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Everyone wants their WordPress site to function and perform its best. No business owner wants to be forced to sacrifice function for performance or vice versa. If your site isn’t getting the attention you think it deserves, you may need to learn how to create a WordPress performance tuning strategy.

Why is a WordPress Performance Tuning Strategy Important?

A WordPress tuning strategy is vital because you’re likely to use too many features and way too many plugins for unnecessary functionality when you self-host your WordPress site. Installing all of that stuff you’re not using means your site won’t perform as well as it should.

Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization >>

When your site slows down, it negatively impacts search engine optimization and visitor experience. Therefore, it’s up to you to enact a performance tuning strategy to ensure your site is up to speed.

Identify Potential Issues with Your Website

The first step in a WordPress performance tuning strategy is to identify potential issues with your website. Some of the most common performance issues with WordPress sites are:

• Browser Caching. A cache is a copy of your website information stored on your computer to make it load faster upon subsequent visits. But if older versions of the page are stored, it can decrease speed instead. Therefore, you need to understand how caching for WordPress affects your site.
• JavaScript. This programming language helps you add features to your WordPress site. But it also can slow down your page rendering speed.
• Minify CSS. When you minify CSS files, you cut out unneeded parts of code, reduce file sizes, and speed up the site.
• Image Optimization. Images use a lot of data. You need to optimize them, making them smaller and preventing pages from loading slowly. One way to do this is with WebP images.
• Using a Content Delivery Network. A content delivery network (CDN) is a web server platform that reduces the distance between the user and the server, generating faster processing and load times.

Repair Common Issues Through Performance Tuning

You don’t automatically have performance tuning features pre-installed when you run a self-hosted WordPress site. That means you’ll need to take those steps on your own. Here’s how.

Ensure Your Host is Optimized for WordPress

Working with an optimized WordPress host is a huge benefit. Being optimized means they’re experts on WordPress sites.

To find out if your host is optimized for WordPress, ask:

• Does the host have browser caching enabled?
• Will they use a CDN by default?
• Do they scan and protect your site against WordPress-specific hacks?

Hostdedi takes care of all of this and more with fully managed WordPress hosting services.

Clean Up Plugins

Plugins add functionality and features to your site. The myriad of plugins available is one of the perks of running a self-hosted WordPress site. But, unfortunately, plugins also can slow down your site.

The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

To clean up your site’s plugins:

• Check Usage. Make sure you’re using the plugins you enabled on your site. If not, uninstall them.
• Review Compatibility and Updates. Check to be sure the plugins you kept are still compatible with the WordPress version you’re running and that they’re updated regularly. If the plug-in isn’t updated regularly, they could have bugs. These bugs can slow down your site and make it vulnerable to attack.

Consider Multimedia Elements

You want to work with a host that uses a content delivery network, as described above, if your site includes a lot of multimedia. That’s because load times differ based on distance from servers. 

When your site is located far away from a server, just compressing your images isn’t enough to ensure fast loading time.

A CDN has servers located around the world, storing unchanging (static) files from websites. These static files mean the webpage doesn’t have to be loaded completely every time, and the server doesn’t have to do as much work. Thus, a CDN ensures that load time is fast, regardless of where you are.

Why You Need a WordPress CDN >>

In addition to using a host with a CDN, use PNG files when possible. PNGs are of higher quality and easier to compress. Also, be sure to compress your photos before you upload them to your site. Compressing photos and using a CDN will help your site load quickly.

Check Redirects

Did you recently rebuild or audit your site? If so, you may have removed pages or posts. If you didn’t correctly set redirects, you’re likely to lose out on traffic until you fix them.

You should review the new site after a rebuild or migration to make sure the URLs go to the correct pages and identify any broken links. You also should look for redirects that create chains because those slow down your site.

Ensure Security

Your hosting company needs to be WordPress optimized to avoid hacks and security breaches.

To ensure that your WordPress site is secure, ask your hosting company about:

• Automatic Updates. Ask your hosting company if they run automatic WordPress updates. If so, make sure you are notified of any updates. 
• Security Scans. Find out if they regularly run website scans to discover and repair security holes.
• SSL Certificates. Ask if they include SSL certificates for free with a site.
• Auto Repairs. Can they fix any issues they discover automatically? You want to make sure this happens because unresolved issues put your website at risk.
• Backups. Ask if the host company will back up your site. If so, be sure to find out how often. It’s standard for a hosting company to back up your site daily. These backups allow your site to be restored to a recent version if something happens.

Strengthen Your Performance Tuning Strategy With Hostdedi

Creating and running a WordPress performance tuning strategy means being aware of many intangibles that can impact your site’s functionality and performance.

The simplest way to make sure that visitors to your site don’t run into slow loading pages or other issues is to host your site with a company that runs the performance tuning strategy for you.

Hostdedi provides fully-managed WordPress hosting that includes:

• Automatic updates.
• SSL for security.
• Built-in CDN.
• Image compression.
• Caching.
• And more!

With Hostdedi, your site is optimized, secure, and fast. Contact us today to learn how Hostdedi can take on-site performance tuning for you automatically.

Or, give it a try for free. Start your two-week trial of fully managed WordPress today.

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Learning how to write a product description is an essential skill for ecommerce store owners.

Besides describing product features, well-written product descriptions can entice customers to buy, increase sales, and boost the visibility of your online store.

As crucial as it is, coming up with great product descriptions can be difficult, especially when there are a lot of details to note.

What Is Product Description?

A product description provides essential information about the features and benefits of a product and why it’s worth buying.

An effective product description:

• Boosts product sales.
• Attracts your brand and audience.
• Helps your online shop rank higher in search engine results.

A winning product description informs and excites, appealing to a potential customer’s logical and emotional sides.

Understanding the Ecommerce Decision-Making Process

Before potential buyers make a purchase decision, they undergo a decision-making process called the buyer’s journey. 

Ecommerce is unique in the sense that ecommerce business owners have the opportunity to optimize the process and influence customers every step of the way.

The buyer’s journey has three stages, namely:

• Awareness.
• Consideration.
• Decision.

During the awareness stage, buyers realize the need for a product. In the consideration stage, they look at and compare products. It’s likely at this stage that they visited your website and product page. 

A good product description is able to capture the audience at the consideration stage to help them convert to the final decision stage. 

Thus, marketers and retailers alike will benefit from learning how to write a product description.

How to Write a Product Description

1. Define your target audience.
2. Do keyword research.
3. Use brand voice to tell a story.
4. Ensure readability.
5. Include high-quality photos and videos.

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step in writing a good product description is to define your target audience.

By doing so, you’ll determine which features are most attractive to your potential customers, and you’ll learn how to write a product description that highlights these product details.

Establish buyer personas for each target customer segment. Imagine what they’re like and list the following to come up with an ideal customer and brand voice:

• Demographics. 
• Behaviors. 
• Motivations. 
• Pain points. 

2. Do Keyword Research

Part of learning how to write a product description is to figure out how to optimize product descriptions for search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be an effective way to attract customers to your product page, and every SEO strategy begins with keyword research.

Keyword optimization depends on which stage of the buyer’s journey you’re in, but because you’re writing product descriptions for product pages, long-form and specific keywords with navigational and transactional intent are your best bet.

To further optimize your product page, place these keywords strategically in:

• Product title tags. 
• Meta descriptions.
• Image ALT tags. 
• Product copy.

3. Use Brand Voice to Tell a Story

Although the ecommerce decision-making process seems like a rational and straightforward journey, it’s actually an emotional journey.

A winning product description appeals to two sides of a customer: logical and emotional. 

The logical side describes a product’s benefits, while the creative description appeals to the customer’s emotions.

The brand voice you came up with in the first step comes in handy when writing a creative product description.

