Monthly ArchivesFebruary 2022

As an online store owner, you’ve got a powerful resource to improve your sales — data from your website. Your online store is a goldmine of valuable data about:

• Sales
• Customer behavior
• Website performance

However, only 47% of industries use data analytics to improve sales. That means more than half of businesses are missing out on the benefits of sales data analysis. You don’t want to do that.

Just capturing data doesn’t result in better business decisions. You need to analyze and monitor your data. For that, you need data tools.

Let’s see what data tools are and how they help you get a better understanding of your business.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Data Analytics 101

Online stores have the power to track every activity on the website. You just need to collect and analyze this data to derive valuable insights into your business. For example, sales data analysis tells you which products sell well and which don’t.

Through data analysis, you’ll also get additional insights such as:

• Performance of your business over time
• Customer attrition points
• Speed and usability of your website

Data analytics also help you create a data-driven sales strategy. Invesp Corp’s survey shows 87% of marketers believe data is the most underutilized resource in their business. They are not wrong. With the right data tools, you’ll bring about a phenomenal improvement in your sales.

Let’s take a look at the significant ecommerce data tools.

Data Tools To Improve Your Sales Performance

Your data is just numbers if you don’t derive insights from it. For effective data analysis, you should first choose what data types to capture. Next, you should choose the right data analytics tools to monitor and interpret your data.

Data analytics tools give you actionable insights, and you can use them to:

• Understand sales trends
• Predict future sales
• Fine-tune sales processes
• Understand customer behavior

Let’s look at the main data tools available for your online store. We’ll also explore tools available in Hostdedi’ StoreBuilder.

Tools for Sales Data Analysis

Without a doubt, steady sales are the biggest goal of every ecommerce business. Hence, it’s crucial to perform sales analytics to understand your selling patterns. Sales data analysis informs you about the following:

• Top selling products
• Underselling products
• Sales trends
• The peak time of sales

To visualize these, you need the right data tools. For example, HubSpot and Salesforce provide customer relationship management (CRM) tools to monitor and analyze sales data.

If you’re a Hostdedi customer with a fully managed WooCommerce store, you have the Sales Performance Monitor. It’s an excellent tool for sales data analysis that monitors your store’s sales and measures it against a predicted model.

The Sales Performance Monitor will alert you if your sales degrade compared to the historical data. Thus, it keeps you informed about the health of your online store revenue.

Data Tools To Analyze Customer Data

Monitoring and capturing customer data is crucial to improving your sales. Understanding the customer’s behavior helps you with:

• Creating personalized marketing campaigns
• Upselling and cross-selling
• Customer retention

Your online store can collect different types of customer data. Let’s look at important customer behavior data worth analyzing.

Analysis of Cart Abandonment Data

The Baymard Institute reports that the average ecommerce cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. That means more than half of your customers never finish their purchase. Hence it’s essential to capture and analyze the cart abandonment data.

Once you have this data, you can take steps to recover these carts, i.e., urge your customers to finish their purchases.

Companies like Keptify offer cart abandonment tools. Hostdedi has partnered with Recapture to enable WooCommerce store owners to detect and recover abandoned carts. If you’re a Hostdedi customer, you can access the abandoned cart recovery tool.

Customer Review Management Tools

Customer reviews are essential for the success of your business. You can use its built-in commenting system for customer reviews if you have a WordPress-based business. But, to hit your sales goals, you also need to analyze customer reviews.

Data tools help you manage customer reviews by:

• Enabling/ disabling customer reviews
• Allowing only verified owners to leave reviews
• Enabling star ratings and making them mandatory

There are several WooCommerce plugins for managing customer reviews, such as Ultimate Reviews and YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews.

Hostdedi provides you with the Better Reviews for WooCommerce tool to help you monitor and analyze customer reviews and boost revenue.

All-in-One Data Analytics Tools for Businesses

You’ve seen how standalone tools help you perform data analytics. But if you want to capture all your data with a single tool, you should go for comprehensive data analytic tools for your business.

Glew is a popular business intelligence tool for WooCommerce store owners. Glew helps sales teams capture a wide range of data for sales analysis. That includes several key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

• Revenue
• Product sales
• Gross profit
• Average order value
• Conversion Rate

If you have a WooCommerce store managed by Hostdedi, you’ll get Glew as a part of the StoreBuilder tool.

Performance Monitoring and Testing Tools

Along with sales data analysis, you also need to analyze the speed and performance of your website. These metrics influence customer experience and have a significant role in your sales growth.

Here are a few factors that could affect the speed of your website:

• Cheap hosting
• Heavy graphics and images
• Outdated templates
• Plugins and widgets

Among these, plugins are crucial for an online store. Slow loading plugins can affect the functionality of your website. Therefore, you should use a tool that measures the performance of your website before and after installing a plugin. It’ll help you detect if any plugin is slowing your website.

