Throughout the time of running Petersweb, we have released multiple websites, mainly small blogging sites, and resource sites. Over the Easter weekend, 2020 one of our clients released a Website powered by Woocommerce. This was our first large e-commerce site released by a client. We have written other articles regarding getting your website ready for Black Friday. However, releasing your first e-commerce website is somewhat more tasking. Here are our top tips for getting started with eCommerce!
- Make sure you make full integration with Cloudflare. We normally recommend doing a partial integration, however, this only protects the www.yourdomain.com. This, in turn, leaves the site without the ‘www.’ Portion vulnerable to web-based attacks. This is normally a reasonable level of protection, however, with an eCommerce site, it is advised to not take any chances with the protection of your assets.
- Make sure you are comfortable writing simple firewall rules for your website. We have an article linked here on how to prevent invalid logins to WordPress, which is a good start for added protection. However, with eCommerce websites, you will find more and more attacks trying to get around this protection methodology. Don’t be scared to add extra challenges to certain countries of IP origin. I would recommend looking at the incoming traffic activity through the plugin ‘Wordfence’. We strongly recommend having the Wordfence plugin installed! Look at what countries are accessing your website, are any of these countries displaying malicious trends in their traffic patterns?
- Use a good caching plugin. If the caching plugin is set up correctly it will help to speed up the loading time of your website. This will help your customers get onto your website even faster! Taking this action combined with the use of our Cloudflare CDN will make your website run at a good pace.
- Do not use Jetpack. Woocommerce will keep asking you to install Jetpack to add additional functionality. However, this majorly slows down your website and doesn’t actually add a lot of additional functionality that you can’t get from other plugins.
Our general advice for releasing an eCommerce web-site is to consider security and speed above other factors such as the design of your web-site. We are not suggesting that design is unimportant, however, would you rather have a pretty website that takes 10 minutes to load or a slightly less aesthetically pleasing website that takes under 2 or 3 seconds to load. (OK 10 minutes may be a slight exaggeration, but you get the gist). Also, another key piece of advice is, on the day that you release the website, you can be tempted to start altering content. Try to avoid making changes on the day of release, the last thing you want is your new website to break on release date! If you are interested in the particular web-site that inspired this article feel free to check it out: www.prettymama.co.uk
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we can help get your Ecommerce web-site up and running!