Be descriptive. Use superlatives and “power words” that influence customers to buy, but do so in a natural and conversational tone.

Telling a story that appeals to a customer’s emotion is what makes them buy.

4. Ensure Readability

Over the years, people’s attention spans have gone down. Because so much information is available, most people resort to scanning instead of reading.

To make it simple for customers to find information, use bullet points to describe product benefits and features. Creating bulleted lists also makes it easier to create product description templates.

For example, an Amazon page for a T-shirt lists the product’s features in a bulleted list for customers to skim through quickly.

Incorporate a lot of white space and use different font styles and sizes that follow the best practices for combining fonts.

5. Include High-Quality Photos and Videos

The best product descriptions always include high-quality product photos and videos, and the majority of customers consider visuals to be an essential part of their purchasing decisions.

Not only do visuals support what’s written in your product description, but they also show customers what the product looks like and how it works, which is crucial when customers can’t physically examine the product.

Outstanding photographs don’t always require a product photographer — you can learn how to use your smartphone to take product images for your ecommerce site.

Final Thoughts: How To Write a Product Description That Grows Sales

Learning how to write a product description is an essential skill to have when you own an online store.

The best product descriptions attract customers to your ecommerce site, boost product sales, and contribute to website visibility.

Writing effective product descriptions requires an understanding of your target audience’s buyer’s persona in order to address pain points and offer value propositions.

As a full-time business owner, you have a lot on your plate. Let Hostdedi take care of your ecommerce website.

Try fully hosted WooCommerce with Hostdedi today. With Hostdedi, you’ll get: 

• A fast, high-performing site.
• Instant auto scaling.
• Always-on security.
• Automatic plugin and platform updates.
• The strongest WooCommerce support around.

Better is Built In with fully managed hosting from Hostdedi. Try it free for 14 days.

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When it comes to your WordPress site, one seemingly small thing can make or break traffic — speed. 

Your WordPress site should load in three seconds or less. Slow loading means visitors will leave your site, abandoning any purchases they planned to make.

Luckily you can use WordPress performance plugins to make sure your site operates quickly, and loading speed doesn’t cause you to lose visitors.

Why Use WordPress Performance Plugins?

WordPress performance plugins make your site run and load more quickly. But that’s not all they do. They focus on key features that make your site perform better and faster.

Here are some of the areas in which WordPress performance plugins help optimize your site:

• Cache. A cache for WordPress is commonly accessed data that are temporarily stored to speed up processing. A computer can access this information quickly while retrieving any new information related to the site. Caching is the most common way to get your website to load faster and generally perform better.
• WordPress HeartBeat API. WordPress’s built-in server polling Application Programming Interface allows applications to talk to each other quickly. It allows for almost real-time updates.
• Reducing or Disabling Ajax. Ajax updates part of a web page without reloading the entire page. It can be helpful, but it also can slow down your Central Processing Unit, making it necessary to reduce or disable Ajax usage.
• Deferring Scripts. To defer scripts means you load your CSS or JavaScript files last, making your site accessible to visitors more quickly.
• CDNs. A Content Delivery Network distributes the work of delivering content to your web browser, making it more efficient by increasing the number of sources, their closeness, and caching.
• Lazy Loading. Lazy loading loads the parts of the website visitors are viewing first. Lazy loading means avoiding loading the whole page at once, which may take a long time.
• Minification. Reduces website load time by eliminating unnecessary content in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
• Concatenation. Combining files to reduce the number of requests on your site.

Remember, when installing plugins, only install what your site really needs and what you’ll update regularly. Old, inactive plugins will slow down your site, defeating the purpose.

👉 The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

9 Best WordPress Performance Plugins

Now you have a better idea about what WordPress performance plugins do. But having this information may not make choosing a plugin easier with all of the options out there. So we’re breaking it down even further for you. Here are the nine best WordPress performance plugins.

1.WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache has more than two million users, making it one of the more popular caching plugins. It is free and easy to set up. It includes settings for advanced users to allow them to get more out of the plugin. 

WP Super Cache features include:

• Support for multiple caching types.
• Serve static HTML files.
• Cache preload.
• CDN support.

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a popular speed-enhancing plugin with more than a million downloads. The free plugin supports a variety of caching methods and advanced support for some CDN services. But, because there are so many customizable options, this plugin is best for advanced users. 

W3 Total Cache features include:

• CDN support.
• Browser, database, and object caching.
• Minifying.

3. WP Super Minify

WP Super Minify is a free plugin that combines, minifies, and caches JavaScript and CSS files to speed up page loads.

WP Super Minify features include:

• Option to disable compression of CSS/JavaScript.
• Easy to use with simple, three-step installation.

4. WP Smush

WP Smush is a free app used to optimize images and remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It uses a lossless format, so viewers don’t notice any difference in image quality.

WP Smush features include:

• Strips unused color from images.
• Strips unnecessary metadata from JPEGs.
• Optimized JPEG compression.
• Ability to run existing images through the plugin.

5. LazyLoad by WP Rocket

LazyLoad by WP Rocket is a free app that loads specific page elements as the viewer needs them, instead of loading all at once and slowing down the load time. 

LazyLoad features include:

• Replaces post images, thumbnails, etc.
• Can replace YouTube iFrames with preview thumbnails.

6. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is an easy, user-friendly caching plugin. It allows users to cache their site with a single click instantly. Its crawler automatically gathers your WordPress pages to build up the cache. WP Rocket isn’t free. It ranges in price from $49 to $249 a year, depending on how many websites you want it to run on.

WP Rocket features include:

• User-friendly interface.
• Minify CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
• Cache preload, page caching, and advanced caching rules.
• Lazing loading images.
• CDN support.
• DNS prefetching.
• Google Analytics integration to load the code from your server.
• Settings import and export.
• WordPress version rollback.
• Delay Javascript execution time.

“We serve clients with varying needs, budgets and configurations. And WP Rocket is one of our go-to plugins.” — Eric Dye from WP VALET

7. Perfmatters

Perfmatters allows you to disable WordPress options that aren’t necessary for most sites and slow down performance. It also allows you to disable scripts on a per page basis, stopping plugins from loading code whether it isn’t needed. It isn’t free. It ranges from $24.95 to 54.95 a year, depending on the number of sites you want to run it on.

Perfmatters features include: 

• Works with your existing caching plugin.
• Disable WordPress options that are slowing your site down.
• Disable scripts on per page/post basis.
• Supports advanced performance-boosting functionality such as DNS prefetch and preconnect.

8. NitroPack

NitroPack is a complete speed optimization platform. It optimizes everything for you and allows you to choose how aggressive you want the optimization to be. The app automatically implements a global CDN, various caching types, minification, compression, image optimization, serving images in next-gen formats (e.g. SVG), DNS prefetch, deferring of JavaScript, etc. 

There is a free NitroPack plan, but it adds a badge to your footer and has limited resources. Otherwise, it ranges from $17.50 to $146.67 a month, depending on your site’s needs and how many sites you run.

NitroPack features include:

• Automatic website optimization.
• Supports WordPress and other content management systems.
• Global CDN included and automatically configured.
• Various caching types (page, browser, etc.).
• Automatic image optimization.
• Convert images to next gen formats.
• DNS prefetching.
• Defer JS loading.
• HTML, JS, and CSS minification.
• HTML, CSS, and JS compression.

9. WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache is a free performance plugin that focuses on caching. It’s used by more than one million people, probably because it’s easy to operate. You install it, activate it, and run through the settings.

WP Fastest Cache features include:

• Easy setup.
• One-click changes.
• Minify CSS and HTML.
• Set posts/pages to exclude.
• Set expiration times for all posts/pages or certain URL strings.
• CDN integration.
• Premium, paid version available with extra features.

