Selling Auto Parts And Accessories with WooCommerce – Pt. 4 Tips and Tricks

In our fourth post in our series about selling auto parts and accessories with WooCommerce (see part 1, part 2, and part 3), we want to share some final tips and tricks that we have found useful, as well as talk about some of the limitations that we’ve seen with WooCommerce.

Make Backups Every Time You Do Anything

Before you decide to update a plugin, bulk import some product data, or even just archive some orders, take two minutes and run a backup. You won’t be sorry. In fact, this is a rule of ours at Spork, and it’s saved our bacon more than once.

For backups on the sites we manage, we use a plugin called BackupBuddy. The plugin is fairly fast and easy to use, and it has the ability to send backups to Amazon’s S3 system for safekeeping. It also is fairly reliable when it comes to making periodic backups. This plugin also makes restorations easy, just in case a plugin upgrade or import breaks something.

There are other backup plugins out there too besides BackupBuddy – Updraft has a lot of fans. Definitely check that out as well.

Variations vs. Simple Products

When you have a single type of product (let’s say a solid fold tonneau cover) with lots of variations, you have a couple of options:

1. You can create a unique page for each specific fitment, treating every fitment like it’s a stand-alone product
2. You can create a single page for the product, and then add variations for each fitment

Most companies go with option #1, because it’s easiest from a data management standpoint. Rather than adding variations to a single product (which can be complicated from a data import perspective), you just upload each variation as a product. For something like a solid fold tonneau cover, this can result in 10 or 20 pages on your website that are basically identical – same product name, same images, same description, and so on – with the only difference being the size of the tonneau and the SKU.

If you’re using WooCommerce, we definitely recommend option #2. While it’s more complicated to import your product data, it’s much more straightforward for the consumer (and for search engines). If, for example, you have one page on your website for a specific model of solid fold tonneau cover, you would have a list of variations on that page for each specific fitment. That makes it easy for consumers to find the exact product they need, it decreases the overall size of your site (in terms of pages that need to be crawled and indexed), and it makes your site simpler to navigate.

Use WP All Import and Export

We’ve used the WP All Import and Export plugins for years, and we highly recommend both. In terms of use cases, here’s just a few ways we’ve used these plugins on WooCommerce sites:

1. Data migration, either moving part data into a site, or migrating it from one site to another
2. Bulk tagging and optimization, from fixing title tags to mass updating product descriptions, links to PDFs, etc.
3. Customer data exports, order analysis, customer login/user account imports…Lots of stuff.

If you’re selling auto parts and accessories online, you’re going to touch a lot of data. These plugins will save you lots of time.

WooCommerce and Performance

It used to be that WooCommerce struggled with performance in automotive ecommerce applications. Once a certain database size was reached, and filters were applied (like say, year, make, and model), the site was slow.

However, this is less of a concern after WooCommerce 3.6 was released in April, 2019. Additionally, there are a number of tools available to boost the speed of WooCommerce sites. In no particular order…

1. CloudFlare Pro, which is $20/month, but does a great job of making sure images don’t slow down your site (it sizes images based on the user agent, which is pretty spectacular as far as mobile performance is concerned).
2. W3 Total Cache, which allows web developers to completely control caching. It’s easy to implement sophisticated caching with this plugin.
3. FacetWP, which uses a completely different database architecture to serve filtered product results quickly.

While there is still an upper limit to the number of products a WooCommerce site can manage, it’s likely in the tens of thousands of SKUs.

Having said all of this, we still do not recommend WooCommerce for sites with large catalogs. If you’re going to sell 20,000+ SKUs, we’d recommend a hosted ecommerce platform rather than WooCommerce.

NOTE: For a list of ecommerce platforms we recommend for auto parts and accessories retailers, click here.

Hire An Experienced WordPress Developer To Review Your Site

Even if you can’t afford to hire a developer to build your site, it’s always a good idea to ask an experienced WordPress developer to just inspect your website and rattle off some opportunities for improvement. For a one-time fee, a developer can:

• Check for common configuration problems or mistakes
• Suggest easy changes that will make your site faster
• Make sure you have a good process in place for backups, updates, and periodic check-ups
• Warn you about security problems, slow plugins, weird theme customizations, etc.

In a perfect world, you’d have an experienced developer tackle the entire project. If that’s not feasible, having one conduct a review before you take your site live is the next best thing.

Speed Matters

Website speed and conversion rates are very closely related. If your site is just a couple hundred milliseconds faster, conversion rates can go up a few points.

Aside from hiring an experienced developer to help you make your WooCommerce site as fast as possible, there are a few things you can do:

• Invest in quality hosting. A good hosting solution will cost you at least $150 a year, and potentially a few multiples of that amount. The cost will depend on how busy your site is and what kind of service you would like.
• Use as few plugins as possible. Every plugin you add to your site has the potential to slow it considerably. A poorly coded social sharing plugin, for example, can increase page load times by half a second. So, it’s a good idea to strip your site down to the fewest plugins possible, and then add plugins one at a time, checking to see how they impact performance.
• Use a CDN. Cloudflare has a free plan, is easy to setup, and makes a real difference. Cloudflare’s “Pro” plan offers some additional speed benefits, as well as a suite of security features that are nice to have.
• “Krak” your images. Images are the single biggest resource hog on most ecommerce websites, as they tend to be higher quality than necessary for use on a website. This is because most humans can’t tell the difference between a great quality image and merely a good quality image, so images can be compressed quite a bit before people start to notice a difference. A tool called Kraken.io is available to reduce the size of your website’s images to the bare minimum. They also have a WordPress plugin that you can use to ‘krak’ your images in bulk.
• Consider Google’s page speed advice. While the Google page speed tool isn’t perfect (a lot of the rules they use to judge page speed are overly technical), it’s a good place to get a diagnostic reading on website performance. If your site is slow, Google’s tool will tell you. Just don’t beat your developer over the head if your site rates a “B”, because a “B” is often very good.
• Don’t use “sliders.” A slider is a javascript powered slideshow or carousel. Usually, companies use them on homepages to show lots of different messages. They’re everywhere in ecommerce, and they’re terrible. They slow everything down, and consumers don’t pay attention to them.

Don’t Get In A Hurry When It Comes To WooCommerce Updates

Everytime you update the WooCommerce plugin, you risk website breakage. Typically, the problems that updates cause aren’t obvious, so you might not catch them until a few days have gone by and someone logs a complaint.

Generally speaking, it’s OK to put off most WooCommerce updates for a few weeks. Unless it’s a security update, WooCommerce updates should be delayed because

1. They’re a bit of a time soak, and
2. Often times there’s an update to the update that will arrive a few days or weeks later

NOTE: The same is true for updating the WordPress core. It’s A-OK to run an older version of WordPress, even when a newer version is available. In fact, it’s usually a good idea to run 2 updates behind, as most updates require an update of their own before they’re 100% for stable. Security updates are the exception to the rule, of course.

Summing Up

WooCommerce has a lot of positives:

• It’s relatively inexpensive to get a WooCommerce site off the ground
• It’s fairly simple to manage a WooCommerce site
• WooCommerce websites convert reasonably well, all things considered

But it’s not the perfect platform for every ecommerce website. It’s usually not the best tool for retailers offering 20,000+ SKUs, and the quality of your WooCommerce site often comes down to the quality of your developer.

Still, it’s an option, and we hope this deep dive article series was helpful.

Read the Rest of The Series

• Part 1 – Setup
• Part 2 – Theme Design and Development
• Part 3 – Helpful Plugins
• Part 4 – Tips and Tricks (this article)

Featured photo: © Dezay