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How to build a scalable e-commerce website with WordPress

05.08.2020
How to build a scalable e-commerce website with WordPress
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Steady growth is the goal of every business. If once you create a startup website, it should be able to grow, or scale, together with your business. E-commerce web development is no exception. E-commerce websites, as one of the most common website types, need this ability especially strongly. Let’s explore how to build an e-commerce website that scales with WordPress.

What is a scalable website?

A scalable website is one that is ready to expand with time. It is able to handle larger amounts of traffic. It easily hosts hundreds or thousands of content pages even if it started with a dozen. It is also not a problem to add new functionality, more complicated and diverse than before (integration with a third-party application, live chat, multiple languages, and so on).

Scalability is mostly about a scalable website architecture. In other words, it depends on the way the website is built. Often, it’s the website building platform that allows it to scale more, less, or not at all. That’s why it is so important to pay attention to the website platform from the start.

Why do you need a scalable e-commerce website?

Your e-commerce website is literally a profit-making tool, so it should work at the fullest capacity you need. It should keep up with your business and even drive it forward. A scalable website will allow you to respond to the increased market demands, new trends, and innovation needs.

You can rely on your website to handle thousands of new products, as well as your customers’ data (credit card numbers, shipping addresses, and more). Your store is available all the time and does not slow down — irrespective of seasonal or holiday traffic spikes, so characteristic of e-commerce.

When you are just starting your e-commerce business, your budget may be limited. However, if your store is scalable, you will be able to increase its capacity at any time later. Expanding an existing site is always cheaper, faster, and more effective than building one from scratch on another platform when the old one has reached its limits.

How to build a scalable e-commerce store?

Anyone can make their online sales dream a reality and build a scalable e-commerce website, for which basically 3 essential things are needed:

1. Using a scalable platform

Earlier, we mentioned the importance of the website building platform for anyone who wants to create a scalable e-commerce store. One of the good options is to choose WordPress.

According to Statista, WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce platform in 2020.

woocommerce is the leading ecommerce platform in 2020

So here is what you can do with WordPress:

  • You can use a popular WooCommerce plugin for WordPress, which has a full package of e-commerce functionality. It is currently installed on 5+ million websites. Multiple businesses on WooCommerce have 100,000+ products, and there was also an experiment held when WooCommerce handled 1,000,000 products.

woocommerce plugin for wordpress

  • You will be able to extend your e-commerce store with thousands of free and paid add-on plugins of various complexity.
  • You can choose from plenty of e-commerce WordPress themes to create an attractive look and shape your website’s layout.
  • It’s possible to change the theme in the future or order custom WordPress theme design.
  • Numerous WordPress caching plugins can significantly increase your website’s loading speed.
  • WordPress allows you to add a robust search feature to your store so your customers can search through plenty of products.
  • Product management and customization is easy with WooCommerce, so don’t worry if your product range grows a lot.
  • Many e-commerce businesses start with a simple shopping cart and then want to expand their business and promote it through content. WordPress will give you unlimited opportunities for content marketing.
  • You will be able to extend the choice of payment providers or any other third-party solutions.
  • WooCommerce is very flexible at integrating them thanks to a REST API.
  • Additional scaling capabilities are available through a “headless” approach, which separates frontend and backend, offering even more space to increase your speed.
  • You have great opportunities to connect your e-commerce site to a mobile app and boost your digital presence.

2. Choosing a reliable hosting

There is another big factor that influences a website’s ability to “grow big” in terms of handling a lot of data and users. If you want to build a scalable e-commerce store, choose a hosting provider with flexible packages and hosting capacities that will be able to accommodate your increased performance requirements. Consider also one that offers related services like uptime server monitoring, which will make sure your site is always up.

If you experience hosting issues like lack of flexibility in packages, slow speed, recurring downtime, lack of security, unresponsive customer support, it’s time to move your website to another hosting provider. Contact us to use our Drupal Harbor hosting service with plenty of extra services to meet your needs.

3. Working with a good web development team

When developers build a website according to the latest practices, with clean code, and with future expansion in mind, it’s much more scalable as a result. On the contrary, low-quality code created by unprofessional and irresponsible teams often serves as a one-time solution and, when you decide to scale your website, it is very hard to deal with.

In order to have the best quality result, choose a web development team with a good name and a positive track record. InternetDevels is a good example of one.

Hire our team to create a scalable e-commerce website!

Ready to start your e-commerce journey? Be sure it’s future-oriented and will confidently lead you to future growth! Our WordPress experts are ready to build a scalable e-commerce store for you. Drop us a line and let’s discuss it.

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