Building Your WordPress Performance Plugin Strategy

Building a WordPress performance plugin strategy is necessary to keep your site operating quickly for viewers. The nine performance plugins above (or a combination of them in some cases) will help keep your site running quickly.

Still not sure about the best performance plugin strategy for your site? Hostdedi can help! Contact us to learn more.

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Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting is designed to make your ecommerce store lightning fast.

Speeding up your WooCommerce store can help prevent customer drop-offs and lost sales —‑ whether you are a store owner on Hostdedi’ managed WooCommerce hosting or a WooCommerce store owner not yet ready for a specialized product.

While you might think that improving your user experience comes with collecting more user analytics and including tools like personalization and live chat, these tools and analytics may actually slow your website.

Increasing the speed of your store can positively affect your SEO by improving user experience. In fact, a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load will be abandoned by 40% of shoppers. A 2 second delay increases bounce rates by 103%. And a delay of even 100-milliseconds impacts conversion rates by 7%. Delayed loading can lead directly to lost revenue, especially during peak times, such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

Whether you’re using a shared hosting option, or have not grown to the stage where you require a fully managed option, the 12 powerful changes that we include below can help optimize your WooCommerce site, speed up your store, and improve performance. Best of all, these changes won’t take a lot of time, effort, or cost to implement.

1. Test Your Site’s Current Speed

To speed up your WooCommerce store, you need to test your current speed — and you may need to continue to test the speed as you make changes and optimize your WooCommerce site. By testing the speed, you can be sure that your improvements are working.

If you want a simple approach to testing the speed of webpage, try WebPageTest.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights looks at the content of a page and offers suggestions to make the page faster.

Both of these sites offer more complex metrics and analytics. Google has PageSpeed Tools, which includes protocols and standards as well as performance best practices, and WebPageTest has a tool to capture your user’s visual experience.

2. Make Sure You Have a Fast Theme

Having a visually impressive WooCommerce theme with many built-in features may sound like it will improve user experience. However, these features take time to load. Choosing the fastest WooCommerce theme for your store can be relatively simple.

Before choosing a theme, consider all of the features that you’d like to include in your online store. Write these features down, and rate these features according to necessity. This task will help put you in the place of the user who will come to your store — and help you include only what is necessary for your user to succeed.

Make sure that your theme is fully compatible with WooCommerce — and that it’s a theme that is set up for ecommerce.

The fastest WooCommerce themes are often the lightweight themes, and use a page builder to help you include only the features that you need to speed up your WooCommerce store. You might even do well to start with a free theme. These top WooCommerce themes could work for you.

3. Evaluate Your Existing Plugins, Widgets, and External Resources

Do your existing plugins, widgets, and external resources optimize your site, or do they slow down your WooCommerce store without significantly increasing functionality, optimizing user experience, and ultimately, creating revenue?

To figure out how to speed up your WooCommerce site, take a look at your plugins, widgets, and external resources. Plugins can help improve performance. Widgets and sharing tools can connect your WooCommerce site to social media. External resources might make your site look great, but are they improving user experience?

External resources, such as scripts, style sheets, fonts, or even Google Analytics might seem to help organize your site, however, it’s not always possible to optimize performance for these external resources, and they may slow your site down.

To speed up your WooCommerce store, consider replacing widgets to social media with simple share buttons. These share buttons prevent adding additional HTTP requests and limit internal dependency on DNS queries.

Plugins can be helpful in some areas, but less helpful in others. Consider plugins to compress images, improve checkout and shipping options, reduce cart abandonment, and increase sales. Plugins can also clean up your WooCommerce store database — and a plugin can automate this process. Cleaning up your database may also increase the speed of your site. Check out the WP-Optimize plugin.

Plugins can also slow down your WooCommerce site. Only install the most essential plugins, and remember to check the speed of your plugins.

4. Use Snippets: a Great Way to Make your WooCommerce Store Faster

Code snippets are the foundation of easy, common sense WooCommerce modifications. With the Snippets plugin, you can easily download and install snippets created by others, or author your own. There a number of ways in which snippets can help speed up your WooCommerce store, including adding functionality to your store, or by disabling tasks, areas, or widgets that are not used. 

In the examples below, we have removed or disabled items, rather than adding elements to tweak performance. We did this because those tasks take effort, and every unnecessary action that uses backend resources may be impacting the performance of your store.

Note that each of our snippets in this example is tagged. Tagging your snippets makes it easy to stay organized around the changes you make that impact your admin area, WooCommerce, widgets, or your dashboard.

5. Check Out Little Bizzy Plugins

Plugins created by Little Bizzy exist to optimize your WooCommerce store in tiny, meaningful ways. They will disable AJAX cart fragments to help with load times and disable internal and external embeds to speed up page rendering. Again, we are looking to trim excess in order to speed up your WooCommerce store.

6. Take a Look at WP Disable

Optimization.io offers WP Disable, a plugin option that allows you a great deal of flexibility, while being easy to use. Installing the plugin adds an Optimization.iolink to your admin menu, which takes you right into the modification area.

One of the amazing components of WP Disable is the ability to focus on your WooCommerce store specifically, while making overall improvements to other areas of your site with a few clicks. Talk about an easy way to make your WooCommerce store faster!

Let’s look at some examples on the Requests tab, under the aptly titled Remove Excess Bloat section.

7. “Clean” Your Store

Revision checks can slow down your WooCommerce store if you added extensions and created a default revision check on product pages.

Extensions can help, but consider evaluating the performance of your extensions to ensure that they’re relevant and necessary. You might be able to speed up your WooCommerce site by replacing some of extensions with equivalent code. Replacing extensions with equivalent code can also increase performance.

Revision checks on WooCommerce sites are a good place to start. Revision checks allow you to go back and view changes to the product pages. While revision checks can be great, if you’re only making minor changes, such as changing a word or two, those revised copies of your original product page add up and slow down WooCommerce performance. Consider disabling or limiting the number of revisions.

8. Disable Unnecessary Elements

Emojis

Emojis can be a lot of fun, but they can slow down your WooCommerce site. Unless you specifically want emoji use to be available, they are unnecessary and can be removed as an option just by clicking the Disable Emojis slider.

Query Strings

If you have ever run a GTMetrix or Pingdom performance test on your store you may have seen a suggestion to “remove query strings from static resources.” This is because some servers and proxy servers are unable to cache query strings, and removing them can make your WooCommerce store faster.

9. Host Affiliated Ads and Products

For ads, consider using a single network — or hosting the images yourself. By hosting the images yourself, you have control over ad placement, can optimize the images, and can reduce the DNS queries.

10. Compress Your Images

Images can be a key part of an ecommerce site, but images can significantly slow your site.

Images are a place where plugins can help, however avoid image compression plugins when you can. WordPress offers a link to a plugin that will compress JPGs and PNGs, and with a single API key, you can get up to 100 free image compressions per month.

Consider compressing your images before you upload them to your site. Use JPG format for photos and high-resolution images where you need a lot of detail. Use PNGs for icons, logos, illustrations, and transparent images — basically, most images that that aren’t or don’t need to be JPGs.

GIFS work well for animations. While GIFs can be used for small images, PNGs usually work better.

11. Use DNS Prefetch

DNS Prefetch is an option that lets your site pre-resolve domains for faster load times. When enabling DNS Prefetch you’ll provide a list of domains you commonly link or redirect to. After those domains have resolved, delays in resolving them again are eliminated.

12. Choose Platform Options that Make your WooCommerce Store Faster

All of the tweaks we just discussed have the potential to make your WooCommerce Store faster, but what about WooCommerce itself?

It’s not likely that you need WooCommerce CSS or scripts to run on pages that don’t have WooCommerce elements. Once again, we can disable something unnecessary and gain a lot in performance because your backend doesn’t have to work to load things that are not needed.

