you can reliably expect to have stock.
Check in with your fulfillment partners regularly. Make sure there are no issues or surprises. We’ve already mentioned supply chain issues, but it’s worth repeating. Foster good business relationships with your fulfillment partners so you always know where you stand.
Since the supply chain issues have been a steady problem since the pandemic began, most online retailers have a good idea of how long it takes to get their stock in and shipped out to customers. Whether or not it’s a holiday, you should regularly check in on how long it takes your items to get to you, as well as delivered to your customers.
7. Keep *ALL* Your Content Fresh
If you’ve got a blog, an ecommerce best practice is to perform content audits regularly. Refresh your blogs, add new content, and track what performs well. These are all critical to a strong ecommerce content strategy.
A lot of the content your customers will see is emailed to them. Log in to your email marketing accounts and dashboards to ensure they can accommodate expected new subscribers around promotions. Make sure you’re not being sent to spam.
Update your automatic email copy! Anything sent to your customers that’s autogenerated is probably not looked at as often as it should. Check now, check regularly, and avoid looking unprofessional.
Same goes for forms (and make sure they’re working)! Anything involving customer data collection should ALWAYS be checked regularly. You don’t want to lose out on customers because of something easily fixable.
Check on non-store integrations too. The API for Instagram, for example, changes frequently. Anything pulling data from your site or accounts should be connected properly. This is another reason why staying on top of updates and using the most recent version is so important.
Customer service content should also be routinely updated. Whether it’s sizing charts, FAQs, return policies — whatever! Any changes you decide on need to be communicated effectively and available to your customers.
8. Promote Internally
Your customers aren’t only purchasing from you around the holidays (unless, of course, you exclusively sell Christmas trees). Promos happen all year long.
A great online store should have a great ecommerce marketing plan. That being said, marketing isn’t just advertisements. Whether it’s for a special event, a campaign, or to meet a quarterly goal, your entire business rests on customers buying your products. Ensuring they can do that (especially during a sale) is a great way to build customer retention.
Letting them know what’s on sale and what great deals you have not only informs your customers, it helps you make money. Upsells and cross sells can help rake in dough — it’s a great idea to add them to your product and cart pages.
Utilize sitewide banners, pop-ups, etc. but don’t forget to check on their connections regularly. If you want them to work for you, they need to be working. The Hostdedi Plugin Performance Monitor is stellar at letting you know if something has gone awry.
Schedule your sales and set up coupons ahead of when you want them — like we said before, rush jobs usually lack quality. It also gives your team time to test if everything is working correctly.
9. More Ideas To Keep Traffic Flowing
Everyone remembers great ads, but it’s hard to stand out with so many stores selling the same items. Not everyone has a full social media marketing team or a PR agency to help build brand awareness.
Promoting Your Business With Podcasts
Some great ideas to keep your business on people’s minds include involving yourself with other brands. A great example of this is using podcasts to build your audience. If you’re selling a product you know will solve a pain point for consumers, it’s time to do some research.
Look into podcasts that discuss interests related to your products, send a pitch to the creators, and start helping people learn about your products.
The key to being a great podcast guest is making sure you don’t slam listeners with attempts to sell. Podcasters will feature guests that add value to their content.
For example, if you sell running shoes, look up fitness podcasts. Offer to discuss the top five gifts for runners this season. Come prepared with features, reasons why your products are good for XYZ customers — and sell without selling.
Be a Socially Responsible Brand
Another great idea actually sounds like the opposite of making money. Involving your brand with charities is a great way to spark interest in your store.
Ever order from Domino’s? There’s always an upsell in their carts to donate to St. Jude’s Hospital. Been to a local restaurant lately? Chances are there’s a donation box for a local charity. People like to feel like they’re doing something good.
Giving Tuesday is an annual event that is an easy and fast way to involve yourself with a good cause and your community. Sandwiched between the major commerce holidays, it’s a day where people across the globe give back. Partnering with a nonprofit not only helps a good cause, it also helps employee and customer retention.
Now more than ever, people are attracted to companies that are involved with “Corporate Social Responsibility” projects. Involving your business with it can mean expanded brand reach, boosted sales, and brand loyalty. If you raise money for a charity, whether through employee contributions or a drive, donations are usually tax deductible.
You know commerce. And now you know ecommerce best practices.
We know hosting. If you’re done with cheap hosting but still want fast and easy, come check out why WordPress users trust Hostdedi fully managed hosting. We don’t call ourselves your digital ecommerce experts for nothing.
With our scalability, security, speed, and support you’ll go from putting out fires….
… to being on fire (in a good way)!
Whether you’re building a site from scratch or have an existing one you’d like to migrate over, we’ve got you covered. Check out our fully managed WooCommerce hosting plans to get started today.
Redis cache is one of the most popular caching tools used to speed up WordPress websites. Like WordPress, it’s open source, so it is a great option to use alongside WordPress.
However, if you are not familiar with caching in general, it can be a bit overwhelming to understand what Redis is for and how Redis cache works.
In this article, you will learn what Redis cache is and why it’s one of the most popular caching tools available today.
We’ll start with a brief explanation of caching in general and then dive deeper into how Redis cache works and how Redis Cache can be used to speed up your WordPress website.
