WooCommerce Questions
Suitability/Capability of running a shop with 1000 products
Marketpress did a twitter poll which asked WooCommerce stores owners how many products they had on their site. The results came in as:
- 57% had more than 100 products
- 40% had more than 250 products
- 11% had a WooCommerce shop with more than 1000 products.
So although there are less mega WooCommerce sites out there, they do exist and function very well. One example of shop that has a lot of product is Soul Brother. They have more than 25,000 products on their store. They also use the Woo Canvas Framework alongside WooCommerce.
WordPress too is more than capable for large sites. WordPress list some of their bigger clients here.
When it comes to stores this size the weakest link is going to be the server you are hosted on rather than the WordPress and WooCommerce platform.
Stability
Question: What evidence is there that woo commerce is a stable platform
WooCommerce is developed in the open. There is a large community refining the product and helping contribute the WooCommerce community. you can take a look here to view the WooCommerce community at work. There are regular updates and fixes for even the most minor of points. It is a constantly improving product.
The WooCommerce team also have their core code fully audited by Sucuri. We also wrote an article about how WooCommerce is secure
Future upgrades and support –
Question: What is the availability of plug-ins and what is their reliability
WooThemes have their own plugin marketplace and all plugins that are provided there are updated to ensure compatibility. WooCommerce offer licences for each plugin which ensures you can get the most upto date plugin.
Customisation
Question: Can component technology be customised (eg. we may need to include custom product flags to highlight special offers or “available as a kit” type info on product categories/archives)
WooCommerce, Woo Canvas Framework and WordPress are all built with hooks, filters and language files throughout. This allows a very granular level of customisation if required. We can add and amend nearly every aspect of the site.
We also develop with Child Themes which means we never touch the core code. This allows you to stay up-to date with the latest framework, wordpress version and plugins while keeping your custom coding.
SEO
Question: Does running a Woo Commerce based shop bring SEO advantages/disadvanatges over other shops (specifically Magento).
WooCommerce is fantastic for SEO. It has a huge amount of best-practice on-site SEO out of the box. Combined with the Yoast SEO module and you have a very powerful setup. In particular the site is fully setup for social sharing and seo schema.
We found many developers who use Magento also use WordPress as their CMS for other areas of the site. Often this results in inconsistent on-site SEO rules and poor SEO. By having the whole site running on WordPress you can have consistent and powerful on-site SEO rules.
SEO Migration
Question: How can SEO be managed effectively in migrating from an existing shop to a new one (particularly when it comes to urls
We will take a list of existing URLs and put 301 redirects in place. The Shop category slug structure can also be amended to suit the previous sites structure.
Hosting and Support
Our cloud hosting services are lighting fast with UK datacenters and are scalable to meet your traffic requirements. Shared hosting is to be avoided and any hosting service whose main marketing message is that they are cheap are best avoided.
How is support charged
Support is included for all sites that we host and for all companies that subscribe to our online marketing packages .
What access is there to support
How can downtime for essential maintenance/upgrades be managed
We develop on our development servers, do all site upgrades and amendments for you on our staging server and once we are confident the site is ready we then push the changes onto the live production server. By having these three stages we can ensure that upgrades and maintenance can be managed without site downtime.
What happens things go wrong?
Don’t worry we take a daily backup of your site so we can always revert to a previous state. We also always do updates on our staging site so you can be sure your site will be up and selling.