Whether you are a newbie store owner or an experienced professional, making mistakes is natural. Running a website is becoming so complex that it’s hard to keep up.
If you are facing issues with customer retention, traffic, or revenue and are wondering if you need to do something differently, this guide is for you.
In this article, we will explore the five major mistakes many WooCommerce store owners make that can greatly damage their brand. Going through these tips, you will be able to identify issues with your website and also find helpful solutions to fix them.
Top 5 WooCommerce Mistakes & Their Solutions
Below are five commonly encountered mistakes that many store owners make while starting online.
- Having a Slow Website
- Bad Website Design and Poor Usability
- Using an Outdated Version of WooCommerce
- Not Optimizing for SEO
- Failing to Implement Security Measures
Now, we will go through each of the above mistakes and the ways to resolve these issues.
1. Having a Slow Website
Have you ever visited a site that was so slow you didn’t even give it a second thought and left? If so, you know how it affects the user experience, and should avoid that on your store.
According to Neil Patel, 40% of users choose to leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and as per Invision, $2.6 billion U.S. dollars are lost in sales each year by slow websites.
This means that to ensure customers stay in your store, you need to give them faster results. A few ways to do so are explained below:
How to Speed Up Your Site?
- Find Out Your Site Speed
The first step is to find out your site’s loading speed for mobile and desktop. Using the PageSpeed Insights tool, you can simply enter a URL to find out how fast it loads.
Here, you will find a range of metrics and scores for a detailed page speed analysis. To get a head start, look into the performance score. If it’s less than 90, you need to work on your site speed. If it’s higher than 90, you are good to go!
- Choose Better Hosting
It doesn’t seem that straightforward, but hosting greatly affects your site’s speed. Many free hosting plans offer shared hosting, causing your site to load slowly. As these plans offer lower bandwidth, data transfers are slow, leading to higher waiting times for downloads and image loading.
Thus, while purchasing web hosting, buy a plan that goes well with your site, as your business depends on it! Some recommended hosting providers you can look into include Bluehost, Nexcess, Pressable, GoDaddy, etc.
- Get a Faster WordPress Theme
After you have checked that there are no issues with the hosting, you should now look into your WordPress theme. Ideally, the theme should have a clean and high-quality code and positive reviews. It should also be optimized for both mobile and desktop.
If you think any of these things are missing, simply choose another theme that goes with your site and then check your site speed to assess improvements.
- Keep a Check on the Plugin Count
As a new store owner, you may want to put every functionality under the sun on your website, but that is not good practice. You see, every feature you add through a plugin takes space and can make your site heavy. Plugins can also clash with each other, causing certain features to not work properly.
Thus, you need to be smart about the plugins that you integrate with your site and only add the necessary ones to keep your site running smoothly. Explore some of the best WooCommerce plugins here.
Compress Images
Who doesn’t like pretty images, right? We are all attracted to captivating visuals and vivid colors, but if your images are taking up too much space, they can slow down your site. Therefore, as you are uploading images to your product gallery, you should compress these images.
One free tool to do so is tinypng, which compresses multiple images within minutes. You can get their pro version as well if you want to save more time.
2. Bad Website Design and Poor Usability
After you have fixed your site speed, the second thing to look into is whether your site has a good design and offers ease of use.
You might think your site looks great, but your customers may disagree. When someone visits your store, can they easily navigate to your product catalog? Are your product images clear and relevant to your products?
Is the layout intuitive and attractive, or is it dull and looks like it was made 20 years ago? Is the menu bar accessible? Is there a search option that works? All these small details can make or break your brand!
How to Improve Web Design?
- Keep Navigation Simple
The first thing to do when it comes to website navigation is to keep things as simple and minimal as possible. Make it easy for customers to scroll through your site, find your products, and easily checkout.
One way is to have a helpful search bar where you can autocomplete user searches and even show related items to prompt cross-selling. You can also keep it low on popups and allow users to shop without signing in.
- Maintain Visual Hierarchy
There are small steps you can take to keep different elements coherent and visually appealing. To maintain a well-designed hierarchy, make use of white spaces, use contrasting colors to draw attention, and make sure the content is well aligned. You can also add big images of products you want to draw attention to.
- Mobile Optimization
Most people access the internet through their mobiles and that has become common knowledge now. As you create a website, you need to make sure it works well for both desktop and mobile users so you can cater to both.
Most e-commerce platforms like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, etc offer mobile optimizations and allow you to show bigger fonts on mobile devices, simplify actions, and reduce loading times, especially on mobiles.
