Nick is planning to set up an online store to sell handbags. Now, he starts searching for the best website builders to find one that’s e-commerce-friendly. Next, he comes across WordPress and starts wondering, “Is WordPress good for e-commerce?” If your question is similar to Nick’s, you’re at the right place.

Whether you’re looking to sell physical products or services, such as an online course, keep reading to find out what makes WordPress the best e-commerce platform for your needs.

Top 5 Reasons To Use WordPress for E-commerce

WordPress powers approximately 43% of all websites.

Let’s find out what makes WordPress so popular, and specifically, why is it a suitable choice for creating your e-commerce site?

1. It’s SEO-Friendly

Without optimizing your e-commerce website for search engines, it’d be difficult to generate traffic and attract customers. Luckily, WordPress makes search engine optimization a breeze through the following ways:

Editable Permalinks

The ability to plug a keyword in a page’s URL tells the search engine that your page contains relevant information users are searching for. And if I were Google, I’d send users to that page.

The Ability To Optimize Product Images

Want potential customers to find your store quickly? Optimize product images by adding relevant keywords in the file names. Also, sprinkle some keywords in the image alt text. WordPress makes this so effortless.

SEO Plugins

Not everyone understands how SEO works. But with easy-to-use SEO plugins, even the least tech-savvy individuals can optimize a website. Here are some of the plugins that make e-commerce SEO easy:

Yoast SEO

The tool lets you optimize product descriptions, blog posts, and other pages around a focus keyword. It offers templates for a meta description and SEO title and helps you create content that both humans and search engines can read.

Google XML SiteMaps

The plugin simplifies the creation of XML sitemaps that make it easy for search engine crawlers to understand your e-commerce website’s structure.

All In One SEO Pack

The plugin is beginner-friendly and works immediately on activation. It’ll optimize your page titles and generate meta tags for search engines.

Besides, it automatically notifies search engines whenever you make changes on the site.

2. It Works With E-commerce-Friendly Plugins

For a WordPress website to succeed, you need to install the right plugins. These tools let you build and customize a site so that visitors will enjoy the look and want to come back.

For e-commerce sites, WordPress provides several plugins to make selling products seamless. WooCommerce is an example of an insanely popular e-commerce plugin.

Here are some of the top features that make WooCommerce outstanding:

• It’s designed to integrate with any WordPress themes.
• There’s a product description feature to improve SEO for your site.
• It comes with built-in blogging to help you level up the content marketing game and amp brand awareness.
• It features attributes, tags, and categories that make it easy for people to find your products.
• The product filtering and sorting feature help customers to search and find products quickly by price, rating, popularity, newness, and more.
• You can select from multiple payment options.

Other e-commerce plugins include Product Countdown WordPress Plugin, Easy Digital Downloads, E-commerce Product Dialogue, and more.

3. It’s Optimized for Mobile

Mobile use has increased over the past couple of years. According to StatCounter Global Stats, more than 55% of all web traffic originates from mobile phones.

Besides, research by BrixFeel shows that 49% of shoppers use smartphones to make online purchases.

As an e-commerce website owner trying to scale your business online, this means your site must be mobile-friendly. That way, you’ll attract more customers to view your products and even make a purchase.

Luckily, if WordPress powers your website, you don’t have to do extra work to make it accessible on mobile.

The reason is most WordPress themes are responsive, meaning they display your products and content clearly on smartphone screens.

4. It Integrates With Social Media

Undoubtedly, social media is perfect for marketing your products or services. Why? Because potential buyers hang out on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and more.

9 in 10 Instagram users follow a business. So, if your business is on Instagram, you’ve got higher chances of increasing sales.

That’s not all:

A whopping 97% of Pinterest users visit the platform to gain inspiration from the beautiful images and videos on that app. They come with an open and undecided mindset, which means they could buy from you if they like your pins.

Notably, a social media marketing campaign is essential to your online business, and WordPress makes that easy.

The platform lets you:

• Add follow and sharing buttons to your site
• Auto-publish content to various social media pages
• Include a social login option that makes it easy for users to log into your site without signing up afresh.

Bottom line: A solid social media presence will help boost your site’s traffic and sales.

5. WordPress Sites Have Fast Load Times

Loading speed impacts not only traffic but also conversion. Plus, it’s also part of the page experience, which is a crucial ranking factor.

Pingdom analyzed the top 50 e-commerce sites based on traffic and noticed that the average homepage load time is 2.87 seconds, the average homepage size is 3.43MB, and the average number of requests is 174.

Simply put, an e-commerce site should load in under three seconds. Page speed is necessary if you’d like to attract and retain customers.

The good news is WordPress features fantastic plugins to crank up site speed. For example, ShortPixel Image Optimizer compresses large images to increase your website’s load time.

And, WP-Optimize caches your website, clears the database, and compresses images for quicker load times.

Remember, monitoring WP site speed is necessary to keep it optimal and reduce the bounce rate.

Start Using WordPress Today

Building an e-commerce website on WordPress will give you a competitive edge. Not only does it enhance search engine visibility, but it also makes site customization and marketing non-complicated. So, get started today by using this website builder to set up a successful e-commerce site.

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