The same concept applies to Reviews and Cart Fragments. For each item, all you have to do is click the slider and then save your changes.

Your store may not be hosted on a Managed WooCommerce Hosting platform, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from some of the same options that we use every day. From code snippets to plugins, we believe these tried and true methods can make your WooCommerce store faster.

We Can Take Care of This for You!

When you’re ready for us to take care of these things for you, check out Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting.

This blog was originally published in March 2018. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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Make better, data-driven decisions by adding WooCommerce analytics to your ecommerce site.

Setting up a store using WooCommerce has many advantages. Setting up a site analytics package (like Google Analytics) to collect information the day your WooCommerce site goes live will help ensure the success of your online store.

This article will walk you through the process of adding Google Analytics to a WooCommerce site.

Additionally, and more importantly, this article will tell you which metrics are important and what you can do with the data once your site has been up and running for a while.

This article will also include alternatives to Google Analytics that have similar features in case you’re interested in other options.

How to Add Google Analytics to a WooCommerce Site

Setting up Google Analytics for your WooCommerce site starts by having a Google Analytics account. If you have a Gmail address or if you’re using G-Suite for your email, you have a Google Analytics account.

While there is a free version of the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration, the free version doesn’t provide all of the information that you need, such as Checkout Behavior Analysis.

Checkout Behavior Analysis is an essential feature that helps visualize how people flow through your site so you can identify snags in the purchase process.

To get the most out your WooCommerce analytics, you’ll need to:

1. Purchase WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro
2. Create a site profile in Google Analytics
3. Upload the plugin within WordPress – to do this, go to Plugins > Add New, and then click “Activate.”
4. Connect your site to Google Analytics — To do this, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Integrations where you’ll see the Google Analytics Pro section
5. Make sure that Enable Google Analytics Tracking is checked. If this is unchecked, then you will have no tracking on your site
6. Authenticate your Google Account so that Google Analytics can start collecting site analytics. You can also add your tracking code manually by checking the box under the authentication button.
7. If you want to track site admin and store manager activity, check the Track Administrators box. (Note that most site owners opt to ignore this data)
8. If any of your customers will be from the EU, you need to check the Anonymize IP addresses box to stay compliant with the law. Even if you don’t expect clients from the EU, it’s a best practice to check this box now and avoid compliance issues later.

These are the main settings that you should be worrying about to start setting up your WooCommerce analytics. Yes, you can change the naming of the various events that the plugin will track with Google Analytics, but most sites should leave the names as they are.

What Metrics to Track on WooCommerce Analytics

While some of the metrics that you track for your WooCommerce store are specific to your industry or product types, some metrics are particularly useful for all stores.

Checkout Behavior Analysis

With Google Analytics turned on, Google will automatically start Checkout Behavior Analysis.

Checkout Behavior Analysis is essential piece of Google Analytics for WooCommerce. This feature enables you to visualize how people flow through your site so that you can identify areas for improvement in your purchase process.

Sales Conversion Rate (CVR)

Understanding how much of your efforts — your marketing, paid advertising, and site design — result in customers making a purchase is essential to your success. If you’re seeing a low conversion rate coming from email subscribers, but a high conversion rate from social media ads, you might consider putting more money into your social budget.

Google Analytics for WooCommerce can help you collect this information, and ensure that your efforts are working.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Using analytics on your WooCommerce site will help you know how much gaining a new customer costs you. This number differs from the sales conversion rate in that it’s specifically relates to new customers — not returning customers.

While returning customers still frequently have to be convinced to purchase by marketing campaigns, it often takes more effort to convince a first-time customer. It takes money to grow a customer base, and understanding how much you are spending on marketing for that first-time customer counts.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

While gaining new customers is great, lifetime customers — repeat customers — are essential to the success of your WooCommerce store. You’ll want to know how metrics like:

• Revenue per user
• Sessions per user
• Goal completions per user

LTV is an important number when looked at with CAC. It’s the CAC:LTV ratio that you’re looking for. It’s not sustainable if you’re spending more to acquire a customer than a customer is spending.

WooCommerce Analytics Plugins that Track Customer Activity

These WooCommerce analytics plugins work by telling you how your customers think.

WooCommerce Customer History

The first option we’ll look at is WooCommerce Customer History. Just like the title says, this plugin tracks your users on your site. Much like Google Analytics, this means you can see where people drop off and do not complete their purchase as well as the popular pages for your customers.

WooCommerce Customer History also helps you by looking at the purchases a user has made and then calculating their lifetime value to your business. Maximizing the lifetime value that users have is a great way to increase the profitability of your store.

It’s generally much easier to get a customer to make a repeat purchase than it is to find a new customer. Repeat customers already trust you — you don’t have to spend as much time convincing them to purchase from you.

Understanding the history of your customers — what drove them to purchase or what drove them away — can help you optimize the purchase process.

WooCommerce Cart Reports

Another plugin that goes well with WooCommerce Customer History is Cart Reports. Where WooCommerce Customer History tells you what people purchased, Cart Reports shows you what they left in their cart. Customers may leave some products behind in their carts more frequently than others.

With the WooCommerce analytics from Cart Reports, you can reach out to customers and ask them why they didn’t purchase. Maybe you didn’t have the right color or size. Maybe the price was too high.

Armed with this information, you can change your product orders to better reflect what your customers want, and make sure that you match your customer demand.

Cart Reports also allows you to email the customer in an attempt to convert their abandoned cart to a sale. If you’re able to send this kind of email, Cart Reports will identify the converted sale on its dashboard, enabling you to track the effectiveness of a cart reclamation campaign.

The biggest drawback to Cart Reports is that it doesn’t allow you to automate the process of touching base with customers who have abandoned their purchases. You have to find each abandoned cart and manually contact the customer.

For a small store or one with very high-ticket items, reaching out manually may be possible. For a large online store, or one with many lower priced items, reaching out to customers manually may be too time consuming to be valuable.

Jilt, which is included with all Managed WooCommerce Hosting plans from Hostdedi, easily recovers lost sales using cart abandonment technology.

Learn more Jilt and plugins that can help with cart abandonment here.

Recommendation Engine for WooCommerce

Recommendation Engine looks at the products that your customers purchase together and then makes recommendations for other items in your store. If many customers purchase Product A and B together, then Recommendation Engine will show Product B when it sees someone looking at Product A.

You can also configure Recommendation Engine to show customers:

• Products related to their purchase history.
• Products other customers have also viewed.
• Products that are regularly purchased together.

It also provides a few widgets so that you don’t need to dive into the code of your site or hire a developer to add product recommendations to your site.

Using WooCommerce Analytics to Optimize Your Purchase Funnel

With WooCommerce analytics set up on your site, you can dive into one of its most critical uses: watching the funnel of customer purchases.

Generally, the funnel is made up of a user:

1. Adding a product to the cart.
2. Providing a billing email.
3. Selecting a payment method.
4. Placing the order (finishing the funnel).

A rule of thumb for ecommerce sites is that you want to remove every possible barrier to making a purchase. That may mean instead of offering a related product on your checkout page, you leverage Smart Offers to allow a one-click additional purchase after the user has completed their main product purchase.

Use data to analyze your customers’ journey in the purchase funnel. Where do you notice a lot of drop-off in conversion rate? Which new users have the lowest CAC and how did they discover your site?

Increasing conversions can be as straightforward as fixing pages that stop users from purchasing, updating the language on a button, or fixing a broken link.

By looking at the funnel of purchases for your site you can identify where and how you can make it easier for users to purchase.

You can also increase conversions on your site by removing unnecessary checkout fields.

Removing extra fields on the checkout page helps people complete their purchase instead of feeling overwhelmed by the information they need to enter.

For example, if you’re selling a digital-only product, you don’t need a physical address. While you may need the purchaser’s country and zip code/postal code to calculate tax, the specific street this person lives on doesn’t matter.