What is Caching?
To get started, what is caching? Caching is a temporary storage mechanism that allows websites to load information faster. Instead of accessing the database directly, the website will access the cached version and pull the necessary information from the server memory.
You can learn more about WordPress and website cache in our article, Caching for WordPress.
What is Redis Cache? Redis Cache Explained
So, what is Redic cache? When it comes to Redis, Redis is short for Remote Dictionary Server. Redis is a caching system that works by temporarily storing information in a key-value data structure.
Redis cache is popular because it is available in almost all major programming languages. In addition, like WordPress, it is open source, which means it is a well-supported system that is a brilliant way to speed up your website or application without incurring a high cost.
What is Redis Used For?
Redis is used for speeding up website page load time for users. When it comes to WordPress websites, it is mainly used as a caching system to temporarily store information that would usually sit in a database. This way, it can be loaded much faster rather than having to access the database directly.
While Redis cache is primarily used as a caching system to speed up WordPress websites, Redis itself is much more powerful than that. It can also be used as a database and a message broker, but in this article, we will focus on Redis and how it is used as a caching mechanism.
Redis cache shines when used with WordPress websites as an object caching tool. Since WordPress is such a powerful and flexible Content Management System, it has lots of data objects that need to be accessed regularly.
What is Object Caching?
An object in programming terminology is an abstract data structure that the programmer defines.
For example, in WordPress, there are many objects such as Posts, Pages, or users. When using WooCommerce, you have even more objects such as Products or Orders. These objects are stored in the database and accessed multiple times while you use your WordPress website.
Object caching allows you to keep the objects in temporary memory so that you do not need to go back to the database to access the data.
How Does Redis Cache Work With Object Caching?
Since WordPress works with many types of objects, each time those objects need to be accessed, your website has to access the database to retrieve the information. Redis makes this faster by temporarily storing the retrieved data. Then, next time your website needs this information, your website can access it from the temporary storage instead of having to access it from the database.
This will significantly speed up your WordPress website since accessing your website database using SQL queries is a lot slower than accessing the needed information via the Redis object caching system.
One area where this is tremendously helpful is the WordPress admin panel. If you have thousands of posts or products, Redis object cache will help speed up your backend so that you can update your website fast.
Without Redis cache, every time you log in to your backend, you would need WordPress to access the various objects in the database. This will eventually lead to slower load times as the amount of content on your website increases.
How Does Redis Work?
So now that you know what Redis cache is and what Redis is for, we can dive a bit deeper into learning exactly how Redis cache works.
The key to understanding how Redis cache works is to know how a dictionary works in programming. A dictionary is a data structure with two linked elements — a key and a value. In short, the key is used to access the value.
How Redis cache works is by assigning the original database query as the key and then resulting data as the value. Now, the Redis system can access the resulting database call by using the key which it has stored in its built-in temporary memory.
Now, this specific database call is ready to be reaccessed as many times as needed without running the database query again. Depending on the Redis cache setup, this can stay in memory for a few hours, a few minutes, or longer.
Redis also has a built-in system to ensure the database call is up-to-date by having built-in settings that will clear the WordPress cache either when the content is updated or in specifically timed intervals.
How Do I Use Redis Cache for My Website?
Now that you know what Redis cache is, it’s important to know how to use it with your WordPress website. In short, you will need to set up the Redis cache system on the server that is hosting your website server.
While there are a lot of resources available to explain this process, unfortunately, it is not an easy task and will require some advanced server management skills.
It’s also essential to ensure that you have Redis cache setup correctly and optimized for WordPress websites. Otherwise, you can risk experiencing some unexpected behaviors on your websites, such as outdated pages or some pages not loading accurately.
When it comes to installing and setting up Redis cache, we recommend you leave this in the hands of server experts.
Get Built-In Caching With Hostdedi
We know how important it is to have a fast-loading website, and we also know Redis cache — seriously, we’re pros!
That’s why here at Hostdedi, we offer built-in Redis object cache with all of our fully managed WordPress hosting plans. Hosting with Hostdedi means that your websites will load blazing fast and you won’t have to worry about setting up Redis correctly.
With Hostdedi, you can manage all of your caching within the WordPress admin panel. If you are running a WooCommerce store, we have an advanced WooCommerce cache system enabled with our fully managed WooCommerce hosting plans.
With Hostdedi’ built-in caching, the heavy lifting is done for you — we ensure the Redis cache is set up correctly so that you can focus on your business.
Try Fully Managed WordPress Hosting from Hostdedi
We hope this article has helped in getting Redis cache explained, and we look forward to having you onboard one of our Hostdedi plans. Try our fully managed WordPress hosting if you are looking to speed up your website. With Hostdedi, you will have a blazingly fast website and save yourself lots of time and frustration.
We are experts in WordPress hosting and ensure that your WordPress website is always up to date, fast, and secure.
With our industry-leading visual comparison system and our award-winning 24/7/365 WordPress support, you can rest assured your website is working the way it should.
Plus, with our free migration service, you can get your website set up on Hostdedi hassle-free.
Check out our fully managed WordPress hosting plans to get started today.
