While we all know that WordPress has made it super easy to develop an ecommerce website quickly & cost-effectively, do you know there are still some challenges that most of the webmasters face while developing or maintaining a WordPress ecommerce website?
In this blog, I am going to discuss 4 such challenges along with their solutions.
#1 Security Vulnerabilities
Being one of the most common CMS in the world, WordPress has also become favorite of spammers and hackers too. In other words, WordPress is prone to malicious worms, malware, and viruses.
It becomes even more important to secure a WordPress website if it’s developed with ecommerce features. In other words, when you run an ecommerce website, its essential to take care of security vulnerabilities.
How to fix vulnerabilities in a WordPress ecommerce website?
Although, there are several ways to fix security vulnerabilities, some of them are below:
Slow loading speed of WordPress Ecommerce websites has been found in most of the cashes. It could be because of using outdated plugins/themes or even due to the web hosting provider. Whatever is the reason of slow loading speed of WordPress ecommerce websites, it really kills the revenue of every business.
Several studies have shown that the users who are dissatisfied with the loading speed of an ecommerce website are very less likely to buy products from it. What’s more. Search engines like Google has also officially accepted that they consider websites’ loading speed for ranking them on search results.
As I mentioned that there could be a few reasons behind slow loading speed of an ecommerce website that has been built using WordPress, here are some fixes that have worked for me(in almost all the cases) and should be helpful for you too.
A. Update all the plugins and themes to their latest versions
B. Install caching plugins like W3Cache
C. Install plugins for compressing images
D. Optimize database. Plugins like WP-DBManager allow you to optimize, repair, backup and restore your database.
If your ecommerce website has been built using WordPress, you may be required to upgrade the version of your WordPress software from time to time. The primary reason to upgrade WordPress version is to keep your website free from any security threats and vulnerabilities.
As you can see that upgrading version of your WordPress ecommerce website is for a good cause and must be done regularly, but still many webmasters don’t upgrade it. Why? Simply because a simple upgrade can simply cause a lot of other settings to reset.
If your WordPress developer has done a lot of customizations in your WordPress core files (although it’s not recommended at all), a simple upgrade can spoil your ecommerce website. As a result, you will be left with no option other than doing all the customizations again.
#4 Regular Upgrades For WordPress Plugins
We all know that WordPress websites run on plugins. Just in case you are not familiar with plugins, a plugin is a set of codes which can be plugged-in with your WordPress website to run a specific feature.
For eg. if you want to create an ecommerce website on WordPress software, Woocommerce is one of the best plugins to empower a simple WordPress website with comprehensive ecommerce features. Similarly, for every feature, there are several options of plugins available.
Just like any other platform or tool, WordPress plugins also need to be updated regularly failing which can cause security vulnerabilities and other issues.
What’s the solution?
Always make sure that all of your plugins are always updated with their latest version. If there is any plugin used on your ecommerce website that doesn’t have its latest version or in other words, it’s no longer maintained by its developers, you must replace it immediately.
Updating plugins is as easy as few clicks but if you need any plugin to be replaced by another one, it’s better to hire a WordPress web developer to do this job for you.
How to choose best plugins:
A. Make sure that its number downloads should be higher.
B. Make sure that its last update must be on a recent date, preferably not older than six months.
C. Make sure to read other users’ reviews for that plugin.
Conclusion
Be it any Ecommerce/CMS software, you wI’ll face some or the other challenges. The only way to tackle these challenges is to get yourself informed about the problems, their consequences and solutions.
