Essential Tips for Scaling Your WooCommerce Store as You Grow (2024)

Do you have big plans for your online store and are thinking about scaling WooCommerce? You’ve come to the right place.

Like any other business, scaling is crucial to the long-term survival of your ecommerce business. As your WooCommerce store grows, you need to think about scaling it. How will it handle more shoppers, products, and transactions efficiently?

👋 If you don’t know how to do this and where to start, you’re in luck because this is what we’ll cover in this guide. We’ll walk you through several essential tips for scaling your WooCommerce store.

But first, let’s get the basics out of the way and understand how well WooCommerce is set up for scaling.

How well does WooCommerce scale?

Scalability is the ability to grow your online store without sacrificing performance or user experience.

In other words, how well your online store handles a growing number of customers, site visitors, orders, products, etc., without slowing down or crashing.

As you gain more customers on your WooCommerce store and expand your catalog, you have to consider scaling it. Alternatively, you could be looking to start building your online store on WooCommerce and thinking about its long-term growth.

Either way, it’s perfectly normal to have questions about WooCommerce scalability. Whether it will be able to handle your ecommerce business’s increasing demands as it grows or not. After all, one of the biggest myths about WooCommerce is that it doesn’t scale as a business grows.

You can easily scale your online store with WooCommerce

You’ll be pleased to know that WooCommerce is built for scalability. It’s one of the most flexible ecommerce platforms, able to handle thousands, even millions, of shoppers when you set it up correctly.

To confirm this, take Mint Mobile as an example. This online store built on WooCommerce reportedly receives about 20 – 30 million visitors monthly.

WooCommerce developers do a pretty good job of setting up WooCommerce to scale. They continually optimize it for scalability and performance. But we know that WooCommerce doesn’t work alone.

As the store owner, you have to work to set up your store’s non-WooCommerce aspects to prepare it to handle your growing business smoothly. If Mint Mobile can do it, you can too.

With that in mind, let’s look at some effective strategies for scaling WooCommerce.

Tips for scaling WooCommerce

The truth is that there’s so much to do when you want to prepare your WooCommerce store for the growth of your business. As a result, if you don’t have a clear strategy or the right tools, scaling your WooCommerce store can be difficult.

So, let’s make it simple. We’ll break it down into topics you might need to think about as you scale your ecommerce business on WooCommerce and provide some actionable steps.

Optimize site performance for better speed and load times

📈 We all get frustrated with slow-loading websites, and some users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. According to a study by Akamai, a 100-millisecond delay in page loading time can reduce the conversion rate by 7%. You can’t afford this when you want to scale your business.

Site speed is important when scaling because it impacts user experience and SEO – search engines favor fast-loading websites. If your ecommerce store is optimized for speed, you’ll get more visitors and convert more of them into paying customers.

This is why you should start with this when scaling yourWooCommerce store. There are different ways to do this, including:

Using caching solutions

What does caching do to improve your online store’s performance? This process stores temporary copies of frequently accessed pages of your ecommerce site on the user’s browser or your servers.

This includes your shop, catalog, product, or landing pages. These pages are pre-loaded and ready to be served to site visitors as soon as they click to view them. This seems like a complicated thing to implement on your online store.

But with WordPress and WooCommerce, you know that there are plugins for everything, including caching. You can use caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, and Solid Performance to do this for you.

Optimizing images and media files

Images and media files increase the size of your web pages. The average web page size is about 2.2 MB, and out of this, 1.8 MB is dedicated to images. Your page load times increase with the size of your web pages.

Luckily, there are image optimization plugins like Smush or Imagify that can optimize your images without significantly reducing their quality. They do this using various techniques such as compression, resizing, or converting them to a lighter format like WebP.

Choosing the right hosting for scaling WooCommerce

Choosing the right hosting solution helps you lay the foundation for creating a scalable WooCommerce store. As you scale your online store, you’ll gain more site visitors and customers, your site will process more payments, and you’ll manage more products in your inventory.

WooCommerce allows you to add as many products as you’d like. What remains is setting up an infrastructure to handle a growing number of shoppers and transactions efficiently.

Your web host will provide the resources your ecommerce site needs to handle an increasing level of activity without a drop in performance or downtime.

So, you’ll need to pick a hosting solution that can handle high traffic volumes without crashing. Imagine your website crashes during a sale or promotion. That would be disastrous as you would lose tons of sales.

📈 It can happen to anyone. In 2018, Amazon suffered a crash during its Prime Day promotion and lost a whopping $72 million.

If you want to select a hosting solution to ensure your website performs optimally as it grows, here’s what you should do.

