Book a Call

There are a lot of platforms available for the development of your ecommerce store. Examples include Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. All of these online-shop builders have their own advantages and disadvantages. Here at Fox and Lee, we refuse to use anything else than WooCommerce – and trust us, we have our reasons. We’re happy to share the benefits of WooCommerce compared to other platforms with you.

Let’s start with a quick reminder. WooCommerce is the free WordPress plugin that adds ecommerce functionality to your website. Even though it’s ‘just another WordPress plugin’, it’s unbeatable in its functionalities and potential. The more than 4 million active installations speak for itself. WooCommerce integrates seamlessly with WordPress and gives you access to hundreds of free and premium extensions.

Now, what are the benefits of WooCommerce?

Flexible

First of all, WooCommerce is a highly flexible product. It offers you a lot of options when it comes to your products, where you can tailor your own product categories and attributes so you can build a shop that exactly fits your brand. You can sell whatever product you’d like, whether these are physical objects, appointments or downloadable files.

Expandable

WooCommerce also has the great benefit of being not just an ecommerce platform. Since it integrates with WordPress, you have the opportunity to integrate your shop with a professional custom website or even include a blog for your SEO and content strategy. Because it’s all accessible within the same interface, it’s easy for you to make adjustments while still keeping your brand identity intact.

Customisable

One of our favourite aspects of WooCommerce is that is highly customisable. And with that, we mean that you can change almost everything. Except for the ready-to-use templates, WooCommerce gives you the chance to choose your own colours, sizes and tweak the code until it exactly matches with your brand image. As professional web designers, we love to bring out our creative side and WooCommerce never comes short.

Scalable

When you choose an ecommerce application, it’s necessary to keep the future plans of your business in mind. You might only need a couple of product categories and pages now but you might be expanding your product catalogue sooner than you think. WooCommerce is able to scale from a couple of products to an immense online store. Plus, they are not only capable of handling a large number of products but they can also deal with thousands of shoppers per second.

Analytical

There is no point in running an online store if you don’t know how it’s performing. And to know this, you need data. WooCommerce itself offers you an extensive set of analytics in a clear and organised way. If you need to know more, there are a lot of integrations on the market that make it possible to connect your store with analytical tools, such as Google Analytics for example.

Safe

Lastly, you need a store that is safe. Since WooCommerce is regularly updated, you don’t need to worry about any security issues and you won’t be experiencing too many bugs. Updates are easy to install and don’t require much technical knowledge. WooCommerce monitors the codes and checks for vulnerability so you know your website is safe. And since it’s an open-source website, there’s a huge community of developers available that can also offer valuable tips.

Convinced? Let’s start building a beautiful WooCommerce website. Contact us today and we’ll help you out.

If you’re looking to build a new website for your business, custom WordPress development is the way to go.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS. As of the end of 2018, nearly 1/3 of all websites are built off of WordPress, with WordPress controlling about 60% of the market share. And for good reason.

WordPress is incredibly flexible, open source, and user-friendly—making custom website development easier than many other platforms.

As custom WordPress developers, we’re often asked what makes a customised site better than a template site.

We’re happy to answer. Here are six major reasons why custom WordPress sites lead to superior performance.

1. Save Yourself Time in the Long Run

While it may seem faster to pick a template website and CMS and simply plug in your own content, custom sites will save you time in the long run.

Why?

Off-the-shelf themes or templates are coded inconsistently from one to the next. Remember: these themes are all built by different developers, each with their own coding styles and preferred structures.

So even with a template site, there can be a high learning curve.

When it comes to making any changes to the theme, whether it’s a HTML structure, CSS markup, or PHP code, you or your developer will have to reverse engineer how the site was built—which can take longer than building an entire site from scratch.

By developing your own custom WordPress site, you are in the driver’s seat. You know how the site is built, so making changes is easy.

2. No “Theme Bloat” or Extra Baggage

One of the biggest advantages of a custom WordPress site is the ability to slim your site down to only the necessities.

Off-the-shelf theme development companies care about one thing only: volume

In order for those companies to be successful, they require a huge number of people to buy their sites. But every individual website user has different needs.

To cater to as many paying customers as possible, these developers cram as many features into these templates as they can. These templated themes come with many page layouts, tons of add-ons, and all kinds of unnecessary bloat—known as “theme bloat”—that you likely won’t ever use.

And, if you ever have to customise the site (which you will some day), you’re just throwing more onto the pile of features.

On the other hand, when you develop your own custom WordPress site, you have complete control over what features go into the site.

That means a slimmed-down, lighter site with only the features you need. Not only does that mean an easier user experience from the backend, it also means less unnecessary code and queries on the website frontend, which means a better experience for your site visitors too.

Which leads us to our next point…

3. A Much Faster Website

When you’re able to control every line of code on your site, you can be sure that every line of code is being used.

That means your code can be fully optimised to be as streamlined as possible, which means faster load times and a smoother user experience.

With an off-the-shelf template you are at the mercy of the site speed you’re given, with limited ability to optimise.

Remember: page speed is becoming increasingly important to Google’s ranking algorithm. According to Google’s industry benchmark data, most sites take around 6 seconds to load.

But their research also shows that 50% of visitors will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

It’s in Google’s best interest to make sure that they’re only serving up extremely fast websites.

So make sure your site is one of them.

4. Better Search Engine Friendliness

While there are many off-the-shelf templates that provide so-called “SEO benefits,” the reality is that a custom website is always going to have an SEO advantage over a template.

Google’s ultimate goal is to serve up the best websites to its users. If properly designed, a custom site is going to provide a better user experience than a template site—which makes Google happy.

On top of a better front-end experience and faster page load times, custom sites offer a ton of other SEO benefits.

A custom WordPress site will give you greater control over page layouts, the link architecture of your site, the quantity of content you can create, page meta data, and even advanced SEO components like schema markup.

You’ll also have more control over elements like H1, H2, and H3 headings, without being stuck with the default heading tags provided by certain themes.

On top of that, if you ever encounter any SEO issues, you’ll have the ability to get under the hood and fix whatever’s wrong.

5. Security and Support

With an off-the-shelf template site, more built-in features can mean more security holes. You can’t be certain about the reliability and safety of the system you’re using.

When something does go wrong, you’re also far less likely to have the support available to help you through any issues you encounter.

Investing in a custom site also means investing in a developer who’s going to work with you to make sure your business is protected and that you always have the answers you need.

6. Freedom

Ultimately, a custom-developed WordPress site is going to give you and your business the freedom it needs to succeed.

A custom site will give you the freedom to service your customers in the best way possible. Not only will you have the ability to tailor the look and feel of your site to your exact specifications, you’ll also be able to control how that frontend meshes with your backend system—to make sure your business processes aren’t hampered by the need to fit into a predetermined template.

You’ll also have more control over your future, with less reliance on third-party tools that could change or be deprecated at any instant. And when browsers and devices change—because they always will—with a custom site, you’ll be primed to easily adapt to that change.

And should your business ever change (always for the better of course), you will be able to adjust your site to those changes, putting you in the driver’s seat.

Fox & Lee – Custom WordPress Developers in Melbourne

At Fox and Lee, we create beautiful and practical solutions. Our Melbourne-based custom WordPress development and design studio can take your business from good to great—with a website that dominates the competition.

Ready to get started? Click here to fill out our web form now

Google Rating
5.0
Based on 49 reviews
js_loader
Send us a message

Fill out the below form and we’ll be in touch with you

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Name*