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There are over 2.3 million eCommerce stores hosted on the WooCommerce platform, and for good reason. WooCommerce makes creating your own eCommerce store quick and easy. Great functionality and an intuitive interface come together to create a powerful eCommerce platform. First you just have to complete the WooCommerce setup.

With a combination of additional plugins and options from the get go, getting through the beginning stages can seem like a daunting task. Don’t worry, with WordPress, it’s easy. This guide will take you from a clean WordPress install, through to creating your first product and customizing your storefront.

What This Guide Covers:

Step 1: Installing WooCommerce

Step 2: WooCommerce setup

Step 3: Creating your first product

Step 4: Adding images, product galleries, categories, and tags

Step 4: Customizing your WooCommerce setup

Note: If you choose the Hostdedi Cloud to host your WooCommerce store, we will install WooCommerce for you, meaning you can start from step 2.

What You Need:

• A hosted WordPress or WooCommerce solution
• An active internet connection (unless you’re going to be testing on a local account)
• Around 20 minutes of your time
• A fiery passion for eCommerce (optional)

The first thing you’re going to need to do is to load up WordPress and head to the admin panel. From here, look down the left hand panel and find Plugins. Clicking here will expand the options you see. From these new options, you’ll want to click Add New.

Next, head to the top right of the screen and type WooCommerce (as we’ve artfully done above). The first result should be WooCommerce. If you’re unsure, just take a look at all the incredible reviews – or read the description. Click Install Now and wait. Make sure you stay on this screen.

Once it’s installed, that Install Now button will change to Activate. Click this ASAP and you’ll now have a fully functional WooCommerce install on your WordPress site. It’s time for the eCommerce magic to begin. 

Once you’ve installed and activated WooCommerce, you’re going to need to go through a short WooCommerce setup wizard. To do this, look back at the left hand panel and find WooCommerce. Click it. If it’s not showing up, refresh the page and it should appear. If it’s still not there, head back to Step 1 and repeat.

After you’ve navigated to the WooCommerce page, you’ll find a button under the page title called Run the Setup Wizard. Click this and prepare to let WooCommerce know everything you want your store to be (almost).

Begin WooCommerce Store Setup

The first group of information we need to let WooCommerce know about is where we are, who we are, what type of product we’re selling, and what currency we’re going to be charging in. If you have multiple currencies then don’t worry. We’ll cover this later. For now, just go with your local currency.

The information here doesn’t have to be entirely accurate, although it will help at a later date if it is. Once you’re finished, click Continue to be taken to the Payment page (for configuring how people will be paying you).

Set up Your WooCommerce Payments

Before we go any further, while the options above may seem limited, you can install your own payment gateway after setup in the form of a WooCommerce plugin.

However, if you do use one or more of those listed above, then it’s just a case of moving the slider to the “on” position. Once you’ve selected your payment gateways, click continue.

Setting Up Shipping

It’s now time to set up your shipping information. Here, you’re going to need to input your shipping zones and how rates are calculated. If you’re a beginner, we advise leaving these as their default options. Remember, these options can all be edited at a later date or expanded upon with additional plugins if you need.

You’ll also need to input the weight unit you’re using and the the dimension unit. We recommend going with the most frequently used unit in your primary demographic location. For instance, if you are running a store in the US, oz and inches are likely the best fit. If, however, you’re running a store in the UK, it’s better to opt for kg and cm. Metric or Imperial, you decide. 

Once you’ve finished with this screen, again, click continue.

A Few Extra Things

The final stage of the setup offers some optional plugins to install if you think they may fit your store. We’ll leave this up to your better judgment on whether you think they are suitable. If you’re unsure, we recommend getting in touch with a developer to see how these plugins will benefit you.

Once you’ve finished, you can then activate your WooCommerce install at the next screen and you’re ready to go.

What use is an eCommerce store without products?

This step will help you to create your first product so that it’s ready to go live on your WooCommerce site.