If you use fully managed WooCommerce hosting by Hostdedi, you’ll get access to the Plugin Performance Monitor tool. Here’s how you can use it to test the speed of your website.

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To ensure your website’s health and usability, you also need to test your website constantly. If you perform manual tests in real time, it might disrupt your services. Automation of website testing is crucial for online stores.

Hostdedi provides built-in automated testing for WooCommerce stores. This feature covers the top ecommerce website testing test cases, such as adding an item to your cart and checking out. Here’s how it works:

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Final Thoughts: Using Data Tools and Sales Data Analysis To Improve Sales

Data is a powerful resource you can use to improve sales. Sales data analysis can identify issues with sales and facilitate revenue growth. Moreover, the analysis of customer behavior helps you create personalized marketing campaigns.

Hostdedi Store Builder comes with several data tools to help you with your online store, such as:

• Sales Performance Monitor
• Abandoned cart recovery tool
• Better Reviews for WooCommerce
• Plugin Performance Monitor
• WooCommerce automated testing

To access Hostdedi’ data analysis and visualization tools, check out our fully managed WooCommerce hosting today.

To err is human — this age-old saying might come from a time when the first lines of code were yet to be written, but it still rings true today. Making mistakes is unavoidable, especially when repetition is involved. In deploying websites, repetition permeates the entire process.

If your site is complex enough, you may need to run a certain number of NodeJS (installing scripts, SCSS to CSS conversion, etc.) or Composer (installing libraries, running tests, etc.) tasks to begin with. You’ll then need to transfer all files to the server, clear the cache, and make sure everything works the way it should.

Even though they’re repetitive, these tasks are not that hard to handle — when you’re flying solo, that is. The more people start working on one project, the more complicated it gets.

Luckily, you can make it simple and error-proof through WordPress deployment automation.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to automate repetitive tasks and make your deployment process a breeze with Buddy. Let’s get this show on the road!

Single Source of Truth: The Git Repo

Before you start transferring files to a server, let’s think about what you can do to ensure that every team member working on your project has access to the same files — this includes all changes introduced by others. You can get all of that with Git. Without getting into much detail about Git itself, here are a few things this version control system gives you:

• Access to the up-to-date version of files for all collaborators.
• Detailed change history.
• Branches: a way to work on changes in isolated environments.

When you start using Git, you can say goodbye to overwriting changes prepared by other devs and forget the days of figuring out when and where the buggy code was written.

There are many ways to use Git:

• Using the command line.
• Through tools built into popular code editors, such as Visual Studio Code.
• With dedicated tools such as Gitkraken or Git Tower.

Let’s also think about the things you should keep in a Git repository. There are many strategies and approaches to this and they change depending on what you’re working on. To start our journey, I recommend using a .gitignore file with these contents:

# Ignore everything in the root except the “wp-content” directory.

/*

!.gitignore

!wp-content/

# Ignore everything in the “wp-content” directory, except the “mu-plugins”, “plugins”, and “themes” directories.

wp-content/*

!wp-content/mu-plugins/

!wp-content/plugins/

!wp-content/themes/

With this configuration in place, the repository will store only the files from wp-content/plugins, wp-content/mu-plugins, and wp-content/themes.

I recommend reading this GitKraken article to get started with Git.

Connecting the Repository to Buddy

After you set up the repository, connect it to Buddy. First, choose where you host your files. Choose between GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Buddy Git Hosting, and a private Git server.

When you connect the repo, Buddy encourages you to add your first action and start automating.

Adding Pipelines

What is a pipeline? Think of it as a set of actions carried out in the specified order, triggered by an event of your choice.

When you add a new pipeline, you must define its name, choose the trigger (manual, push to the repo, recurrency), and choose the branch which the pipeline handles.

Click “Add a new pipeline” to reveal a list of actions.

Building Assets and Installing Libraries

Thanks to package managers, such as Composer or npm, you can make your life much easier when it comes to managing package versions and ensuring that all installed libraries or packages are compatible with each other.

Additionally, you can get a lot of things done using scripts run with Composer or npm:

• Converting SCSS to CSS
• Running unit tests
• Checking code for errors with linters or PHPCS

However, before you start adding actions to your pipeline, I recommend reading these articles:

Now that you know how to use these package managers, let’s handle the actions. To add Composer to your pipeline, add the PHP action and enter these lines in the action’s terminal:

cd wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME

composer install

Next, install libraries and run npm scripts. You can handle this by adding a NodeJS action and entering these commands in the action’s terminal:

cd wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME

npm install

npm run build

The npm run build command isn’t universal — your app might use a different command to trigger builds. Check the package.json file to find out what command is used for building.

