WordPress plus WooCommerce is the perfect pair for creating and running your own online store.
When the pandemic threatened to shut down the world, the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping was already set in motion. The latest twists and turns didn’t spark the change, they only sped it up significantly and now it shows all signs of sticking around for good. It does not matter if changing times made you want to go online. Or, an ever-lasting appeal of low start-up costs and high customer reach. Or you simply think it’s the time to up your game and put your shop online. Still, the first challenge is to decide which ecommerce platform is the right choice for your business, Enter WooCommerce, one of the best-known extensions of WordPress, and one that allows its users to set up and deploy an ecommerce platform without needing too much technical know-how or having to resort to web wizardry. Launched in the September of 2011 by Automattic, WooCommerce now powers around 3.9m websites across the globe, and the number continues to grow. It was created with small to large-sized WordPress-using merchants in mind but has managed to stay friendly towards newcomers by combining a user-friendly approach with powerful performance, high flexibility, and a full set of features. Although we could easily dig up more reasons why WooCommerce and your ecommerce website are a match made in heaven, we’ll stick to 10 for the sake of convenience. If you want to find out more about WooCommerce’s story of success, you can check out its official site and its blog, where you’ll also find tons of tips and tricks. Along with this, fans of social networking sites can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Although there’s a whole array of first-rate ecommerce platforms currently on offer, most of them will cost you a pretty penny. However, this is not the case with WooCommerce which you can download straight away completely free of charge. In addition to this, it’s equipped with a full range of features, including plugins, extensions, and a capability for unrestricted customization which will boost your business without the risk of busting your budget. If this sounds too good to be true, it’s because this isn’t the whole truth. One of the obvious drawbacks with WooCommerce is that like any other plugin it won’t work with the free version of WordPress. You can “fix” this by upgrading your WordPress plan or installing it by yourself on a domain name you own and host. On another note, despite the core system being free, if you want to purchase additional plugins (for multilingual sites, currency conversion marketing, extra SEO, faster-loading speed, and such), extensions, or themes, it can go from free to costly pretty quickly, so keep your eyes open. Still, you can be pretty confident that WooCommerce will stay a free plugin for WordPress. If you are wondering how many webstores are using WooCommerce in 2021, let’s start with a few raw numbers. According to BuiltWith,5,106,506 live sites are using WooCommerce as we write, which means that in the top one million sites 58,946 of them are using WooCommerce which is 5.89% of them, and it’s a big thing. Now let’s be a bit more specific and check out how many online stores have put their trust into WooCommerce’s hands. According to the numbers, WooCommerce powers over 25% of all online stores which leaves all its competitors in the digital dust. And if you wonder how many new sites are installing WooCommerce, an up-to-date statistic is available on the WooCommerce page as part of the WordPress plugin section and it shows a staggering 161,972,783 downloads, over 322,000 of them being in the last week. All in all, since lots of folks use WooCommerce, why wouldn’t you too? An open-source approach combined with user-friendliness has made WordPress the most widely used content management system ( CMS) for newcomers and webmasters all over the world. Whether you dream about opening an ecommerce store, or simply building a blog, WordPress will supply you with all the tools you need to turn your daydreams into reality.