We’ll be covering the areas of:

• Product name
• Product description
• Product pictures
• SKU
• Inventory
• Shipping costs

Remember, WooCommerce has a lot of added functionality over just plain WordPress, designed specifically for the purposes of eCommerce. We’re going to want to use as much of this as possible.

Before you get started with this step, there are a few things you’re going to need:

• Some product photography – WooCommerce have a great blog post on how to create inexpensive product photography, or maybe you’re already as photography expert or have the photos from suppliers.
• Content and copy for product descriptions and names.
• An idea of what SKUs you’re going to use (if you’re running a big store)

Now that you’ve gotten all of that sorted, head to WooCommerce down the left sidebar => Products => New Product.

This top section of the page will be very familiar to WordPress users. That’s because it’s basically the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

You can enter your product name at the top and a product description at the bottom. Note that the product description here will be the long product description located below the product – not the short description located next to the Image.

Once you’ve finished loading your content here, you’re ready to move onto some of WooCommerce’s finer product setup features.

Advanced product data gives you a chance to select the price for your item, set inventory, organize its SKU, and more.

Along the top, you’ll notice two tick boxes for Virtual and Downloadable. If you are selling items that don’t require shipping, you can tick these and WooCommerce will ignore shipping rates.

This is where you can set the short description as shown above. You can enter whatever information you wish to enter here. It’s advisable to keep this section short and it will act as one of the first things a prospective buyer will see. Keep it catchy and fun – product specifics belong in the long description below.

The next step for adding your first WooCommerce product to your catalog is including images and categories. To do this, you just need to head to the right side of your WYSIWYG-like WooCommerce editor.

Here you’ll find the category options. You can add new ones if you wish to. These are incredibly helpful for aiding customers in their conversion journey and making sure they enjoy an easy and intuitive user experience. Tags can also be used to help with this and, once again, we highly recommend you use them – especially if you are running a large store.

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to input pictures. WooCommerce has put together a great guide on how to go about improving product photography for your eCommerce store. We highly recommend making sure your products photography is of a high quality, it’s one of the most significant page elements involved in affecting conversions.

To add your primary product image, scroll to where it says Product Image and upload and select your image. Below this, you can add additional images to be featured in the product gallery, this way you can exhibit different aspects of your item. In creating a page for the incredible Hostdedi swag notebook, we’ve shown what it looks like from the front in the product image, and then a look at the inside in the product gallery.

If you’re going to be taking your WooCommerce store live, you’re probably going to want to see the range of different themes already available – or possibly customize your own.

This guide will not go into how to create your own WooCommerce themes – that’s for another article – but we will direct you to where you can change theme settings and choose from a selection of pre-built ones.

To do this, head to Appearance down the left side of your WooCommerce dashboard. From here, you can select Themes to look at a range of different pre-built WooCommerce themes, or you can select customize to change elements on your site easily. This includes repeat elements like site titles, logos, and more. You can also take a look at Plugins, below Appearance, for a list of extensions you can add to your WooCommerce store to expand functionality.

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Google’s web crawlers have supported JavaScript for many years, but “support” is an ambiguous term. JavaScript is a fast-moving target and although Googlebot can process many JavaScript features, it is possible to do a lot of damage to a site’s SEO by relying on features that the crawlers can’t handle.

The issue of JavaScript-support has become increasingly important over the last few years. The release of client-side web frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular caused a move away from traditional server-side rendering.

Today, developers often prefer to render content in the browser with JavaScript. The server sends an initial HTML app shell and the site’s JavaScript code; everything else is loaded from an API and rendered by the client-side code.

WordPress’s REST API was built for just this type of use. Magento has enthusiastically embraced Progressive Web Apps for eCommerce front-ends. Progressive Web App frameworks are available for WooCommerce.

But if a WordPress site or Magento or WooCommerce store uses JavaScript to render its content, that content will be invisible to crawlers that don’t support the relevant features.

Which JavaScript Features Can Googlebot Understand?

In a nutshell, Google’s crawlers can understand ES5 and older. It cannot understand the new features added to JavaScript in ES6, which is a shame because ES6 is awesome.