At this point, your pipeline should look like this:

Unit Tests and Code Analysis

So the website is ready for deployment — all libraries downloaded, all assets built. Now it’s all about uploading it to the server, right? Before you do that, how about you run some tests that check if the code you’ve written works the way it should?

You can handle this testing stage in a couple of different ways:

Depending on your specific needs, decide which tools and approaches are right for you.

Use Composer to install the tools you need and add new commands to composer.json, for example:

{

“scripts”: {

“test”: “vendor/bin/phpunit”,

“phpstan”: “vendor/bin/phpstan analyse src tests”

}

}

After you handle the tools, add a PHP action to your pipeline and add these commands in the action’s terminal:

composer install

composer test

composer phpstan

Now your pipeline should look like this:

Deploying to a Staging Environment

At this point, not only do you have your code all ready, but it’s also checked and tested for any bugs. Time to deploy to production? Hold your horses, cowboy!

First, let’s deploy the site to a staging environment. If you have a Hostdedi server, creating a staging environment is extremely easy. Just follow this guide and you’ll be done in no time.

With the environment ready, it’s time to transfer all the files there. Use the SFTP action in Buddy to handle that. Remember to specify the right remote path — the directory to which the files are uploaded.

It’s a good idea to use the action’s Ignore paths tab to specify the list of files and directories you don’t want to upload to the server, e.g. node_modules.

Once everything’s uploaded to the staging server, you have to make sure that no additional actions run without your specific approval. Why? The fact that the code has been thoroughly tested doesn’t automatically mean that you want to push it to production right away.

Sometimes the QA team wants to click around and check a few things manually. You should give them a chance to do that.

To facilitate that, add the Wait for approval action which stops the execution of any downstream steps until the person with the right permissions approves it.

With that said, here’s what your pipeline should look like now:

Additional Tests

I know it’s tempting to just approve the execution, get it over with, and deploy the app to production. But bare with me — let’s run some more tests and make sure nothing’s broken. It’s worth it, believe me!

Buddy has a couple of actions you can use to run additional tests. You’ll be happy to hear that they require almost no additional configuration.

Let’s start with Visual Tests, which are regression tests that allow you to check if the look of the specified sections hasn’t changed in an undesired way. To get this going, simply add a list of pages we want to compare. If Buddy detects differences between the pages, you’ll have to give it a green light to mark the action as successful.

Next, it’s worth checking if our changes don’t have a negative impact on the Google Page Speed rating. We don’t want to slow down the page load time. To measure that, you can use the Lighthouse action. All you do is specify the page you want to test and the thresholds for results.

The last thing that’s worth checking is if all links on your site actually work. To do that, you can use the Link Validator action, which checks if any of the links on your site return the erroneous 4xx or 5xx status responses.

Is this all you can do? Of course not! I won’t describe EVERYTHING, though. We’ve covered the most universal and useful cases, but feel free to read up on some more interesting actions here.

Here’s what your pipeline should look like after adding all of the additional tests:

Deployment to Production

Okay, now it’s time to deploy to production. Finally!

The first step — enable maintenance mode using WP-CLI. To make this happen, add an SSH action, configure server access details, and add these commands in the action’s terminal:

cd public_html

wp maintenance-mode activate

Thanks to this, the user will get an appropriate downtime message when you upload files to the server.

Next, add the SFTP action, which will transfer all files to the server. The action’s config will be very similar to the one we used to transfer files to the staging server:

Then add another SSH action which disables the maintenance mode. Add these commands to the action’s terminal:

cd public_html

wp maintenance-mode deactivate

With all of these steps done, it’s a good idea to notify all of the relevant people using Slack, Telegram, or other communication media. Read more about all available integrations here.

Don’t stop at sending notifications when everything goes according to plan. It’s a good idea to communicate when something goes wrong so that your team can jump in and fix the errors ASAP.

Here’s what the final pipeline looks like when you’re using Slack for notifications:

Now You Know WordPress Deployment Automation

Thanks to WordPress deployment automation and tests, deploying to production won’t give you nightmares anymore.

While implementing the presented flow might take you a while, nobody says you can’t add these steps gradually.

You can start easy with just building your assets and deploying. Then it’s worth spending some time adding tests to the mix — start with the ones that don’t require too much configuration, such as PHPCS or PHPStan. Alternatively, you can go with the testing actions that Buddy offers — Visual Tests, Lighthouse, etc.

When you’re ready, bring out the big guns and add the tests that you have to prepare by yourself, such as PHP Unit or Cypress.io.

