Do you want to build an eCommerce website to sell your products online? This blog post may help you.
Creating a website is a different thing but making the desired profit out of it is different. It requires several ingredients to make a website successful. The same is the case with eCommerce stores.
Recommended post: Is your eCommerce website answering these 7 questions for your users
To create a profitable eCommerce website, you definitely need a perfect combination of several things. And the most important thing that I will be talking about here is your web developer.
Yes, the skills of your website developer determine, to a large extent, the success of your eCommerce website.
But the question is “What are the required skills that a website developer must have in order to create a profitable eCommerce website?“.
In this blog, I’ve shared 5 essential skills that your developer should have.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Web designing
If you think that a website developer shouldn’t possess any designing skills, as told by your developer perhaps, you may need to revise your thoughts here.
As per my experience of more than a decade being a web consultant, I know and can confirm here how important it is for a developer to know the designing skills.
No, I am not talking about the creativity to design a website layout, but here I mean the ability to take care of design elements and their attributes such as spacing, margins, padding, colors, etc. without waiting for the web designer for every minor design update.
If your developer completely relies on the web designer to take care of every design aspect of your website, they may end up delaying your project, and in most cases doing an unfinished job.
For an eCommerce website to be profitable, you need to hire a professional web developer who knows not only the required coding skills, but he must also know how to make a website presentable while doing their job.
#2 Plugins/modules customization
Most of the websites these days are developed using CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, etc. We all know that.
But did you know that a CMS-driven website requires several plugins or modules to run effectively?
For example, a WordPress website requires a plugin to perform specific features or functionality and a Drupal website needs modules to run the required features.
Installing and configuring a plugin or module is as easy as a few clicks. However, in order to customize a plugin or module, you do need an experienced website builder how has the required expertise to customize them.
Why do you need a web developer to customize the plugins or modules?
Well, every plugin or module comes with a pre-defined flow or features. But it’s very much likely that you may need some different functionality or flow according to the specific requirements of your business.
Here you will need a web designer to customize the plugins or modules to match your business-specific needs.
#3 Theme customization
While it’s true that there is plenty of options for you to choose a theme to build your website using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, however, you may need to customize the chosen theme to match your requirements.
Therefore, your website developer should possess the necessary skills to be able to customize a theme and match your expectations.
It’s not a big deal to create a WordPress website for any novice developer using any pre-defined theme because it hardly takes a few hours to install and configure a theme.
But in order to create a custom website design, you need a professional & experienced web developer who knows how to customize a theme.
#4 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the primary motives to create an eCommerce website is to get business out of it. And for getting business from your website, you need a lot of traffic, rather, quality traffic.
Search engine optimization (ranking on higher positions of search engines like Google) is one of the effective yet affordable mediums to get quality & organic traffic on your website. We all know that.
But did you know that SEO starts from the website?
In other words, if your website is SEO-friendly, your SEO battle would be almost half-won.
There are many things that a web developer can implement on your eCommerce store to make it SEO-friendly. Some of them are mentioned below:
- Provision to add unique meta tags for each webpage.
- Installing a plugin for interlink among webpages.
- Optimizing the loading speed of the website.
- Optimizing all the high-resolution product images on your site.
- Creating necessary files such as robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
- Installing Google Analytics trackers on each webpage.
- & More
It should be, therefore, an important skill that you need to check in your website builder before you hire them.
#5 Security comliance
The security of a website is crucial for its success. Especially, for an eCommerce store to be profitable, you need to have a secure website.
Why security is important for your eCommerce website?
Here are a few major reasons to secure your online store:
- Your customers are targeted
- You may lose your reputation
- You may lose your business revenue
- You may lose SEO rankings
- The lack of security can affect your website’s performance
Recommended post: 6 Reasons why security is important for your WordPress website
Therefore, you must check before you hire a website developer, that he is able to build a secured eCommerce store for you. In other words, security compliance is another important skill that your web developer should possess.