Choose managed WooCommerce hosting

There are different types of hosting environments, such as shared, dedicated, etc., which are all good for different types of websites. However, for ascalableWooCommerce store, managed WooCommerce hosting is by far the best option.

This is a type of hosting solution specifically designed for WooCommerce. Its resources (servers) are set up to handle high traffic and large product catalogs. Everything is set up for you so that you can focus on what matters – acquiring more customers and getting more sales.

Which managed WooCommerce hosting provider should you choose?

Several hosting providers have managed WooCommerce hosting plans, including Kinsta, Hostinger, and SiteGround. But for scaling, we highly recommend Liquid Web’s managed WooCommerce hosting.

Its hosting plans are powered by Nexcess’s high-performance servers to ensure your customers will always experience fast-loading pages. Also, it has a load balancer that distributes traffic evenly across its servers. This means your WooCommerce store won’t crash during sales.

Note: You shouldn’t confuse managed WooCommerce hosting with managed WordPress hosting. The latter is suited to different types of websites, including blogs, but the former is only for ecommerce sites on WordPress.

Prioritize scalability

You want to make sure that your hosting plan scales with your online business. If your monthly shoppers’ numbers go up, you should be able to add more resources to accommodate this.

One feature you should look for is the availability of multiple hosting plans. Also, the web host should allow you to move from one plan to the next easily. This is something Liquid Web does so well.

As you move up the hosting plans, it will assign more server resources, i.e., storage, bandwidth, and PHP workers, to your WooCommerce site.

Optimize performance with a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) comprises a network of servers spread out across the world. It distributes your site’s content to these servers so that it is loaded from the server closest to a customer.

Content doesn’t have to travel a long distance to reach a user’s browser, which makes your web pages load fast. With a high site speed, customers will have a better user experience, which could lead to more conversions.

Like hosting providers, there are several CDN providers. But Cloudflare offers the best-in-class CDN solutions. It is worth mentioning all of Liquid Web’s managed WooCommerce hosting plans come with a Cloudflare CDN integration.

This means once you get hosting from Liquid Web, you don’t have to figure out how you’ll integrate a CDN into your hosting solution to boost your site’s speed.

Think about security as you scale WooCommerce

Customers care about security now more than ever. If you want to scale your online shop and acquire more customers, you should care about it, too.

📈 With about 37% of Americans falling victim to credit card fraud, can you really blame customers if more than 60% avoid a retailer whose security has been breached before?

To acquire more customers and retain them, you must bolster your security. Customers will be more at ease sharing their payment information when you alleviate their worries concerning credit card fraud.

Keep in mind that a larger website means more attack surfaces for cybercriminals. Which makes it even more important to secure your WooCommerce site.

You can add extra layers of protection to your WooCommerce site in the following ways:

Use WordPress security plugins

You must protect your data and safeguard your user’s information. Fortunately, there are several plugins that can prevent attacks on your site and protect it. Security plugins like Wordfence and Succuri will monitor your site for threats and protect it from malware, hacking attempts, and denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

There are also all-in-one solutions such as SolidWP that do a more comprehensive job. It includes:

• Login security features to protect your site from brute-force attacks and leaked passwords.
• Database backups to help you recover your data in case a security breach happens. You can restore everything in a single click.
• A user-friendly security management dashboard – where you can visualize your online store’s security status in real-time.

SolidWP combines all of these features in a single plugin to give you a more complete security solution.

Regularly back up your site

📈 It might come as a surprise that there are around 2,200 cyberattacks per day. In the worst-case scenario, if one of these attacks gets through your security protocols, you’ll need a strategy to recover from this hit.

By conducting regular backups, you’ll have something to fall back on if you get hacked. As mentioned earlier, SolidWP can help you do this. You can also opt for Updraft Plus or JetPack Backup plugins.

Limit login attempts and use strong passwords

📈 5% of all data breaches are caused by brute force attacks.

This is where hackers make numerous attempts to guess your passwords. Customers or employees can also mishandle their passwords, which can cause them to fall into the wrong hands.

These are things you want to protect your online store from. You can do this with the help of login security plugins such as Login Lockdown. With this plugin, you can add features like 2-factor authentication, Captcha, and the ability to block logins by country, to ensure login credentials are well-protected.

Use plugins to reduce maintenance time for large WooCommerce product catalogs

As your WooCommerce store grows, so does your product catalog. This also means you’ll need to spend more time maintaining it. Managing product information, inventory levels, setting prices, and merchandising hundreds or even thousands of products would take up a lot of your time.

What’s more, you’ll likely make a few mistakes, which could lead to things like understocking or overstocking. Understocking will frustrate your customers since you’ll sell what you don’t have – and they might have to wait until you restock.