WooCommerce analytics can also tell you if you have an effective, fast theme. Your theme should be helping you make conversions. It should create a seamless and enjoyable experience for the customer.

If you notice one page has an especially high bounce rate, perhaps it’s because it’s taking too long for the theme to load. Or maybe, the theme is loading incorrectly, so users navigate away.

By having a funnel in Google Analytics, you can view your data periodically and make sure that you don’t have obvious problems with your site conversion process.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

While Google Analytics has considerable power, the data can also get confusing if you’re not a seasoned pro. Not every store needs all the information that Google Analytics can provide.

Luckily there are a few other options to enhance your site sales including:

Each of these options has their benefits and their drawbacks. No single WooCommerce analytics package meets the needs of every site. While Google Analytics is frequently the default program to collect site analytics, make sure you explore your options to pick the one that best matches your needs.

Online stores need an analytics package to be successful. However, setting up the analytics, collecting the data, and understanding and interpreting that data can seem overwhelming. Having Google Analytics installed before an online store goes live makes it possible to dig deeper into the information later.

By combining just WooCommerce Customer History and Recommendation Engine, you can get insight into how your customers are purchasing and increase that value. These two plugins alone quickly pay for themselves as you improve your store profitability.

Need a WooCommerce Host?

Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting solution has plans for every kind of business.

Specially designed to convert more sales, it’s packed with cutting-edge technologies to reduce query load times and cart abandonment rates.

Best of all, these plans arm you with more than 20 different performance tests so you’ll know that you can accommodate tons of web traffic.

Give it a try. Start your free two-week trial of fully managed WooCommerce today.

This blog was originally published in November 2018. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

The majority of marketers will agree that ecommerce content marketing is one of the best investments you can make for your online store. 

Ecommerce content marketing increases traffic and conversions, lowers acquisition costs, promotes thought leadership, boosts search engine results, and improves your marketing efforts.

But effective content creation is not as easy as it seems. Content for ecommerce websites requires a carefully considered ecommerce content strategy that maps out your business’s goals, metrics, and action items.

Ecommerce Content Marketing

Ecommerce content marketing is a type of inbound digital marketing that connects ecommerce businesses to customers depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Specifically, ecommerce content marketing is the process of creating content for ecommerce websites. Marketers create content in various formats for different channels to achieve an ecommerce site’s goals. 

The ultimate end goal is to get the potential customers to buy from the ecommerce store, while the short-term goal is to move customers along the sales funnel.

We’ll show you a step-by-step guide for creating an ecommerce content strategy below.

Ecommerce Content Strategy

1. Determine the buyer’s persona.
2. Perform keyword research.
3. Choose a content channel.
4. Create content.

1. Determine the Buyer’s Persona

The first and most crucial step to achieve your ecommerce content marketing goals is to identify your target customer’s qualities. 

When you create a representation of your ideal customer, you can plan what pieces of content to create, map out which part of the sales funnel to place the content, and develop a brand voice.

To craft your ideal customer, consider their:

• Demographics. This includes basic information such as age, gender, education, and income bracket.
• Pain points. Identify the problems your customers have and how you can help solve them.
• Usual channels. Which content channels do they frequent? Social media, email, or blogs? Knowing their preferred content channels shows you the best way to reach them.
• Personality. What are your customers like? Are they fun, serious, or impulsive? This information helps determine their shopping behavior.

You can gather data from your existing customer base or capture new information using methods such as interviews and questionnaires through email lists and landing pages.

2. Perform Keyword Research

Once you’ve created your ideal customer’s profile and determined the types of content to publish at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can now perform keyword research.

Keyword research is essential when planning content for ecommerce websites because it shows you the search terms that your target audience uses when they look for information, solutions, or products. It also gives you an idea of the keywords you can use to rise through the search engine optimization (SEO) ranks.

Some of the ways to succeed at keyword research are to:

• Look at competitor analysis to see how competitors’ domain names and backlinks rank compared to yours. 
• Check out competitors’ top posts to identify keyword gaps. This empowers you to find opportunities to create new content.
• Use long-tailed keywords that convey search intent.

3. Choose a Content Channel

After you create your buyer’s persona and do keyword research, the next step in your ecommerce content strategy is to choose your content channels.

After the buyer’s persona exercise, you’ll likely be familiar with the platforms your ideal customer uses. Create content for the channels where you’re most likely to see results.

Since there are several different content marketing channels, business owners and marketers have to agree on the goals for each and the metrics to measure.

An excellent place to start is email marketing because most people use this channel. Studies have found that email marketing provides one of the highest returns on investment (ROI).  As an ecommerce brand, email marketing is also helpful to reduce abandoned carts.

4. Create Content

After everything else is settled, you can start creating good content for ecommerce websites.

A simple principle to guide you when you brainstorm content ideas is to think about what the customer might need or what they need to know.

Don’t limit yourself to blogging — you can explore other content types, such as:

• White papers.
• Checklists.
• Webinars.
• Videos.
• Infographics.
• Podcasts.
• Tutorials.

Different content types can be mixed to achieve goals such as creating brand awareness or increasing subscriber count.

Tips for Creating Content for Ecommerce Websites

It can be daunting to come up with content ideas, especially when you want to create valuable content. Here are some content creation tips to look into:

• Create evergreen content. Evergreen content is timeless content that people are always interested in. It brings in steady traffic and establishes you as a thought leader in your niche when done correctly.

• Make content appropriate for the channels you’ve chosen. For example, if you’re on LinkedIn, you should appear professional, while if you’re on TikTok, you have more license to be casual.

• Consider user-generated content (UGC). User-generated content is any form of content created and posted by users, such as product reviews and social media posts. If you have a marketing budget, you can even hire influencers to post content about your brand.

UGC creates trust, promotes your ecommerce brand, and is a quick fix when marketers fall into a creative slump.

• Repurpose content. Use information from existing content and change the medium. You can make high-quality content such as videos, infographics, or e-books from existing blog posts, which you can use as lead magnets.

There are many ways to generate content. You can use in-house content creators, hire freelance writers, or ask for guest posts.

Final Thoughts: How To Create an Effective Ecommerce Content Strategy

One cannot understate the importance of content for ecommerce websites. 

An ecommerce content marketing strategy provides direction to ensure you meet your content marketing goals, be they increased visibility, brand awareness, engagement, or conversions.

Complement your content strategy with a powerful ecommerce platform. Sign up for a Hostdedi fully hosted WooCommerce plan today.

Try it out for yourself with a two-week free trial.

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A website can be a costly endeavor. It takes time to:

• Plan and set up your environment.
• Find the right plugins or extensions.
• Build out the right functionality.
• Secure and update as needed.
• And constantly monitor it for vulnerabilities.

That is why managed hosting is so important. 

But first, what is managed hosting? There are two types of managed hosting. There is server-side hosting, which covers only the server, and application management — this is what Hostdedi does.

Managed application hosting goes beyond the server to cover items like malware scanning, plugin updates, and migrations. Like Hostdedi, they’ll also likely have application-specific knowledge and expertise.

When looking for a managed application hosting provider, you need to consider these five factors.

What to Look for in a Managed Hosting Provider

1. Reliability

You can’t just go with any managed application platform. Some managed application companies leave most of the heavy lifting to you. They notify you if they find an issue, or write up a doc on how to secure your platform, but they won’t always be there to help in a real emergency. Their systems are set up more for awareness and management of notification rather than to mitigate issues.

👉 Top 10 Questions to Ask a Cloud Hosting Provider >>

Hostdedi has many tools in place to make sure your site doesn’t hit a failure point due to a vulnerability, or a bad actor destroying your systems. Our team has built two-factor authentication encrypted access points that sit behind a web application firewall to keep unwanted traffic (like bots) away from your backend.