ES stands for ECMAScript, the name of the standard on which JavaScript implementations are based. Each release is given a number. ES5 was released in 2009 and introduced various new Object methods and many of the Array methods – such as array.map and array.reduce – that are much loved by JavaScript developers with a functional bent.

ES6 was released in 2015 and brought some big changes to JavaScript, including classes, arrow functions, object destructuring, promises, the let and const syntax, iterators, generators, and a lot more.

But here is the problem: at the time of writing, Google’s crawlers are based on Chrome 41, which was released just before ES6. They do not support any of the whizzy new features. That wasn’t much of a problem previously as most of the browsers in use didn’t support them either. Developers were required to stick with older features or to transpile their JavaScript to ES5 using Babel.

But as browser support has improved, developers, especially library developers, are releasing production code that uses a lot of ES6 features, and if web developers are careful, they can introduce code that Google’s crawlers don’t understand.

Three Solutions To Google’s Language Barrier

There are three basic solutions to Google’s non-comprehension of ES6:

1. Don’t release ES6 code to production: transpile it to ES5 or avoid it altogether.
2. Stick to traditional server-side rendering with Node, PHP, or other server-side languages.
3. Render the initial load of a client-side application on the server. This is a popular choice and frameworks like Next.js make it fairly straightforward. The initial view, content included, is rendered on the server and sent to the browser. Thereafter content is loaded by the client-side application in the traditional way.
4. Google has recently introduced a new option: dynamic rendering. With dynamic rendering, content sent to the web crawler is rendered on the server, but content sent to browsers is rendered on the client. If that sounds like a breach of Google’s rules against sending different content to browsers and crawlers, that’s because it is. But Google is making an exception because it recognizes that its crawlers are holding developers back.

It is likely Googlebot will lag behind browsers for the foreseeable future, so if you want to embrace Progressive Web Applications for your business or eCommerce store, it’s worth taking the time to understand exactly what the crawlers understand.

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Page speed is linked to almost every aspect of your website. From SEO to conversions, to user experience and beyond. A faster site usually means better results across the board. Yet improving site speed can be a complex process. From the hosting provider you choose to the platform you decide to work with, there are a lot of areas that can be tweaked to improve site speed. This article is about website optimizations you can implement yourself.

But first, how do we know site speed is important?

It came to prominence in 2010, when Google officially announced that site speed would be involved in calculating web search ranking. SEO optimizers everywhere quickly started trying to make sure that sites were fast enough to make the search engine cut.

On top of this, it was becoming increasingly clear that site speed also had a large effect on conversions. For eCommerce businesses, the statistic that a 1 second delay in page response can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions is often cited. Many users expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less, bouncing if load times take too long.

This article will look at some simple website optimization tools, tips, techniques, and more. Starting with how to test your site for speed, and then providing actionable and easy to implement website optimizations.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to test your website’s current speed. This will help to give you a snapshot for before and after benchmarks during the optimization process.

A couple of website optimization tools you can start with are Webpagetest.org and Google’s Page Speed Insights. Make sure to run multiple tests and then average the results. Web Page Test will allow you to do this automatically in the settings menu. We also recommend selecting a testing location near to where your site is hosted to get the most accurate results.

The example above shows how we usually set up webpagetest.org for basic speed checks.

Page Speed Significance

Below you can see the results of a page speed test on the Magento demo site averaged out. We’ve picked out 3 of the most important and significant stats we want to use for optimizing the site.

Load Time	Time To First Byte	Bytes In
2.264s	0.318s	927 KB

The first stat we’ve taken is load time. This shows us the complete time it takes to load our page. Remember, if a page takes over 3 seconds to load, you may be losing half of your potential traffic. This number is the most important for us to change.

The second stat is Time To First Byte (TTFB). We’ve talked about this previously and discussed how this is a generally overused statistic. While it can help to provide guidance, TTFB can be manipulated relatively easily and isn’t as important as some may think.