In need of hosting that’s optimized for WordPress? Check out Hostdedi’ fully managed WordPress hosting plans today.

ATLANTA, GA. February 02, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Hostdedi, the fully managed, high-performance, cloud platform built to optimize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento sites and stores, today announced a new integration with HubSpot, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The integration pairs Hostdedi’ high quality cloud hosting, premium software plugins, and site management tools with HubSpot’s software platform designed to help companies market and sell more effectively. Hostdedi will include the HubSpot plugin across all plans and allow customers to get started for free.

“Increasingly, businesses are being driven to start or grow their business online. And these entrepreneurs are being challenged to up their game with technology and the complex work of digital marketing. It can be daunting,” says Terry Trout, SVP of Marketing. “At Hostdedi, we’re working to make it easier. We’re building solutions and partnerships that allow our customers to worry less, dream big, and do more online.”

Hostdedi brings together high quality hosting with plugins and tools that work together to make it easier to build and manage a site or store. The Fully Managed Hosting experience provides infrastructure management that keeps hosting secure and up to date and comes with built-in monitoring that alerts customers when there is a problem with performance. Customers can count on faster speeds, stronger security, inherent scalability, and help when they need it.

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that includes marketing, sales, service, operations, and website management products that help companies grow better. For small businesses looking to build inbound marketing, they have tools to help with SEO, social media, landing pages, marketing automation, blogging, and web analytics. HubSpot has gained popularity because it’s extremely quick to learn, with a simple, easy-to-navigate layout that is user friendly, even to those who aren’t tech-savvy. There are a ton of built-in templates and tools that can help users get started growing a business even if you’re an absolute beginner.

“Our singular focus is on helping SMB customers who want to make money online,” says Trout. “We know that if a website or online store fuels the revenue generation of a business, we need to be a partner in our customer’s businesses, not just a service. It’s why we’re constantly evolving our solutions and why we’re adding access to a powerful software platform that is designed to help them market and sell more effectively,” says Trout. “This partnership between Hostdedi and HubSpot furthers our commitment to powering the online potential of our SMB customers.”

The HubSpot integration is the latest in a long line of newly added features to Hostdedi plans developed to help customers accelerate their business online:

• Plugin Performance Monitor — A built-in feature that captures and compares site performance before and after changes have been made. This feature provides actionable and prescriptive insights to improve site performance.
• Sales Performance Monitor — Another exclusive feature, Sales Performance Monitor provides critical insights into online store revenue and sales trends, and its intelligence engine alerts store owners if sales slow down.
• WooCommerce Automated Testing — Another Hostdedi-exclusive feature, WooCommerce Automated Testing empowers online store owners to fix any discovered issues and keep their stores defect free to maximize performance and sales.

Together with Hostdedi’ suite of exclusive tools, the HubSpot integration is posed to enable online site and store owners to attract visitors and convert them to customers. In addition to HubSpot, this solution comes bundled with 24/7 security monitoring, instant autoscaling, an integrated CDN, premium image compression, and expert, award-winning support —all powered by fully managed hosting from Hostdedi.

For more information about Hostdedi, visit nexcess.net.

A brick and mortar store is a solid small business model that can bring you a nice income. However, scaling your income with a brick and mortar store can be hard and expensive to do.

But it doesn’t have to be. Instead of opening up a second brick and mortar store, why not bring your brick and mortar online?

A website can help you expand your reach, get more customers, and easily double your income without the added expenses of paying for additional storage or another set of utilities.

On top of that, a website makes you more discoverable, which means you can capitalize on organic traffic. That ultimately means that you don’t have to spend as much on paid advertising to keep a bigger share of your profits.

Creating a website might seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be with the right tools. This article will show you how to create a brick and mortar website in seven steps.

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Choose the Website’s Features

Step 2: Choose Your Platform

Step 3: Select a Domain Name

Step 4: Sign Up For a Hosting Plan

Step 5: Install WordPress

Step 6: Add Your Products

Step 7: Market Your Store Online

Final Thoughts: Brick and Mortar Website: Moving Brick and Mortar to Online

Step 1: Choose the Website’s Features

When it comes to bringing your brick and mortar online, you have two options.

The first is using your brick and mortar website as a catalog to display your products and encourage visitors to visit your physical location. That way, customers buy items offline and increase your face-to-face foot traffic.

The second option is to create an ecommerce online store or a storefront for your brick and mortar business. In this way, visitors can purchase from the comfort of their home, resulting in online sales primarily.

Which option you choose will dictate the features you need to include, such as payment methods like which credit cards you’ll accept, an online catalog for online shopping, shipping costs and options, adding product reviews, and similar.

