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0:12 – Can WordPress host quality e-commerce websites?
1:23 – Simplifying the checkout process of your e-commerce site
2:33 – YOAST and SEO optimisation
3:30 – W3 Total Cache to increase your website’s loading speed
4:18 – Online Backup for WordPress – backup for your database & file system
4:58 – Quick recap
Hi, Fiona Soutter here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s website news update.
0:12 – Can WordPress host quality e-commerce websites?
I have a lot of my clients coming to me, asking about the solutions for e-commerce. Now, as most of you know, I am 
a big fan of WordPress websites and you certainly can make a WordPress website into a very functional and very sleek e-commerce platform. To do this, you are going to need a plugin, called Woo Commerce. There are several e-commerce plugins available, but Woo Commerce is currently – I believe – one of the best options around.
You might need somebody to help you get it set up and the team at Super Savvy Websites are very familiar with this particular plugin. So if you want to add e-commerce to your website, then you might want to have a look at Woo Commerce and perhaps speak to us at Super Savvy Websites to find out how we can get it set up for you.
Now, if you want an e-commerce store which is strictly a commerce and it’s going to be a fairly large store, then you might want to look at some different options. One of the other open source platforms which is out there for e-commerce is called Magento.
Once again, Magento is not the easiest way to set up so you might need to find somebody who is an expert at it.
1:23 – Simplifying the checkout process of your e-commerce site
There are a couple of things that I suggest you do to make your e-commerce platform user-friendly. For example,
- Make it easy for people to check the items in their cart and to update them.
- Make sure you also advertise the security measures that you take in order to protect people’s private details.
- I would also minimise advertising along the way and up-selling, because that can get annoying to your users.
- On that front, make it optional for people to store their personal details with you: they can either register accounts so they can come back and purchase from you again, or it could be signing in just as a guest user.
- It’s also a wise idea to answer shipping information questions upfront, so that people know what to expect. You can have a Q&A section, or a Frequently Asked Questions section, so that people can understand what to expect when it comes to shipping.
These are just a couple of small things you could to in order to make the process of people buying from you online simple & easy and also to increase their level of trust when they are purchasing online.
2:33 – YOAST and SEO optimisation
Speaking of WordPress plugins, there are 3 plugins I’d like to highlight in this video, which are plugins that you might want to consider as essential plugins for your WordPress website.
One of those is called YOAST and it is an SEO-style plugin which helps you to optimize your pages for the search engines in regards to particular keywords. It has a whole pile of different functionalities and I’m not going to get into the techno-geeky side of it other than to tell you that by installing this plugin you will be making your life a lot easier when it comes to giving search engines such as Google exactly what they want.
And it goes beyond than just optimizing for title tags and description tags; it goes into things like robot.txt files and all sorts of other things – as I said, I’m not going to go into it as they may not be things that you quite understand, but go and have a look at YOAST and the functions and features that it provides.
3:30 – W3 Total Cache to increase your website’s loading speed
The next plugin that I would like to highlight is called W3 Total Cache. Now , I did speak about cache plugins a few weeks back – we all know that it is important from Google to increase your page load speed and that’s one of the ranking factors that Google looks at.
Apart from the fact that it is good from a search engine point of view, from a user point of view if your page loads quickly then you are likely to keep people from bouncing off your site and getting frustrated because the page is taking too long to load. I’ve used this plugin on a number of my sites and our clients’ sites at Super Savvy Websites and I really do believe it is the best option out there: you will notice a big increase in the time it takes for your pages to load when people are browsing through your website.
4:18 – Online Backup for WordPress – backup for your database & file system
The final plugin that I’d like to talk about today is called Online Backup for WordPress. Now, there are several options out there for plugins that you can install on your WordPress website to back it up. Another one is called Backup Buddy.
The wonderful thing about this plugin is that it not only allows you to backup your database which includes things like your pages, posts and comments, but also the file system which includes media and attachments and other things like your themes and plugins.
When you have your backup done, you can have it emailed to you as a zip file or you can use the online storage system where you get 100 GB of free storage from the plugin creators themselves.
4:58 – Quick recap
So they’re the three plugins I suggest you have a look at; if you don’t already have them, we included:
– YOAST
– W3 Total Cache
– and…. Online Backup for WordPress
My name is Fiona Soutter, I hope you enjoyed this website news update from Super Savvy Business and Super Savvy Websites and we will look forward to seeing you again in our next website news update!