The third stat is the size of information being downloaded to the page. If this number is very large, it may be useful to take a closer look at what different page elements take what durations. You can do this by taking a peek at the waterfall.

Page Speed Waterfall

An example of what the waterfall looks like can be seen below. Here we’re able to isolate what elements are slowing down site speed the most.

Once you’ve looked at the waterfall, you should have a better idea of what can be improved. Above, we can see that some of the front end .js files can likely be sped up slightly. Lower down the waterfall (off the page), there are also some image files that take longer than many of the page’s other image elements. These may also be an area we can look into and improve on.

Image compression is one of the easiest ways to optimize site speed. Too often do web designers make images that adopt uselessly high resolutions. High-resolution images take up more storage space on a server and can increase load times significantly.

We highly recommend scaling images appropriately. If an image is only going to take up a 100 x 100 pixel space on your site, there’s no need to make it 1000 x 1000.

Image Type Extensions

When saving images, deciding on what extension to use generally falls into one of two different options: .jpeg and .png.

There’s a lot of false information out there about which extension should be used. Many say that .png (Portable Network Graphics) is the better option, with it being designed to compress images as much as possible without losing quality.

This is partially true. However…

.JPEG files actually work much better when using photographs.

Before settling on a file type, it can be beneficial to check how saving as each type affects file size and quality. If you notice a clear difference, opt for the better extension.

There are several ways to improve image optimization. You can use a third-party piece of software and do this yourself, or some CMS’ offer internal functionality, plugins or extensions to manage this for you. The EWWW Image Optimizer WordPress plugin is a great tool for getting started if you’re running a WordPress site.

In addition to compressing images, you should also be compressing CSS, HTML, and JavaScript elements on your site. GZip is a highly recommended for optimizing your website through compression.

Google recommend testing Gzip compression before implementing in a production environment. We recommend making use of a Dev Site environment that mimics your production environment if you’re planning on doing this.

Also note that there has been some evidence that compression can increase Time To First Byte durations – despite reducing overall page speed load times. Some SEO authorities have suggested that Google may, in fact, prioritize TTFB over overall page load times. Because of this, we recommend testing on single pages before making the switch sitewide.

When it comes to page load speed, less is almost always more. Instead of adding additional functionality to core pages, how about settling on something simpler and faster?

The fewer HTTP requests a site has, the faster it will load (usually).

In addition to improving site speed, simple web design has also been shown to improve user experience in many cases. In a UX study conducted by Google, it was found that users tend to judge a website’s aesthetics within 1/50th – 1/20th of a second, and that visually complex sites were almost always judged as being less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.

The more beautiful a website is perceived as, the better UX and SEO will be, and the more conversions will increase.

A simpler website design is one of the quickest methods for improving page speed within a short period of time. However, we recommend running A/B tests in order to see how changes actually perform and not making a 100% change straight away.

Caching is where repeat visitors are able to load your site much faster thanks to page elements being stored on their hard drive in a cache or temporary storage.

For WordPress and WooCommerce sites, we make use of W3 Total Cache to manage caching functions. This will come pre-installed and pre-configured when you purchase a WordPress optimized hosting solution.   

In order to optimize site speed even more, the Hostdedi Cloud allows for use of the Cloud Accelerator. This can easily be turned on and off with the click of a button under the performance section of the Client Portal.

Unsure whether you should turn on Varnish or NGINX? Find out more about the difference between Varnish and NGINX in our Definitive Guide to Optimizing Magento 2.

Caching and CDN

Caching with a CDN (Content Delivery Network) in place is a more complicated process and can require advanced setup. However, a proper caching configuration with a CDN can help you to reach that global audience as though you were with a local host.

For WordPress and WooCommerce, check our guide on How to configure the Hostdedi CDN with WordPress and W3 Total Cache.

Further Notes

What Page Are You Optimizing?

You need to ask yourself: What page are you optimizing? Homepages are an important part of a website, but what other pages are users going to be interacting with a lot? All of these pages need to be speed checked and optimized.

