How to Make e-Commerce Website with WordPress
WordPress is a great content management system and web designers all over the world utilize the benefits of WordPress website design. WordPress offers a variety of themes and great customization options. As it’s an open source CMS, you can design a website even e-commerce at an affordable rate and install variety of plugins to make your website usable.
By using WordPress for ecommerce sites, a dynamic ecommerce site can be created that you will be able to maintain yourself. The following are step by step to create e-commerce with WordPress
Install Your WordPress
Look under the “Software” heading after logging in to your hosting control panel. You will find a link for WordPress under the “Software” heading.
You can install the WordPress files by clicking on this link. A password will be generated that you will enter to login to your site’s administration panel. This will install your site with the default theme.
Choose a Theme Template
You can find hundreds of free WordPress themes by searching for “free WordPress themes” on Google. Unzip the files after downloading the zip file to your desktop.
Upload the theme files to your site’s theme folder on the serve (wp-content-themes). Log into your site’s admin area and click on appearance to activate the new theme.
Click “add new” after selecting your new theme. Your new theme will now be applied to your site.
Install eCommerce Plugin
To find a suitable ecommerce plugin to add to your new ecommerce site, search for “WordPress ecommerce plugin” on Google and download it to your desktop. Install the files in your site’s plugins folder on the server (wp-content-plugins).
The ecommerce links will now appear in your account, checkout, products, page sidebar and transaction results after you have activated the plugin.
Input your Products
You can set up your product parameters by visiting your plugin’s general settings and then adding your products. Regardless of the plugin you downloaded, you will be able to add as many products as you want to. You can manage all of them from your admin panel.
Optimize Your SEO
You can optimize the title and Meta tags for your WordPress blog content by installing the All-in-One SEO Pack. To create search engine friendly web page addresses or URLS, and change the permalink structure. You can achieve this by going to settings>permalinks>custom structure.
In the blank box insert /%postname%.html and save the changes.
Marketing Time
Unless you generate traffic to your WordPress ecommerce website, you won’t be selling much. Some effective ways to generate traffic include:
- Article marketing
- Blogging
- Blog directories
- Newsletter
- Pay per click marketing
- RSS directories
- Social media marketing
- Video marketing
Monitoring
You can track the amount of visitors by visiting the site statistics that will most likely be included with your hosting plan. You will also be able to track where visitors are coming from and the keywords they used that showed them your site in the search engines. This is a convenient way of monitoring your website’s traffic.
3 Major Reasons to Use WordPress for eCommerce Websites
The following are three major reasons you will really benefit by using WordPress to run your ecommerce site:
WordPress is search engine friendly: If you use a good search engine optimized WordPress theme on your ecommerce site, it will get indexed on search engines effectively and users will find it quickly.
WordPress is free: When using WordPress you don’t have to buy software because WordPress itself is an open source software itself. Most renowned web hosting companies seem to offer WordPress as a one-click install.
WordPress is easy: WordPress can be used by anyone who knows how to use Microsoft Word. An online store can be managed relatively easily through the WordPress visual interface.
It is apparent that using WordPress for ecommerce sites is beneficial in many ways, and now you know how to use WordPress for your own ecommerce website.