Making your business visible online is important, but it is just as important to pick the right tools if you are serious about growing. We have looked at many businesses and found that weak online infrastructure plus hiring a marketing agency to generate sales often results in failure. Here are easy steps to help you pick the right platform when you want to grow your business online.
Know What You Need
- The purpose of your website is to generate direct and indirect sales and serve customers. Start by understanding customer behaviour.
- Figure out what features your site needs. If you're selling online products, you'll need e-commerce essentials such as checkout, shopping cart, wishlist, customer communication touchpoints, and user verification. Checkout alone isn't enough. You also need marketing features to learn buyer behaviour, advertising tools, trust-building elements, and more.
Pick the Right Website CMS
- Flexibility: Your CMS must flex to your needs and let you add marketing features and product variations. For e-commerce, Shopify is a strong choice with a wide plugin ecosystem.
- Customisation: Make sure you can shape the site to look the way you want.
- Growing with you: Pick a system that can handle more visitors as your business grows.
Get Good Website Hosting
- Choose wisely: Pick a provider like WP Engine or AWS that can keep your site running smoothly.
- What you need: Think about disk space, RAM, and CPU. Choose SSD rather than HDD.
Recommendations for Better Performance
- RAM: 4 GB or more for a smoother experience, especially with plugins and high traffic.
- CPU: A powerful CPU ensures faster page loads, particularly with many products or heavy customisation.
- SSD storage: Solid-state drives offer significantly faster read/write speeds than HDDs.
Scalability
- Choose a hosting plan that lets you upgrade resources like RAM and storage as your store grows.
Managed WooCommerce Hosting
- Consider managed WooCommerce hosting for a hassle-free experience. Providers handle server maintenance, security updates, and WooCommerce optimisation.
Additional Tips
- Caching: Implement caching to improve website speed.
- Image optimisation: Compress product images for faster loading.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): Use a CDN to deliver content from geographically distributed servers for better performance.
Build Trust and Make Sales Easier
- Get reviews: Ask customers to leave reviews to build trust with new buyers. Trustpilot is a powerful tool that also improves your SEO signals.
- Make buying easy: Use tools that let people pay monthly, quarterly, or yearly to remove purchase friction.
Speed Matters Most Under Real Traffic
- Test the right way: When testing site speed, check it under realistic traffic. Owners often test in their own browser where the site is already cached, then assume it loads the same for every visitor, which is rarely true.
- Use good pictures: Make sure product images load quickly. Buyers online effectively buy the image, since they cannot touch the product. A proper product shoot pays off compared to using low-resolution stock images.
In Summary
The choice between "I will invest in online infrastructure after getting sales" vs. "I will start investing in infrastructure to get sales" is genuinely hard. Choosing the best tools for your online business matters. Investing in the right tools may cost more today, but it reduces the risk of failure, shrinks your marketing budget over time, and helps you learn customer behaviour faster, which means more conversions.