For instance, it’s not good enough for us to just optimize Hostdedi.net, we also need to optimize Hostdedi.net/magento/hosting and Hostdedi.net/cloud/hosting.

Before you set out to begin this process, try to put together a plan for what key pages are drawing in the most conversions and attracting the most ROI.

Page Speed and SEO

We said earlier that page speed and SEO are heavily linked. However, we also mentioned that page speed is – by far – not the most important factor in determining rank. Google has said that if a page or site’s content is more relevant and people are willing to wait for it to load, then they will not penalize that site.

Page speed is an important part of optimizing, but content, quality, and user experience should always come first.

 

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A Domain Name System (DNS) links domain names to the IP addresses that are used to route data around the internet. It is an important component of eCommerce performance: if a shopper’s browser can’t find the IP address of a store’s server, it can’t send requests and load pages. If the DNS system is slow to respond with an IP address, the browser and the customer are left waiting.

Often, eCommerce retailers have little control over DNS performance. For some, this causes a problem as a performance-optimized Magento store on lightning fast hosting can still be slow from the perspective of a shopper. Latency introduced by an unresponsive DNS nameserver is just as effective as increasing bounce rate as slow loading page elements are.

Hostdedi DNS

We introduced Hostdedi DNS to give our clients access to a fast and reliable DNS. The Hostdedi DNS is a multiple redundancy Domain Name Service that provides low-latency name resolution for eCommerce and hosting customers located anywhere in the world. Backed by an industry-leading open source DNS record management service called Octo DNS — which was originally developed by GitHub — Hostdedi DNS also provides fast DNS record updating and syncing.

The chart above shows how Hostdedi DNS works. All connections routed through both Route53 and Dyn, who are connected to servers around the world (to further speed up request responses). This helps to cut out the middleman and mean that data is being downloaded from the closest located available and as quickly as possible.

What to Look for in an eCommerce DNS Solution

eCommerce store owners and website owners generally look for the same things when trying to find a good DNS. These are:

• A low latency network.
• High reliability with multiple redundancies and a history of 100% uptime (or as close as possible).
• Flexibility in being able to update DNS records as quickly and easily as possible.
• Quick DNS record updates for when changes are made. The faster the better.

Redundant DNS Providers

Hostdedi DNS leverages two of the largest and most reliable DNS providers in the world: Dyn and Amazon Route 53. We use two DNS providers for resilience: if one provider suffers an outage the other can take its place.

It is important to note that the DNS servers are not hosted in Hostdedi data centers but in the data centers of our DNS providers. We provide hosting for the Octo DNS orchestration system, which handles the updating and management of records, but the nameservers are hosted on Dyn and Route 53’s massive and redundant global networks.

Redundant Nameservers

Hostdedi DNS uses eight nameservers distributed across both DNS providers. Using multiple domain nameserver with multiple DNS providers offers an incredible level of redundancy and reliability. The likelihood of an outage affecting all domain servers at both providers is tiny.

The practical consequence is that your store remains accessible and responsive even if there is an outage.

AnyCast DNS

Both of our DNS providers offer AnyCast DNS networks. Traditionally, a DNS nameserver was a single machine located in a data center. In an AnyCast DNS network, each nameserver is replicated across many different servers in data centers around the world. This has two major benefits: the first is redundancy; if a server fails, requests are routed to a different server.

The second benefit is latency. DNS requests are always routed to the nearest location, which drastically reduces the round-trip time for DNS requests. You can think of AnyCast DNS as a content distribution network for DNS records (although the technical details are not the same).

The consequence of all this redundancy and geographic distribution is a reliable low-latency DNS service that ensures your shoppers will always be able to reach your store.

Hostdedi DNS is great for eCommerce, but it is just as effective at reducing latency and increasing reliability across our full range of hosting plans, including WordPress, Craft CMS, and ExpressionEngine hosting.

The Hostdedi DNS Checker

Check your DNS and make sure it’s propagated with this simple DNS tool.

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