Luckily, there are several plugins you can use to make this process faster and easier for you. Which frees up time for you to focus on growing your store. These plugins include:

WP All Import/Export for WooCommerce

As you scale your business, you’ll probably order products from different suppliers in bulk and expand your product lines. Updating all of this information in your catalog one product at a time obviously won’t cut it.

The WP All Import plugin allows you to do this all at once. You can create an Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV file of all your product updates and then import this file to your WooCommerce store in a few clicks.

The best part about it is you can choose to import the URL of your Google Sheets. Then, any changes you make to this document will be updated automatically in your WooCommerce site.

This way, you don’t have to import a new version of the document each time you receive a new batch of stock and update the document.

What else can you do with WP All Import?

Apart from importing, you can also export products in a similar way to Excel, CSV, etc., files. Here is where its drag-and-drop interface comes in handy. You can drag and drop the fields you want to appear in the exported file.

Setary

If you have a large product database in your WooCommerce store, Setary makes editing products in bulk easier for you. It allows you to do this from a spreadsheet-style interface. So, if you’ve been maintaining your product catalog in Excel and importing it to WooCommerce, you won’t have to learn anything new.

Setary’s bulk actions feature allows you to make hundreds, even thousands of edits in a fraction of the time it would take you to do this from the WooCommerce backend. This includes changing the prices of tons of products by a percentage or a fixed value.

You can edit everything concerning your products, including metadata and custom fields. Once done, you can import/export this data to keep all systems in sync. As a bonus, it also allows you to use AI to optimize your product descriptions.

Plan for scalability and growth with regular audits and updates

To be successful with your scalability plans, you need to be on the front foot with your store’s security and performance. Of course, this starts with integrating the security and performance-enhancing plugins we’ve already mentioned.

But, security and performance optimization are continuous processes. It is a best practice to constantly assess them and make adjustments when you need to. Also, you need to test any changes you make to your store before putting them out there.

Here’s what you can do to achieve all this.

Conduct regular performance audits

Regular performance audits will help you spot performance issues before they become a big problem. We recommend doing this monthly or quarterly when assessing the number of shoppers or orders your online shop has fulfilled in this period.

There are several tools available for you to use to conduct regular performance audits for free. These include Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix. With these tools, you only need to share your site’s URL, and you’ll get a complete audit of your site’s speed in a few seconds.

Tip: Make sure to check site speed on desktops and mobile devices. Also, use the suggestions these tools will give you to improve your site’s performance.

Schedule plugin and theme updates

WordPress themes and plugins are regularly updated to improve their performance and patch security vulnerabilities. Having an outdated version poses security risks for your ecommerce store.

The risk gets worse with the more plugins you install. Because of this, you should check for updates at least once a week and conduct updates at least once a month. This ensures you’re up-to-date with the latest protective features the plugin’s developer adds to it.

Apart from theme and plugin updates, you should also schedule database cleanups.

Implement a staging site for testing

Suppose, after conducting your scheduled audits, you discover an issue that needs changes. We don’t advise you to make these changes directly to your live website. They could cause issues that cost you customers.

This is why we recommend having a staging WooCommerce site for testing the changes you want to make. You don’t have to buy a new domain for this – simply create a subdomain from your parent domain.

Here, you can make as many changes as you wish without worrying about the issues they may cause. Once you’ve verified that the changes don’t cause any problems, you can proceed to make these changes to your live WooCommerce site.

You can also do this for site updates, major design changes, or when you install a new plugin.

Make the most of increased traffic with sales-boosting techniques

One of the key reasons for scaling WooCommerce is to increase your online store’s sales and revenue. Most of the things you’ll do to scale your WooCommerce store set it up to receive more site visitors and handle more transactions.

As you receive more site visitors, you want to convert as many of them as you can into paying customers. In addition, you want to sell to them as much as you can and provide a great experience so that they become loyal to your brand.

You want to capitalize on your site visitors to grow your revenue and your customer base. Here are a few techniques that can help you do this as you scale.

Implement cross-selling and upselling techniques

Cross-selling and upselling are powerful sales techniques that get customers to spend more when they order.

But they do it differently:

• Cross-selling. By recommending products that go well with a product customers are viewing or have added to their carts. These could be products that complement a customer’s product of interest, such as a smartphone and a phone case.They can also be products other customers have bought or are your best sellers.
• Upselling. By recommending more expensive, higher-quality, or upgraded versions of what a customer is interested in. For example, a smartphone with more storage space and RAM.

📈 These techniques are extremely effective. In fact, studies show that 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from cross-selling.

By default, WooCommerce allows you to display cross-sells and upsells on the product page under a related product section. This is a bit too generic and won’t do a great job of convincing customers to add related products to their purchases.