If you want a simple catalog and don’t wish to mirror the route of ecommerce businesses, you won’t need to worry about adding a payment gateway or configuring shipping options.

However, displaying product reviews or testimonials can go a long way to encourage people to visit your physical presence, even on a catalog website.

Step 2: Choose Your Platform

Once you’ve chosen the features you want, you need to choose a platform for your store. One of the best platforms for any website is WordPress. WordPress is not only free, but it also has thousands of themes that make it easy to style your website exactly the way you want.

In addition, there are thousands of plugins for WordPress that help you build any website quickly. One such plugin is WooCommerce.

Thanks to WooCommerce, you can easily build a WordPress online store and sell your products online.

Step 3: Select a Domain Name

The domain is what your visitors will type in to reach your online retailers’ store. It’s best to use your existing brick and mortar store’s name as the domain name for online businesses.

If the name is taken, try adding the word store or shop or choose a .shop or .store extension.

Step 4: Sign Up For a Hosting Plan

Besides your domain name, you’ll also need a hosting plan. Hosting is where the website files will live, and it’s necessary so visitors can access your website.

If you’re looking for a reliable host, Hostdedi has hosting plans optimized for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. Key features include built-in image compression, abandoned cart technology, page builder plugins, and 1-click staging, plus StoreBuilder.

Moreover, our servers are optimized for faster speeds and better security. These features are crucial for online stores to build trust and increase conversions.

Step 5: Install WordPress

As you’re researching hosting options, you’ll inevitably come across some hosts that will pre-install WordPress for you when you sign up for one of their plans.

If that’s not the case with your chosen hosting provider, you’ll need to install WordPress yourself.

But here’s the good news:

Most hosting companies offer a one-click installation process for WordPress. The only thing you’ll need to do is enter your desired username, password, and your site title. The installer will take care of the rest, and you’ll then be able to log into your new WordPress website.

If you’ve decided to sell your products online, you’ll also need to install WooCommerce. You can do that by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for WooCommerce. Then, install and activate the plugin and follow the Setup Wizard to configure the plugin’s options.

Step 6: Add Your Products

Once WooCommerce has been configured, you’ll need to add the products from your retail stores. If you already have a list of your products in a CSV format, you can easily import it into WooCommerce by going to WooCommerce > Home. Then click on Add Products > Import via CSV.

Alternatively, you can add a product manually by going to Products > Add New. You’ll then be able to add a product title, description, images, and configure important product options such as price, variations, type of product, and more.

Step 7: Market Your Store Online

After adding the products, you need to focus on bringing traffic and promoting your new brick and mortar website. Here are a few basic marketing methods that will give you initial traction:

• Promote on social media — add your website to your social media profiles, post regularly, provide value, and engage with your ideal potential customers.
• Add an email signup form with a discount code — encourage visitors to sign up and stay in touch with you so they can get notified when new products are added to the store.
• Blogging — create content on your website and use it as an opportunity to showcase how your products can be used as well as how other customers are using them.
• Paid ads — if you have a dedicated marketing budget, consider investing in Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, or Promoted Pins.
• Optimize for local search engine optimization (SEO) — include your location in your store’s keywords and set up a Google My Business profile that links to your website.

Final Thoughts: Brick and Mortar Website: Moving Brick and Mortar to Online

Building a brick and mortar website is a big task. But once you know what is involved, you can launch your website quickly. Follow the steps in this article and bring your brick and mortar online.

If you want to expedite the process and take your sales insight to the next level, check out Hostdedi’ StoreBuilder. It’s the fastest and easiest way to build an online store with WordPress — and it comes with fully managed hosting too.

There are thousands of WordPress themes (both free and paid) at your fingertips, but selecting the best one for your website can feel like an overwhelming task — especially if you’re launching a WordPress site for the first time.

Before you land on the perfect theme for your site, you might be interested in trying out a couple to see which one provides the look, feel, and functionality that aligns with your goals or brand guidelines. But once you have narrowed down a few themes that you’d like to try, how do you go about installing them?

In this guide, we will breakdown just how to install a WordPress theme step by step. We will also detail what a WordPress theme is, the differences between free and paid themes, where you can find the best WordPress themes, and what you need to do before installing one.

Table of Contents

What is a WordPress Theme?

1. Free WordPress Themes vs. Paid WordPress Themes

1.1 Pros and Cons of Free Themes

1.2 Pros and Cons of Paid Themes

2. Where to Find a WordPress Theme to Install

3. What Is Needed to Install a WordPress Theme?

4. How to Install a Theme on WordPress: 3 Ways

4.1 How to Install a WordPress Theme Using Built-In Search Functionality

4.2 How to Manually Install a WordPress Theme

4.3 How To Install a WordPress Theme Using Your FTP Client

What Is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is a collection of files (typically a zipped folder that includes different graphics, template files, and stylesheets) that can control the design of your site. Using a WordPress theme, you can easily change the appearance and presentation of your website — such as its layout, typography, or color scheme — without needing advanced coding knowledge. You can think of installing a WordPress theme like dressing-up your site without needing to put together the outfit.

