10 Reasons to Use a WordPress Theme for Your E-Commerce Website
WordPress is an open-source content management system, which is widely used to build and manage a variety of websites. Because of its versatility, one can even create an e-commerce store using WordPress. In this article, we’re going to discuss why we should use WordPress for creating e-commerce websites, despite having platforms like Shopify, PrestaShop, OpenCart, etc.
Why Use WordPress Themes for E-Commerce Websites
As of February 2024, more than 800 million websites have been built using WordPress out of 1.98 billion websites. This means over 40% of businesses or individuals prefer WordPress for creating a website, which directly highlights the popularity of WordPress, opening doors for solutions such as WordPress Themes. Let’s discuss the 10 most promising reasons for using a WordPress theme for your e-commerce website.
1. Easy Availability of WordPress E-Commerce Themes
WordPress’ popularity has convinced creators and developers to create a variety of WordPress themes. You can find thousands of WordPress themes online compared to some countable themes for other platforms. You can browse a vast collection of top WordPress e-commerce themes and find the most suitable and best WordPress template for your e-commerce website.
2. Easy WooCommerce Plugin Integration
The integration of WooCommerce or any other e-commerce plugin is considered mandatory for creating an e-commerce store on WordPress. Most individuals and businesses prefer installing WooCommerce. This installation process might be tough or time-consuming, but not for WordPress. Businesses or individuals can follow a simple installation process to execute the installation.
Also, almost every WordPress theme is designed to be compatible with WooCommerce. This compatibility ensures an easy process for setting up an online store, adding products, managing inventory, and processing payments. This kind of easy integration democratizes online store management, even for those who are not very familiar with coding.
3. Cost-Effective
WordPress e-commerce themes are considered to be a cost-effective solution. The cost of reliable e-commerce WordPress themes averages 100 to 150 USD. If you consider building a custom e-commerce website, you may end up spending more than this on web design only, which may force you to stretch your budget up to some thousands of dollars.
Building a custom e-commerce website isn’t wrong at all, especially when you own a widely-grown business or you have some specific requirements. However, spending thousands on custom development can be avoided, especially when all demands can be met by spending a few hundred on e-commerce themes.
4. Mobile-Responsive Abilities
Most WordPress developers consider creating responsive e-commerce WordPress themes. This means you can easily create a mobile-friendly e-commerce website using such themes without requiring additional coding or customizations. The importance of responsive websites mustn’t be ignored as over 50% of users prioritize web browsing on mobile devices and Google also prioritizes mobile-friendly websites. So, mobile-friendly WordPress themes let you create e-commerce websites that can be easily accessed by over half of internet users and prioritized by Google for higher search engine rankings.
5. Customizations With Live Preview
Creating a customizable e-commerce theme has become necessary these days as every business prefers to have a unique identity, so almost every available readymade e-commerce solution tends to be customizable. However, the reason for preferring e-commerce WordPress themes is their ability to show customizations in the live preview.
Some top e-commerce WordPress themes allow customizations with a live preview with the help of the Elementor plugin. This plugin can be added/installed from the plugins section of the left panel. You can go to pages, choose a page, and click ‘Edit with Elementor’ to make customizations with a live preview of your website based on the purchased e-commerce theme.
6. SEO Optimization Abilities
Almost all e-commerce themes are optimized for search engines, taking care of features like clean code, meta tags, and structured data. This can be helpful in ranking your website higher on search engines. Also, you can install some popular SEO-based plugins like Yoast, Lightspeed Cache, etc to predict your website’s SEO performance.
7. Extensive Plugin Support
WordPress’s extensive plugin support comes in handy when you’re building an e-commerce platform using WordPress themes. With such plugins, you can add more functionalities to your online store. You can find plugins to add capabilities such as shipping calculators, product reviews, social media integration, SEO optimization, multilingual support, and email marketing to your store.
8. A Variety of Payment Gateways
The best part of using e-commerce WordPress themes is you can easily integrate almost all major crypto payment gateways to accept payments online. From fiat payment gateways like PayPal, Payoneer, etc to crypto payment gateways like Coinremitter, Coinbase, etc can be easily integrated into your e-commerce WordPress website to request online payments. This flexibility ensures that your customers can easily and securely pay online and complete their purchases.
9. Secure and Reliable
WordPress is considered to be a highly secure platform. Many WordPress themes are regularly updated to address security vulnerabilities. You can use a reputable and highly-selling e-commerce WordPress theme that provides regular updates. By keeping it up-to-date, you can easily protect your website’s and customers’ data.
10. Analytics Ready
Analytics tools like Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, or WooCommerce-specific tools can be easily integrated into e-commerce WordPress websites. Businesses can monitor website metrics such as page views, bounce rates, average session duration, and real-time visitor statistics with the help of such tools.
With such insights, businesses can make data-driven decisions to improve their website’s performance. You can also look for e-commerce themes with built-in analytics support to monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, identify top-selling products, and better understand customer demographics such as age, gender, income level, education level, marital status, ethnicity, geographical location, occupation, etc. This data-driven approach becomes necessary for optimizing your website and growing your online store.
Conclusion
WordPress e-commerce themes offer a powerful, easy, reliable, and versatile way of creating e-commerce websites. We have highlighted 10 major reasons for creating an online store using e-commerce WordPress themes. There are countless reasons for choosing WordPress themes over custom e-commerce website development. However, the decision-making becomes easy when we discuss cost-effectiveness. In the modern era, when we have plenty of WordPress e-commerce themes available for a few hundred dollars, businesses can skip spending thousands on custom development unless they have specific requirements.