WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms. It is a WordPress plugin designed to add a nice Store section to any WordPress blog. You can even develop a dedicated online store using WordPress and WooCommerce combination. As with developing other types of website using WordPress, there are a few steps you need to take during the deployment stage. In this part, we are going to focus on what to do when you want to deploy your own WooCommerce online store.
Clean Up & Prepare
Whether you are developing the site offline or you use a live server for the job, there are several clean-up tasks to complete in order to safely deploy your WooCommerce online store. First of all, make sure access management and users are in order.
WooCommerce supports additional user roles to make managing your online store easier. Store administrators must not be mixed up with site administrators. The same goes for other user roles. Separate users for managing different parts of the site for maximum security. Test users – particularly those with weak passwords – must be deleted before you deploy the WooCommerce site.
When you accept payment over the woocommerce site, you need a better security like SSL certificate that can secure data transmitting between the server and the browser. You can go with multiple choices like multi domain wildcard, wildcard SSL certificate, single domain, code sign certificate to secure a woocommerce website that would fit in your budget.
Next, delete test items and test purchase orders from the system. The best way to do this is by making a complete backup of your database before deleting the entries manually from WooCommerce. You need to revert to a clean WooCommerce store so that it is functional and appear professional once deployed.
Prepare the Server
Deploying an online store is slightly different than setting up a standard WordPress blog. You need to prepare a few things in order for the online store to work properly. Start by adding an SSL certificate to the server. You can use an SSL certificate to secure the entire site or configure it to work on checkout and payment pages.
Without a valid and functional SSL certificate, it would be difficult for your new online store to appear credible in the eyes of customers. In fact, over 70% of today’s online shoppers will not complete the checkout process unless the page is properly secured. Adding a valid SSL certificate means protecting your customers’ personal information.
You should also determine if you want to add the WooCommerce online store to your main site or to a separate WordPress installation. The later is often seen as more practical, because then you can use a sub domain name or a folder to separate the two WordPress installations. You can have store.yourdomain.com and redirect customers there whenever they want to make a purchase.
Upload and Test
The next step is to actually upload the finished WooCommerce online store. This is the easy part. Upload the theme and other support files, import (or manually) add products to your store and get everything set up.
You also need to add payment gateways – and the correct plugins to use them – as well as define shipping calculation methods and other details for the WooCommerce online store to work properly. The task may seem complicated at first, but WooCommerce has a very good import/export functionality that will help streamline the process.
At this point, you need to test the live version of your online store. Set all payment gateways to sandbox or testing mode and try completing a few transactions. This test is crucial even when you have done a lot of testing during the development process of your store. The test is meant to check if the payment gateway and your live server can communicate properly.
If bugs or errors are discovered, now is the time to fix them. You can either fix the problems based on your own testing or have a closed-beta to get more input from users. Don’t launch the site unless you know for sure that everything works as planned.
Launching the Site
Once everything is in place, you should be able to announce your new online store to the public. At this stage, there are still some tweaking and optimisation to be done. For example, you need to check how your new WooCommerce site – and the WordPress core that backs it – perform under heavy load. Figure out which plugins cause high server load and see if you can optimise them further.
You should also start implementing your SEO strategy at this point. Tweak product descriptions and keywords to make your online store searchable. Monitor the store closely for payment errors and other potential problems too. Don’t forget to make daily backups so that you can revert to an older version of your site if necessary.
Follow the steps we discussed in this article and you will have a live and operational WooCommerce store without a problem. Once the site is mature and no more errors are discovered, you can focus your energy on creating awesome products and services that your customers want to buy.