1. Free WordPress Themes vs. Paid WordPress Themes

Both free and paid WordPress themes have their pros and cons.

1.1 Pros and Cons of Free Themes

The main advantage of installing a free WordPress theme is the fact that, as the name implies, it doesn’t cost you anything. This means that if you don’t end up liking a free theme you install, you can easily change it without losing money. When selecting free themes directly from the WordPress theme directory, you can rest assured they’ve been through a rigorous review process and will be compatible with all free plugins WordPress offers.

But free WordPress themes also come with their disadvantages. For example, these themes typically come with limited features, designs, and functionality, and they are likely used by several other websites. Also, free theme developers usually provide limited support for updates or site issues, and free themes found outside of WordPress could be coded poorly — which could lead to poor site performance or security vulnerabilities.

1.2 Pros and Cons of Paid Themes

While paid themes are somewhat of an investment, they offer superior features, functionality, and support compared to free theme s— and they are typically the fastest WordPress themes out there. With these premium themes, you can gain access to features like:

• Superior support for technical issues and bugs
• Frequent theme updates
• More unique site customization options
• Advanced security features
• Enhanced site responsiveness, including for mobile devices
• Increased browser compatibility
• Increased plugin compatibility

The biggest drawback of paid WordPress themes is the fact that you must pay for them. Some premium themes require a one-time fee, while others require yearly subscriptions. If you decide to change your theme after purchasing a premium one, you will have lost your investment.

2. Where to Find a WordPress Theme to Install

Both free and paid WordPress themes can be found in several different theme repositories. Currently, the WordPress theme directory features over 8,000 free themes that are reliable and can provide your site with a dynamic design. There are also several trustworthy theme repositories outside of WordPress — including Themeforest, Elegant Themes Divi, StudioPress, and CSSIgniter — that offer free and paid WordPress themes.

3. What Is Needed to Install a WordPress Theme?

Depending on how you install a WordPress theme on your site, you might need a few things first. For example, if you plan on installing a theme directly from the WordPress theme directory, you won’t need to upload any files to your site. However, if you want to install a theme from a third-party theme directory or via your file transfer protocol (FTP) client, you will first need to download the theme’s zip file to your computer before getting started.

4. How to Install a Theme on WordPress: 3 Ways

4.1 How to Install a WordPress Theme Using Built-In Search Functionality

If you’ve found a free WordPress theme via the WordPress theme directory, the simplest way to install it is through the built-in theme search functionality in your WordPress admin dashboard. Once you’re logged into your dashboard, navigate to your admin control panel on the left side of the page, find the “Appearance” tab, click on “Themes,” and then click the “Add New” button.

At this point, you can filter through the WordPress theme directory for things like “Featured,” “Popular,” “Latest,” and “Favorites.” You can also make your theme search even more granular with the “Feature Filter” option, or manually search for themes using the search bar.

If you choose to use the “Feature Filter” option, you will be prompted with a list of theme filters to select from to whittle down your search, such as:

• Themes by subject (e.g., blogs, e-commerce, photography, education, etc.)
• Theme features (e.g., accessibility readiness, custom colors, editor style, etc.)
• Theme layouts (e.g., grid, one column, two columns, three columns, etc.)

Once you find a theme you would like to install on your site, hover your cursor over the theme thumbnail. This will display the theme install and preview buttons, as well as a details button.

When you select the “Preview” button, you will be able to see a preview of your chosen theme with filler copy.

When you select the “Install” button, WordPress will automatically install your theme, display a successful installation message, and present “Activate” or “Live Preview” buttons.

By clicking the “Activate” button, you will enable the theme to work on your website. You can now navigate to the homepage of your site to see the theme change.

Note: You might need to refresh your browser to see your website’s new theme.

At this point, you can click the “Customize” button (or head back to your admin control panel and find the “Customize” option under the “Appearance” tab) to start tweaking your theme to your liking.

Note: Each theme in the WordPress theme directory is different, and some might recommend that you install certain plugins or review theme settings before it will function properly.

4.2 How to Manually Install a WordPress Theme

If you are interested in a theme outside of the WordPress theme directory (typically paid themes from third-party theme repositories), you will need to manually upload it using your admin dashboard. No matter which theme repository you use, you will need to download the “.zip” file of your chosen theme to your computer first.

