We love rebuilding older shopping cart sites, migrating them to WordPress. Existing carts are often badly coded, with poor rankings and abysmal SEO characteristics. The SEO superiority of WordPress, when expertly configured, means there is real potential to improve their traffic in a relatively short timeframe.
The WooCommerce cart plugin for WordPress is now the most popular shopping cart option on the net, passing many long-time heavyweights… (Chart right)
Migrate outdated/costly shopping carts to WooCommerce
Like the family car or home, there comes a time when you need to upgrade to something better, more modern. The shop sites we update are those based upon the older open source or host-supplied platforms. e.g. opencart, virtuemart, oscommerce, magento, smallfish, dremus, prestashop, zencart, xcart, cubecart etc. Most are selling just a few dozen or few hundred products.
The most common complaint though with online store owners using these systems is lack of traffic and resulting sales. The poor coding structure, unfriendly urls, crawl errors, slow speed, duplicate content and other problems ensure most cart sites are hated by Google and virtually invisible online, with minimal search page ranking.
Just starting out? Maybe a WordPress Blog + Shopify Cart Combo
For those who have never had an online shop before, it can often make more sense to start with a pre-built, third party shopping cart like Shopify. You avoid the usual hosting and upkeep issues that can quickly frustrate newcomers. Keeping things simple is important in the early days. Focus upon sales and customers, not the technology. Here’s a great review we found recently, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of each.
As she noted, the Shopify blog function and SEO isn’t great. Users soon note there’s too little search traffic arriving at their Shopify site. Yes, they provide some great selling tutorials, but without a high ranking and traffic [plus an email list building system/strategy], growing sales and retaining clients is going to be hard work.
So, why not take advantage of the vastly superior SEO/traffic benefits of WordPress, proven to get site owners 2-3x more search traffic that other popular cart or website platforms?
We can blend a low cost Google-friendly WordPress business blog, with your new or established Shopify cart site, with WordPress now taking care of your ranking and traffic. Shopify is optimised for online sales and collecting money, WordPress for all your online marketing, lead generation, mailing lists and promotion activities.
A WordPress blog first, then a shop 6 months later…
In fact, build the WordPress blog first for market research, to gain credibility and build a client list. Then, 6 months later, add the Shopify (or WooCommerce) shopping cart. Read this article that explains it….
But the connection between WordPress and Shopify is slick. For example, you are able to drop Shopify products directly into any WordPress post. Also, when you add a new product to your Shopify cart, a new blog post could be auto-generated in WordPress, Google auto-advised, even auto-promoted via your Mailchimp email marketing system, as well as being pushed to social media channels like Twitter or Facebook – Chores that once would have taken hours, now done automatically.
This is incredible stuff and often the best value option for newcomers to online selling.