To create a compelling cross-selling and upselling strategy, you’ll need the Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce plugin.

Create a powerful cross-selling and upselling strategy with Iconic Sales Booster

Iconic Sales Booster allows you to maximize sales on your customers by cross-selling to them throughout their journey in your store. You can make the most out of their buying intent and persuade them to buy more products that match what they were interested in originally.

With Iconic Sales Booster, you can make use of proven, powerful cross-selling techniques such as:

Frequently Bought Together

Replace the generic ‘Related Products’ section on the product page with a ‘Frequently bought together’ section. Here, you can include products that complement what a customer has set out to buy, such as the ones we’ve mentioned.

Customers Also Bought

Include a popup that displays immediately after customers click ‘Add to cart’. You can use this popup to show products that complement a customer’s product of interest but are not necessarily bought together with it in the same purchase.

Order Bumps at checkout

When customers leave the product or cart pages, cross-selling doesn’t end there with the Sales Booster plugin.

You have a large product catalog, and it’s easy for customers to miss a product they might need. With order bumps, you can suggest this product when they’re checking out.

One-click cross-sell after checkout

To promote impulse purchases, you can launch a last-ditch effort to get an extra sale after customers complete the checkout.

Regardless of where these cross-sells are, customers will be able to add them to their purchases in one click. There is no need to re-enter their credit card information.

Iconic Sales Booster gives you full control over which product will be suggested and where the cross-sell offer will be displayed. You can also change the sales text to make the offer more attractive to your customers.

💡 This is only a quick, takeaway-focused overview of what Iconic Sales Booster can do. You can dive deep into related products and how this plugin helps you pitch them in our WooCommerce Related Products guide.

Optimize your checkout process for conversions

When customers get to your checkout, you want them to have a smooth experience so that they can follow through with their purchase. After doing all that work to get them interested in your products, you wouldn’t want to lose them right before they make a purchase.

To do this, you need to create a smooth checkout experience with a seamless path to completing their purchase.

The default WooCommerce checkout isn’t as user-friendly as it could be, and we can certainly do better. Fortunately, the Flux Checkout for WooCommerce plugin can help you create a lightning-fast, distraction-free checkout flow.

Create a seamless checkout experience for your customers with Flux Checkout

Flux Checkout upgrades every aspect of your WooCommerce checkout to help you get more customers over the line. First, it converts the default WooCommerce checkout into a user-friendly multi-step checkout.

Instead of customers facing the default word-heavy WooCommerce checkout, Flux breaks this down into a series of smaller, more manageable steps. Then, it walks customers through these steps without any distractions.

With a progress indicator displayed above, customers will always know where they are in the checkout process. Speaking of checkout distractions,

Flux enables you to limit them by:

• Reducing the number of unnecessary fields, such as the separate street number.
• Removing the header and footer.

That’s not all. Flux allows you to make your checkout as simple as it can be through address autocomplete and checkout elements (for displaying trust seals, FAQs, etc).

You can also create a customizable order confirmation page that is not only pleasing to look at but wins you repeat purchases.

💡 There’s so much more you can do with Flux. Learn how you can utilize this plugin to improve your checkout process at each step in our How to Finetune Checkout Process Steps guide.

Introduce a loyalty or rewards program

Implementing a loyalty or rewards program is a great way to encourage customer loyalty and increase the amount customers spend on your brand. There are different types of loyalty programs you can run on your WooCommerce store, but they all follow a basic premise.

That is, customers will be rewarded if they spend more or make more repeat purchases. You can reward them with things like free shipping, discounts, or free gifts. These rewards motivate them to keep shopping from you so that they earn them.

As expected, WooCommerce lacks a loyalty program feature by default. Luckily, somepluginscan help you with this, too. You can use a plugin like Points and Rewards for WooCommerce to set up a points-based system where customers earn points for purchasing items or interacting with your brand.

Then, they earn rewards once they reach a certain points threshold. With a loyalty program in place, you can encourage repeat purchases and boost long-term purchases.

Get to grips with scaling WooCommerce today

Whether you run a small business on WooCommerce or an established one, scaling is key to its long-term survival. Although WooCommerce is built for scaling, there’s a lot you’ll need to do to set up your WooCommerce store for an increasing number of shoppers, products, and transactions.

From setting up the infrastructure to handle this increased level of activity to boosting sales from the increased traffic your store gets. Luckily, WooCommerce has an ecosystem comprising plugins that will help you scale it.

This includes the following plugins:

• Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce – create a compelling cross-selling and upselling strategy to increase your AOV.
• Flux Checkout for WooCommerce – create a seamless WooCommerce checkout flow, optimized for conversions.

These two will enable you to make the most of increased traffic to boost sales and grow your revenue.