Note: To use the WordPress theme upload feature, you must have a self-hosted WordPress.org website.

With this file downloaded, navigate to your admin control panel, find the “Appearance” tab, click on “Themes,” and then click the “Add New” button. From here, locate the “Upload Theme” button at the top of the page and upload the “.zip” file you downloaded earlier. Select the “Choose File” button, choose your saved “.zip” file, and click the “Install Now” button.

Once your theme is installed, you will be prompted with a “Theme Installed Successfully” message. At this point, click on the “Activate” link for your theme changes to take effect on your website.

4.3 How to Install a WordPress Theme Using Your FTP Client

While a more advanced technique, you can manually upload a WordPress theme using your FTP client — which is software that allows you to directly connect to your website’s server to make site changes.

Note: If you haven’t done so, you will need to download FTP client software to your computer. You will also need to create an FTP account through your website hosting provider. Typically, you will have to manually set up your own FTP account within your hosting dashboard. Sometimes hosting providers create an FTP username and password for you when you create a new account.

To begin, start by downloading your theme’s “.zip” file to your computer. Once downloaded, you will need to unzip the file, which will create a new folder with your chosen theme’s name on your computer.

With your unzipped folder, you are now ready to begin the upload process to your website using your FTP client. First, you will need to connect to your site or WordPress hosting account using your FTP client. Once connected, navigate to your “/wp-content/themes/” folder, which contains all themes currently installed on your site.

Now you can upload your unzipped theme folder from your computer directly into your “/wp-content/themes/” folder.

Once uploaded, navigate back to your WordPress admin dashboard, find the “Appearance” tab in your admin control panel, and click on “Themes.” Here, you can see the theme you uploaded via your FTP client and “Activate” it.

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Running a WooCommerce store can be as exciting as it is frustrating. Besides identifying targeted sources of traffic, you also need to increase revenue across those traffic sources. Often, this requires implementing sales and ecommerce marketing tactics to draw in more consumers and direct them to the products they need.

Another way to increase revenue, however, involves leveraging the customers you already have and increasing average order value (AOV). Knowing how to increase average order value in ecommerce is a great way to boost the sales on your online store.

Average order value is the average value of a single order through your store. For example, if one customer purchases several products for $10 total, and another customer purchases a single product for $8, your average order value is $9.

Increasing ecommerce AOV is a surefire way for you to move the needle quickly and effectively, allowing you to drive revenue growth without having to generate more traffic. While it still involves some careful planning, it’s often easier and quicker to cross-sell products than it is to find new customers.

Keep reading to learn how to increase average order value in ecommerce.

How to Increase Average Order Value in Ecommerce: 5 Ways

1. Bundle Products That Work Well Together

Bundling works well for physical and digital products and is a proven way to increase your average order value in ecommerce. This is because it helps your customers understand which products play nicely together and which don’t.

For example, you could bundle an essential oil dispenser with a set of oils at a slightly discounted rate. Or, if you’re in the fashion industry, you could bundle a pair of trousers with a complimentary shirt. As a merchant, it is your job to find which products work well together, and market them as such.

Once you’ve decided which products should go together, there are many reliable plugins for WooCommerce that let you create bundles. A few of these include the Product Bundles plugin and WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce. There is also Composite Products, which allows your customers to configure their own type of bundle.

You can also target specific consumers with suitable bundles. To do this, you will need access an ecommerce analytics tool that allows you to segment your audience. According to Gartner, 32% of businesses prioritize marketing analytics in their budget, with 76% saying they use data to drive key decisions. That’s why we include an analytics and segmentation tool – Glew.io – as part of our Managed WooCommerce solution as standard. 

2. Use Minimum Quantities for Discounts & Perks

Many online stores already implement this strategy in the form of a banner offering free shipping on orders over a certain value. Offering free shipping for orders that exceed your target ecommerce AOV is a win-win situation. Firstly, you can use this technique to increase your bottom line. Secondly, customers feel good because you’re offering them a free shipping option.

Don’t rush to your WooCommerce admin area to set up that banner now, at least not if you don’t know what your free shipping threshold should be. Without knowing that threshold, you can easily find yourself in a situation where you’re losing money, due to the cost of shipping that now needs to be added into your price calculation.

When calculating your threshold, it should be a target AOV where your customers have to purchase multiple products or a bundle – it has little psychological value if it’s easy to attain. Conversely, if you set the free shipping threshold too high, you can turn off your customers and they won’t even try to reach it. You’ll need to balance your price to effectively increase your AOV.

You can take this strategy to the next level by not just having a static banner at the top of your shop (the WooCommerce notification bar works well for that banner), but by having a dynamic element on your Cart and Checkout pages that tells your customers how far away they are from reaching the free shipping threshold. You want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to understand how close they are to getting free shipping.

