Used by more than 30 million live websites, Wordpress is easily the most popular content management system in the world today – and its flexibility is a major part of why it is so popular. Your website can be anything ranging from a small personal blog to a large e-commerce site, and WordPress can handle the job. In fact, WordPress is an ideal CMS for e-commerce sites because setting a website up and getting it launched is usually surprisingly quick and inexpensive.

As powerful as WordPress is, though, it was originally developed as a blog CMS and isn’t set up for e-commerce out of the box. Before you can compete with major e-commerce sites like V2 Cigs UK, you’ll need to extend the functionality of your WordPress installation. You’ll do part of that work by installing plugins, but much of the heavy lifting will be done by your website’s theme. Your theme is responsible for a large portion of your site’s organization and functionality, and it’s almost impossible to make a WordPress website work for e-commerce if you’re using a blog or magazine theme. You need a WordPress theme that’s designed for selling online, and this article will help you find one.

These are the features that the best WordPress e-commerce theme must have.

E-Commerce-Oriented Organization

The most important feature that any e-commerce WordPress theme needs is an organizational system that allows people to browse products and categories efficiently. An e-commerce site with a large product selection may require a nested menu system with multiple subcategories.

Suppose, for instance, that your business sells pet supplies. Within that category, you might have a subcategory for pet food – and within that subcategory, you might have additional subcategories for dog food, cat food, food for pets with special dietary requirements and more.

A large organizational system can get out of hand very quickly, and your website’s theme is responsible for providing a logical organizational structure and menu that allows people to browse categories and products easily on devices with all screen sizes.

Robust Product Search

A good WordPress e-commerce theme should always have a robust site search, and the search bar needs to be clearly visible at the top of almost every page of your website. Most importantly, the search bar should be placed in a way that doesn’t clutter your website’s interface and make other navigational elements difficult to find.

The header section of an e-commerce site should introduce your company, allow access to your site’s navigational structure and provide a search function. That’s a lot of information that should appear at the top of every page, and it’s your theme’s responsibility to ensure that visitors can see all of those things without being distracted from the shopping experience.

Remember that a good e-commerce site search should also have autocomplete and spelling correction features. You’ll probably need to add those features with a plugin, and you’ll need to make sure that your website’s theme is compatible with the plugin you want to use.

Easy Integration with an E-Commerce Plugin

Out of the box, WordPress isn’t an e-commerce CMS. To start selling products, you’ll need to have the ability to separate blog content from product content, manage customer accounts, accept payments, calculate shipping rates, fulfill orders and more. You’ll most likely add those features by installing a plugin. The most popular WordPress e-commerce plugin is WooCommerce, but there are other options as well. Before buying any theme, you’ll want to make sure that it’s designed for the e-commerce plugin you want to use.

Customizable Product Pages

If you visit a major e-commerce website and look at its product pages, you’re going to see a wide variety of features that involve much more than simply displaying the products. These are just a few of the things that you’ll typically find on a great product page:

• A lengthy text description
• Several high-quality images, plus the ability to view larger versions of thumbnail images
• The ability to read and write customer reviews
• The ability to build a product bundle and view upsell and cross-sell recommendations
• The ability to view alternative products similar to the one currently being viewed

Although a WordPress e-commerce theme may come with some of these features, it isn’t likely to have all of them. Once again, this is a case where you’re probably going to need to add functionality by installing one or more plugins. Therefore, it’s vital for your site’s theme to have highly customizable product pages that allow you to easily add, move and remove elements while maintaining a professional and cohesive appearance.

SEO-Friendly Category Pages

Your website’s category pages should never just be lists of products. A category page is an opportunity to provide information that helps to pre-sell customers on the items in that category. Category pages are also important for SEO because they may potentially show up on Google when people search for broad terms.

Returning to the example from earlier in this article, search terms like “dog food” and “cat food” are both terms for which you would want to rank if you sold pet supplies. A category page will always give you the best possible chance to rank for a broad search term because that keyword phrase is also the page’s main idea.

Before a category page can have a chance to rank on Google for its primary keyword, it needs to have some helpful text to reinforce the page’s relevance for that keyword. A good WordPress e-commerce theme should always have an attractive category page layout that allows you to add text and other content to the page.

Built-in Metadata Support

The last feature that any good WordPress e-commerce theme should have is robust support for metadata. If you’ve ever searched for products online, you’ve probably noticed that Google sometimes shows extra information on results pages such as products’ specifications, prices and stock status. For Google to properly understand and organize the information on a product page, the information needs to have the correct tags. Your theme should have the ability to handle this metadata seamlessly.

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