With Hostdedi Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce, you can take advantage of the Visual Compare function. It makes sure all updates are completed and do not present any issues to your front end as well. If something does go wrong, our support team is constantly working to stay up to date with the latest exploit solutions. 

2. Performance

One of the most important factors to the success of your site is speed and website performance. Unfortunately, some major brand name hosting companies don’t actually own the server structure they sell. 

As “resellers” of major clouds like Google or AWS, they don’t get to optimize and completely configure the server structure to be as fast as it can be. They need to work within the confines of a third party that ultimately controls everything. 

Hostdedi owns and operates its own data centers. Having this ability allows us to structure our managed hosting cloud service specifically to your application. This allows us to modify your server backend for your site structure so you can deliver near-instant assets to your users easily.

Along with server structure, we built out specialized containers that let you add services, like ElasticSearch, to your accounts adjacent to your existing services without slowing down your front end. They can be deployed in seconds, are fully managed by our beyond management team, and are accessible over a secure cloud-only container network.

3. Support

You know your business better than anyone else. We make it our mission to know your site the same way. We call ourselves “The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting” for a reason. Problems will arise and when they do we have a team waiting around the clock for your call, text, chat, ticket, or email and we won’t rest until the problem is solved. 

Why Hosting Support Is Important >>

Support is about fixing problems, not just replying to them and that is why you should never have to worry about an issue. We’ve built an experienced team of experts to manage your site for you, provide you with a stable platform, keep watch on site security, and help make sure your site is performing beyond your expectations.

4. Expandability

The reason you set up a site is to grow your brand. With brand growth comes increased traffic. Unfortunately, one of the major failure points for most sites is an influx of traffic their host can’t handle. 

At Hostdedi, we have built our Managed Application Plan to scale as needed up and down. Easily move up in plans without needing to deal with downtime just to migrate. Our container systems allow for additional software that can be added to your cloud solution to expand performance, functionality, and management.

What is Scalable WordPress Hosting? >>

Don’t need to move up for long? That is what Hostdedi Auto Scale is for. Auto-scaling monitors your website and triggers a scaling event whenever traffic begins to exceed capacity of concurrent users (users who are doing the same action at the same time).

A scaling event adjusts the PHP process limit (also known as PHP workers) to accommodate bursts in user concurrency on your site. So when you promote flash sales, see activity from a post that goes viral, or prepare for seasonal spikes like holiday shopping, you can rest assured that your site can handle anything that comes its way.

The most important thing about any managed application hosting company is how they give back to the community. Many of the applications hosted are open source and kept up to date by the many volunteers who live and breathe the app. 

Your host should be no different. The Hostdedi staff is full of contributors to application communities. From plugin authors to core contributors to top developers listed in Stack Overflow or Git, our staff lives to make these applications better for everyone. 

Bottom Line

There are many reasons to start or move to Hostdedi — these are just a few. We have many more features, add-ons, plugin bundles, and security tools to explore.

And if you’re currently locked in a contract with another host, we’ll cover your costs and buy you out of your plan. Switching to Hostdedi is easy with our free white glove migrations.

Your success is the most important thing to us and we look forward to helping you get there. 

The best way to see how Hostdedi can improve your site is to talk to our experts and share the details of what you are trying to accomplish. Contact us today.

WordPress is the most popular tool for website creation in the world. Over 40% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. Over 100 WordPress versions have been released in the last 18 years since it’s been on the market.

If you want to know more about them, just keep reading.

In this blog, we will cover:

• The latest WordPress version and what’s new in it.
• Why is it important to use the latest version of WordPress.
• Why new WordPress releases are pushed out regularly.
• Details about WordPress versions over time.

So let’s begin! 

What is the WordPress Current Version?

The Essential Guide to WordPress Plugins >>

What’s New in WordPress’ Current Version?

FUN FACT: Core WordPress developers are big fans of jazz music. All major releases since version point 1.0 are named after musicians that developers admire! This one was named after Esperanza Spalding.

A Closer Look at WordPress’ Current Version

Let’s do a short breakdown of Esperanza, the current WordPress version, below.

• Adjustment of font sizes in list and code blocks in detail.
• Drag-and-drop blocks from the inserter directly into the post.
• Alignment of blocks, you can adjust block size in any way you want now.
• Ability to change the size of social icons block in detail.
• Simplified default palette of colors.
• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS in one click, thus reducing the usage of search and replace.
• Default lazy-load of iFrames.

To summarize, WordPress version 5.7 made website creation significantly easier. 

Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization >>

Importance of Using the Latest WordPress Version

Once you get started with site creation, you will notice that you can create countless types of WordPress websites. No matter what type of site you are running, it’s of huge importance that you always use the latest version.

Why?

The answer is pretty simple. WordPress is free to use and the fact that it’s so popular makes it a target for hackers. They can study the source code and find exploits in it which will let them proceed with their malicious intent. 

How to Improve Website Performance in WordPress >>

Updating your installation constantly to the latest WordPress version will make sure that overall security of your site is up to date, that all bugs are patched, and that you are not missing out on any new features that developers push out. 

Why WordPress Releases Regularly

Just like we mentioned above, hackers look for holes in WordPress code. That is why developers have to stay on top of things all the time. In summary, a release of a minor WordPress version means that a bug or a glitch that could be exploited was patched.

Additionally, WordPress has a strong community and developers are listening to it. Releases of new versions often contain a feature that was requested by the WordPress users.

What Version of WordPress Do I Have? How to Check Your WordPress Version

You may be wondering, What version of WordPress do I have? It’s simple and there are a few different ways to go about it, which we outline below. Keep reading to learn how to check your WordPress version.

How to Check Your WordPress Version Through WordPress Dashboard

By far, the easiest and most commonly used method to check your WordPress version is through the WordPress dashboard. All in all, you just need a few clicks for this method.

Simply login to your dashboard with WordPress admin credentials and navigate to your main dashboard and click on updates.

Once you are there, you will see a screen that will look just like the one below.

As you can see, the WordPress version will be written in bold letters accordingly. If your installation is not up to date, you will have an option to update it.

How To Check Your WordPress Version Through Your Website Frontend

The second way to find out which version you are using is to open your site in the browser and then right click and select View page source. After you do that, another tab will appear and you will see the code of your site, similar to the image below.

While you are on that screen, press Ctrl+f on your keyboard to open a search bar. Type the word “generator” in the search bar and you will see this.

Your WordPress version will be highlighted and you will be able to easily spot it. 

How To Check Your WordPress Version Through Your Terminal

This is a bit advanced, but if your site is running on Managed WordPress, Managed WooCommerce, cloud or a dedicated server, you will have access to your terminal. You will need to use the SSH creds to access your server. If this is the environment that you are using and you are able to login to your server use this command. It will show you which WordPress core version is being used on the site.

You will need to be in the WordPress install directory in order to use WP-CLI;

cd public_html

Once you are logged in, run the following WP-CLI command:

wp core version

As a result, output will look like this:

5.7.2

In the hope that you’ll be able to find out your WordPress version more easily now, let’s check the version history of the latest releases.

Looking Back on WordPress Version History

WordPress is popular because its core is quite easy to work with. Additionally, it offers a huge variety of themes and plugins to extend the capability of your site. 

The 15 Most Popular WordPress Plugins in 2021 >>

Below you can find a short breakdown of WordPress version history and the key features in these WordPress versions.