3. Leverage One-Time Offers

One-time offers (OTO’s) are presented to your customer right after they purchased one (or multiple) products in your WooCommerce shop, and provide them the option to add another discounted product to their order with a single click. OTO’s can be super effective if you set them up correctly. Let’s go through a few of their key characteristics:

• Relevancy: the offered product adds value to the products already purchased.
• Pricing: The OTO needs to be at a discounted level and should be lower than the order value, so that the perceived added value is as high as possible.
• Ease of use: Adding the OTO must work with a single click. If you make your customers enter their billing details again, they’ll likely cancel the order process for the OTO.

WooCommerce developers recognize the importance of one-time offers and have created many powerful plugins to support this functionality. These plugins often get used in funnels built with WooCommerce.

In this post, Chris Lema describes example funnels using the plugin WooCommerce Redirect Thank You, but you could also look into the plugins WooStroke (see screenshot below for an example flow) or Smart Offers.

4. Start Selling Gift Cards

If you want to know how to increase AOV in ecommerce, consider offering giftcards. Gift cards can be a powerful tool to increase the average order value in your WooCommerce shop, but also need to be used with caution in certain situations. Let’s see how you can use them to not just increase your ecommerce AOV but also potentially reduce future ad spend for recurring purchases.

Begin by determining average product value. It may be that your typical product has a price tag of $25 or higher. In this case, you could send every customer a free $5 gift card for them to use on their next purchase. You can send them the gift card electronically or, better yet, have a batch of them printed and added to each package you send out.

Having that gift card at hand increases the likelihood your customer will order again from your shop, to spend that $5. This helps you reduce the retargeting ad spend to get this customer to shop with you again.

Keep in mind, the prices for your products need to be high enough to leverage this strategy. “High enough” means that the gift card should not result in a free order, causing a loss for you. Additionally, if you’re running “Free Shipping” campaigns, ensure that the gift card cannot be used on shipping costs.

Even if you’re not giving away a gift card with each order, you can sell them directly in your shop. There are plenty of plugins for WooCommerce that allow you to do that. Take a look at Gift Cards for WooCommerce (see screenshot for an example) or YITH Gift Cards. If you want to dive deeper into the ways to create gift cards in WooCommerce, read this article on Business Bloomer.

5. Incentivize First-Time Buyers with Deals

Offering discounts to first-time buyers is a common method of incentivizing visitors to become a customer. You could use hooks like a percentage discount, free priority shipping, a free gift card (see above) or a free product to encourage customers to buy from you. When visiting almost any web shop, you’ll see an offer to save X% on your first order when subscribing to their email list. That’s an example of this strategy put into action.

A second strategy involves adding these opportunities to the cart or checkout page, and to not advertise them as aggressively. Similar to the “do you want chips with that?” question you are always asked when ordering a fast food burger, you can add special offers your customers can put into their carts with a single click.

There are plenty of plugins you can leverage to add a function like this to your WooCommerce shop. Two that I recommend are WooCommerce Multiple Free Gift (see screenshot below for an example) and WooCommerce Checkout Add-Ons.

Bonus: Implement Price Anchoring in Your Products

Price anchoring is a psychological principle that controls how your visitors perceive the prices in your WooCommerce shop, without actually selling anything.

To efficiently use price anchoring, you need to understand what your target Average Order Value is – as that’s the base price. You’ll then position a product with that AOV (could be a bundle if you don’t have a single product at that price) between one product that provides much lower value at a much lower cost (e.g. one piece of the bundle) and another product with a higher perceived value at a much higher price.

This strategy helps to make the product with the target AOV look like the most reasonable and well-priced choice. The other product options are designed to not look valuable or to have such a high price-tag that they feel unattainable to most of your customers. Using this strategy, you’ll find that you’re enticing most of your web shop’s visitors to click on the Average Order Value product. That’s the goal of the strategy.

Implementing price anchoring in your WooCommerce store is fairly straightforward. You have to create multiple products that match the pricing categories outlined above. One type of product goes into the “low-value” category, then you’ll have another category for the target AOV products and one category for the “high-value” products.

Keep in mind that the term “category” is used here as an abstract way to categorize the products for yourself. You should not create customer-facing WooCommerce categories that only contain one type of product.

After creating those products, you need to place them side-by-side, so that your customers can compare them directly. To do that, you can use a plugin like Rearrange Woocommerce Products, or use your page builder of choice.

Start Increasing AOV in Ecommerce

Now you know how to increase AOV for ecommerce. As you can see, there are many ways to increase the average order value in your online store. You can get quite creative in your approach and find ways that work perfectly for your brand and setup.

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