Mindfully checking these steps and adopting industry best practices for mobile users can greatly help you reach a huge chunk of your audience and enhance user experience on your store.
3. Using an Outdated Version of WooCommerce
Only using WooCommerce is not enough – you need to keep it updated as well. Like every plugin you add to your site, Woocommerce also needs to be updated to work properly.
Why should you update WooCommerce in the first place? With each update comes new features and better WooCommerce security measures to keep your site safe. For WooCommerce, there are three types of updates: Major, Minor, and Patch updates.
As the name indicates, major updates bring substantial features to WooCommerce, while Minor updates take care of security and stability. On the other hand, patch updates handle vulnerabilities that can potentially harm your store. Therefore, keeping a check on these updates and then regularly updating your store is a must.
How to Update WooCommerce?
Updating WooCommerce is simple. Follow the steps below, and you will be done in a few minutes.
- Install the Jetpack plugin for backups (so you don’t lose your data)
- Back up your data with the Vault Press Backup option
- Now go to Plugins and head to WooCommerce
- Select Update and choose Update WooCommerce Database
Your WooCommerce site is now updated with your data safely backed up.
4. Not Optimizing for SEO
Why do some websites always rank the highest? One reason is good SEO. You see, it’s not enough to have the best products and the prettiest website; it’s also important for you to be seen by Google.
When you optimize your site, Google is able to find you, understand what your site is all about and then rank you. The better your SEO, the higher you will rank. If you are struggling with SEO, here are some solutions for you to try out.
- Improve Your Content
Imagine a customer comes to your site and finds a product he likes but sees that it does not have a description attached. Would that customer stay? Most probably not.
You see, customers want helpful content as only pictures don’t do the job. When you add helpful content like product descriptions, blogs, intuitive labels for navigation, etc, that helps the user and search engines. Google is able to index and rank you and customers can understand what your brand is all about. This is why working on content is extremely important.
- Work on Structured Data
When you hand a document to someone, and it’s messy, they are unable to understand what you are talking about; that is exactly what happens to Google as well.
If you don’t follow a proper structure on your site, the sitemaps are messy; no proper headings (H1, H2, H3), meta descriptions are not optimized, etc, then Google will have a hard time understanding your web structure.
Thus, it’s important to keep your website data well-structured in order to perform well on search engines. If you are finding this confusing, here is a helpful guide to creating SEO-optimized XML sitemaps.
- Create Links to Your Web Pages
Interlinking means adding links from one webpage to another to encourage users to read more and help Google understand how web pages are related.
Imagine if you have a blog on “ best SEO practices” and another on “best SEO tools.” In that case, it’s wise to interlink these blogs so that Google knows that both are related.
Another good practice is backlinking, which means adding links to your website on other websites. For example, if you have launched a new mobile cover and the link to that product is available on another reputed site, then that would be a backlink.
With backlinks, you tell Google that your products are so good that other sites are linking back to you. That is great for SEO and your rankings on search engines.
5. Failing to Implement Security Measures
Hackers are everywhere, just waiting to spot vulnerabilities in your site. If you dont find the issue before them, you can end up losing all the hard work you have put into your brand. To ensure your site and the customer data is safe, you need to follow some basic security protocols.
Below are some simple steps to go through to make sure your site is prepared for every threat.
How to Keep Your Website Safe?
- Strong Credentials
Having a strong password is a straightforward rule for keeping a site safe, but many still ignore to do so. Most store admins either opt for the same old user name, Admin, or Test, which is extremely common and easy to guess.
To make sure your credentials can’t be accessed easily, you need to be mindful of strong credentials to prevent personalization by hackers. If you want help with finding a complex password, you can use different tools.
- Use Trusted WordPress Themes
When you see a theme for a low price, you might be tempted to buy it, but it’s not always the smartest move. You see, many Nulled Themes are just copies of premium themes that sell similar functionality for low prices but at the cost of your website security.
These themes have malware hidden in their code, and once a security breach takes place, you can’t even ask for support, as these themes are illegal. This implies that while choosing a theme, you should only shop from the official WordPress store or other reputed marketplaces.
- Install an SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which encrypts data exchanged between your website and visitors. Through data encryption, you can minimize data theft, ensuring your website data and your customer’s valuable information are not compromised.
Many hosting providers offer the SSL certificates like Hostinger, so if you dont already have one, you should check with your provider.
Conclusion
In this detailed guide, we explored five common mistakes that most WooCommerce store owners are guilty of. From having a slow site to not taking security seriously, these are small issues that can pile up and be disastrous for your brand.
We recommend you go through each of the above mistakes, and if you feel like you might be making one, check out the solutions we have provided.