WordPress Versions

WordPress Version	Release Date	Key Features
WordPress 5.7.2 (WordPress latest version)	May 12, 2021	Security update which patched vulnerability in PHP mailer
WordPress 5.7.1	April 14, 2021	Security update which fixed 26 bugs in total Data exposure vulnerability within REST API patched PHP 8 vulnerability within media library patched
WordPress 5.7 (major WordPress release)	March 9, 2021	Font size adjustment Reusable blocks Buttons block Drag-and-drop inserter One click switch between HTTP and HTTPS Lazy loading for iFrames Simpler color palette Social icons block New Robots API
WordPress 5.6.4	May 12, 2021	Same date and same features as release 5.7.2
WordPress 5.6.3	April 14, 2021	Same date and same features as release 5.7.1
WordPress 5.6.2	February 22, 2021	Small maintenance update which fixed user reported issues discovered in version 5.6.1
WordPress 5.6.1	February 3, 2021	Maintenance release
WordPress 5.6 (major WordPress Release)	December 8, 2020	Improved video captioning Improved layout flexibility Better control over auto updates Built in patterns for block creation Additional support for PHP 8 Updates for jQuery which affected 5.5 installations as well

WordPress Version FAQs

What is the Current Version of WordPress?

WordPress latest version stands at 5.7.2. The latest major WordPress release is 5.7.

How Do I Know My WordPress Version?

You can check it in your WordPress dashboard to find your WordPress version. You can also find it in the front end of your WordPress website.

What is the Latest WordPress Version 2021?

Version 5.7.2 is the latest WordPress release. It was released in May 2021. This security update patched a vulnerability in the PHP mailer.

What Versions of WordPress are There?

There are hundreds of versions of WordPress if you count every maintenance or security version. But major releases go from 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and all the way to the latest major WordPress version, 5.7.

Hostdedi Makes WordPress Better

WordPress is great, but you need a great host too.

Fully managed WordPress hosting from Hostdedi brings out the best in your site. With several premium tools at your disposal, such as Quebly Pro or TinyPNG, your site will be visually stunning. 

At the same time, iThemes Security PRO will make sure your site is secure.

Automatic image compression, a built-in content delivery network (CDN), and advanced WordPress caching features make your site load at a hyper speed. 

And just in case something goes amiss, Hostdedi’ WordPress experts are there for you 24/7.

Try two weeks of Hostdedi fully hosted WordPress for free!

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In the early days of ecommerce, there were fewer online retailers, which meant you were more likely to make a good amount of money selling your products.

According to Statista, there are now about 2.14 billion online shoppers. The competition is fierce, and several crucial ecommerce challenges have emerged in the process.

Keep reading to overcome the following problems:

1. Security

2. Personalization and User Experience

3. Sales Sustainability

4. Traffic and Visibility

Retailing Problems

1. Security.
2. Personalization and user experience.
3. Sales sustainability.
4. Traffic and visibility.

Several hard aspects of ecommerce pose challenges to online store owners. Above are the four biggest challenges in ecommerce, and here’s how to solve them:

1. Security

Security is a hard aspect of ecommerce that requires critical attention.

Due to the number of transactions that ecommerce stores deal with, online retailers are a potential target for internet fraudsters.

Hackers won’t waste any time taking advantage of ecommerce stores and their unsuspecting customers once they sense a hole in the security system.

A couple of the security gaps that might be in your ecommerce site include:

• An unsecured ecommerce platform: Using an HTTP website instead of HTTPS is one of the biggest challenges in ecommerce.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It isn’t a serious threat when you’re simply surfing the web. But, the moment an HTTP website asks for sensitive information like your potential customers’ credit card details, it becomes a big security issue.

HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP that uses an encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which makes it harder for cyber attackers to access your website.

• Poor payment gateways: This is a common ecommerce challenge as poor payment gateways lead to lower sales, less trust, and a worse customer experience.

Image Source

The amount of money and customers you might lose from using a mediocre website builder and payment setup is far greater than the price of a high-quality website builder.

Your website security is a top priority. Every Hostdedi cloud hosting package guarantees website protection against cyber attacks, including DDoS, XSS, and brute force. And all of our websites come with iThemes Security Pro.

We also offer SSL certificates to ensure your website is safe and secure.

2. Personalization and User Experience

Personalization is one of the biggest challenges in ecommerce. In fact, due to online retailer giants like Amazon’s influence, 80% of shoppers want personalized digital experiences from ecommerce stores.

You will establish trust-based relationships with your audience and make more sales if you show them that you care about their experience on your ecommerce website.

9 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for Fast & Effective Sites >>

To solve this ecommerce challenge, start by dealing with the following points to create a personalized experience for them: 

• Mediocre website hosting: Website hosting is one of the vital elements of successful ecommerce websites. 

Partner with a web hosting company that offers website maintenance and cybersecurity services. This ensures your website is secure and your online store runs smoothly.

• Poor user experience: Mobile takes up about 50% of the world’s website traffic. Mobile optimization for your online store is important, although a hard aspect of ecommerce businesses.

Furthermore, 404 error pages and bad page transitions can put off customers from visiting your ecommerce store. 

• Using starter templates: Several ecommerce stores use starter templates that make their online stores look the same as others. 

But the truth remains that basic templates aren’t original. Your ecommerce site won’t get as much love, attraction, and sales as a custom-designed online store will.

While many online stores look basic and don’t offer a unique, industry-specific experience, Hostdedi’s StoreBuilder offers you full functionality to build a custom-designed ecommerce store and streamline your online business’s workflow through automation. 

With Hostdedi’s Cloud Accelerator, your website will be faster and put an end to slow ecommerce page speeds.

3. Sales Sustainability 

Ecommerce sales sustainability is a hard aspect of ecommerce and for many other forms of business.

After setting up your custom-designed ecommerce website, your next goal should be making online sales consistently.

While making sales requires a proper business plan and marketing strategy, certain website issues cause this ecommerce challenge. These include:

• Poor website layout: Your website layout should be simple, organized, and easy to navigate for online shopping. This way, when your promotions bring visitors to your online store, they won’t bounce the moment they reach your landing page. 

New customers need to take a look around your store, like your product, and likely see proof of credibility before making their first order.

• Disorganized product page: Make your product catalog eye candy. You don’t want to reduce your conversion rates because of a messy product page. 

Arrange your store and make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.

• Complex checkout systems: Keep your buying process simple and make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you. 

Anything that breeds confusion or complexity can lead to shopping cart abandonment. It’s also a good ecommerce practice to add a refund policy to your online store for sales transparency.

With Hostdedi’s PCI Compliant Hosting, you can secure your store for processing credit card payments.

While the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%, Hostdedi’s StoreBuilder provides a cart abandonment solution to boost sales and revenue.

4. Traffic and Visibility

With so many ecommerce companies available, traffic and visibility are hard aspects of ecommerce several online store owners are still trying to decipher.

Gaining visibility and the right traffic to your online store will do a lot for you as an ecommerce business owner. But certain factors might stand in the way. These are:

• Wrong setup due to zero guidance: Setting up an ecommerce website is simple, but only if you know how to do it right. When done incorrectly, you can lose visibility and traffic from search engines.

10 Ways to Attract New Customers To Your eCommerce Store >>

You should invest in good SEO techniques and a hosting company that provides 24/7 support and expert guidance for setting up and maintaining your online store.

• Website crashes due to unreliable web host: Poor web hosting is an ecommerce challenge that will affect personalization, traffic, and sales. 

A mediocre host can cause slow loading pages, server glitches, and website crashes when your online store gets a high amount of traffic, which will ultimately cause you to lose potential customers.

Hostdedi provides Fully Managed Magento Hosting, a complete retail sales package for high-traffic ecommerce websites.

If you want to expand your online store’s traffic capacity, the Hostdedi Cloud Auto Scaling add-on will prepare your website for traffic surges and prevent crashes.

Final Thoughts: 4 Biggest Ecommerce Challenges and How To Fix Them

There are several hard aspects of ecommerce that online store owners face when trying to scale their brands. 

However, it’s more effective to fix the biggest challenges in ecommerce first to achieve your strategic goals. 

Counter the ecommerce challenges above to increase your website traffic, sales, and customer retention.
Ready to run a challenge-free and profitable ecommerce store? Get started with fully hosted WooCommerce from Hostdedi.

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Everyone and everything has a website nowadays. They even function as business cards. Websites are easier than ever to create with platforms like StoreBuilder. But there is still confusion around web hosting behind the scenes.

With so many options, how do you choose a web host? What makes a web hosting company worth it? What should you look for in a website hosting company?

If you’re here, you’re probably asking the same questions. This article will tackle the biggest hurdles you’ll come across when trying to select a good web host, and how to make the big decision.

How to Choose a Web Host: The Basics

Hosting is more than just the place that keeps the lights on and doors open for your website. There are different types, many packages to choose from, and certain options that work better depending on your needs as a user.

You can (and should) certainly check out reviews for hosts you’re interested in. Before you know what to look for in a website hosting company, you should probably figure out what good hosts provide. 

Recently, Hostdedi polled around 1400 customers about their experiences with web hosts. The top three areas that customers reported needing improvement were:

• Features and usability (20.7%).
• Performance and speed (19.89%).
• Cost (14.25%). 

Features ranged from email accounts, control panel dashboards, security options, compatibility, and frequency of updates. Over half the speed complaints came from people utilizing “cheap” hosting — and we’ll touch upon why a bit later.

5 Real Differences Between Cheap Hosting and Good Hosting >>

4 Types of Hosting

1. Shared

The cheapest type of hosting is shared hosting. Many websites are hosted on the same server and “share” resources, while much of the system administration is conducted by the host since as many users are being hosted.

Shared hosting is an option if you don’t mind giving up a bit of control. There are usually caps on usage which can impact your website’s performance, if for instance you experience a surge of traffic. Shared hosting is more vulnerable to security issues than other types of hosting.

2. Dedicated

If you don’t like to share, no problem. Dedicated hosting means the server is yours and only yours. You’re not sharing resources, and you can configure the setup exactly the way you like it. Your site is more secure on dedicated hosting. Because you don’t have to share resources, you’ll encounter better website performance, but it will cost more than shared hosting.

3. VPS

If you don’t like the costs of a dedicated server but gravitate toward the scalability and customizability options, a VPS hosting package might be your answer. Think of it as the middle ground between shared and dedicated. It’s all the DIY with caps on your resources, but at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server.  

4. Cloud

The most reliable of all server options, cloud hosting ensures your site is always up by pulling from a number of different resources. There’s no risk of server failure and you can scale up at any time. This is the best option for heavily trafficked sites, but it costs a bit more.

Managed vs. Unmanaged

Simply put, managed hosting is hosting that is monitored for you. Much like the services shared hosting options provide, managed hosting makes sure everything on the backend is up to date and secure.

Related reading: What is Managed Hosting? >>

Unmanaged hosting leaves it to you to check on all your plugins, make sure your security certificates are up to date, and your site resources are updated and backed up.

What to Look for in a Website Hosting Company

Security

Updated and current security certificates are necessary for secure and encrypted communication between clients and servers. Outdated versions of certificates, such as PHP or MySQL, are red flags and warrant a conversation with your hosting provider if this is happening at your current host. 

Other security measures to consider include checking to see if they have a content delivery network (CDN) and firewall as well as mitigation plans for DDoS attacks, and backup/restores. Sites go down for a variety of reasons and having a plan to secure your data and get it back up and running is crucial if you have steady traffic.

What is an SSL & How Do I Get One? >>

You should also check to see if the host scans for malware. The safer your information and site is, the better. Website hackers and cyber-thieves can absolutely compromise data and make it a nightmare for you, your customers, and, if you utilize shared hosting — potentially anyone on your server.

Select a web host that encompasses the security features you need and has a demonstrated record of working with clients to get everyone’s sites up and running fast. 

Scalability

How many times have you heard about a website crashing because there were so many users that it overloaded due to traffic? That is a scalability issue. Scalability is a system’s response to a change in the processing of resources — more users, more load.  

If you hate waiting in line in physical stores, imagine waiting in line for hours only to find out the store has closed. If you cannot adjust for scalability when you suddenly have a boost in traffic, you’re in trouble. 

Downtime costs you money, so if you can avoid that altogether you’re avoiding lost revenue. Pick a host that offers auto scaling. 

Support

When things go haywire, you want everything back to normal fast. More importantly, you want to be answered by someone kind and helpful. 

With 59.98% of all customers in our survey reporting customer service/support being a top priority for their hosting experience, it is clear that the best hosts provide excellent support. 

Most anyone can answer a phone and read from a script. Not everyone can help you chroot a nameserver. Look for support options that are available 24/7/365 from industry professionals.

Why Hosting Support Is Important >>

Speed and Performance

If your website is taking forever to load, either you’re on dialup or something is wrong. You can get some mileage out of optimizing your website to improve page speed, but often the culprit is the hosting itself. 

Hosts can throttle bandwidth if you’re approaching your limits, particularly if you’re sharing resources with other users on a shared hosting plan. Ultimately, the type of plan you’ve subscribed has the biggest impact on your site speed.

Check loading times, Time To First Byte, and First Paint speeds — some of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Choose a plan that matches the traffic patterns you expect to need. Pick a host that has multiple data centers, preferably one close to you. The faster your host, the bigger your head start. 

What You Should Avoid When Choosing a Web Host

Unlimited Offers

As mentioned above, many survey respondents complained about speed and performance issues when using cheaper hosting options.

The reason these are so cheap and enticing is because there are usually caps on “unlimited” hosting. You may only be able to use a percentage of your bandwidth before you’ve reached your limit and visitors start getting an error message. 

Sometimes the phrasing is more specific, like “unmetered” — and if you examine the fine print, you’ll find wild criteria like if you’ve used more than X% of the system resources for more than 180 seconds, you’re in violation of the host’s Terms of Service. Yikes. 

No Refund Guarantees

Sometimes you make a snap judgement and a day later you realize it’s not what you expected. The nuts and bolts of what you’re working with just aren’t working out. Do you really want to be locked in for a month, or six months, or whatever you’ve signed up for? Probably not. 

When you’re picking a web host, you should go with one that makes it easy to opt out and get your money back. A good host will not only want you to stay on as a customer, but if you decide they’re not for you, they’ll want you to leave amicably. Good hosts want happy customers even on the way out. 

And if you’re stuck in a hosting plan you’re unhappy with, some hosts, like Hostdedi for example, will buy you out of your current plan.

Jumping The Shark

With all that in mind, do your homework before making the decision to commit to a host. We don’t just mean researching your host, either. Examine your needs as a site owner first and foremost. What do you need your host to do for you?

What kind of site are you building? If it’s a blog or even a membership site, maybe Managed WordPress is a good fit for you. If you’re building an ecommerce site, perhaps Managed Magento or Managed WooCommerce is more your style.

Maybe you’ve got it all mapped out, want total control, and are ready to make the switch to the cloud. Once you know what you need, think about how much you need and what options to consider.

Think about how many visitors you currently have or expect to have. Will you need scalability options in the future? How much technical know-how do you have? How much do you want to want to handle on your own? These are just some of the questions to consider when thinking about what to look for in a website hosting company.

Next Steps

Selecting a web host is not very different from picking a caretaker, a bank, or anything else you place trust in when handling something valuable. You want high quality and value for your money because they are keeping watch over something you don’t want compromised. 

When selecting a web host, we think we know what we’re talking about: we’ve been at this a long time.

Let us show you why Better is Built In with Fully Managed Hosting from Hostdedi. Try Fully Managed WordPress or WooCommerce from Hostdedi to experience it for yourself. Start your free trial today.

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