When I stepped in to run WordPress.com while Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg was on sabbatical, my mission was to make WordPress.com the best and fastest host for WordPress developers and agencies. We cheekily called this initiative “Developers, Developers, Developers,” a reference to a certain point in tech history (wink wink, nudge nudge).

Since then, we’ve shipped a number of developer-focused features like GitHub deployments, a full hosting dashboard, and Studio, an open source local development environment. It’s been awesome to see the feedback rolling in:

WordPress.com has been crucial to my agency’s growth. Its intuitive UI allows me to quickly create sleek, functional websites for my clients, and their reliable hosting and support enable me to rest easy, knowing my sites are in good hands. —Brian Lalli, President @ moonrooster.com

WordPress.com really stands out with its exceptional performance and strong security. It’s a versatile platform that’s great for users at any skill level, and their support team is always incredibly helpful. For managed sites, we definitely think WordPress.com is the way to go. —Sonia Gaballa, Partner @ nudge.design

We aimed to provide clients with a reliable hosting service we could endorse without hesitation, ultimately resulting in satisfied clients. We found that service with WordPress.com. —Ajit Bohra, Founder @ lubus.in

As we round the corner into the final quarter of 2024, I’d like to offer a sneak peek into three themes guiding our work: performance, augmentation, and workflows. We hope you’re just as excited about them as we are, and we welcome you to join us in the journey by testing and providing feedback.

Answers for the age-old question: “Why is my site slow?”

WordPress sites should be fast, and it’s not always an easy thing.

When writing custom code, incorporating third-party libraries, or inheriting an existing site, it can be difficult to track down what’s causing poor performance and low scores. Is it a certain plugin, large photo sizes, slow code, or a combination of the three?

Our upcoming speed test tool innovates upon existing approaches to offer a set of performance recommendations tailored to your unique WordPress site. It will be totally free to use, and you’ll be able to sign up for regular updates. These notifications will come in handy as you change plugins, properly size photos, and optimize code because you’ll be alerted if anything changes unexpectedly.

In the not-so-distant future, the speed test tool will also be directly integrated into your WordPress.com dashboard. You’ll be able to see your performance across all of your sites, and better understand correlations between site changes and performance.

Interested in a free site performance consultation? Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter / X and I’d be happy to give you a demo!

Giving developers cybernetic powers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming all types of knowledge work. Was that sentence written by me or ChatGPT? You’ll never know!

At WordPress.com, we think of LLMs as a powerful way to augment developers’ work and give them superhuman-like powers. They’re great at doing things for people—writing blog post outlines, generating code, and creating images—but we think they’re also great for teaching and educating. 

As one practical example, Studio is getting an AI assistant. The Studio Assistant is trained on WordPress-specific documentation and has access to a bunch of context about your site. When you ask it for help, like “update all my plugins using WP-CLI,” it will put together an answer based on your site specs as well as provide an explanation for the answer. 

Download Studio for free today, connect your WordPress.com account (free or paid), and hit me up on on LinkedIn or Twitter / X to get a sneak peek!

Speeding up your daily grind

When you’re developing on an open source platform like WordPress, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of different tools and workflows you can use to develop and ship websites. We’re focused on fostering quick and easy end-to-end workflows that help you deliver results that your clients love.

For example, you can now easily import sites into or export sites out of Studio. This is our first step towards a full, one-click WordPress.com syncing mechanism. Site cloning and a GitHub integration are also on our radar.

You also may have caught my tweet yesterday about our new Create Content Model prototype, which allows anyone to define custom post types and fields natively in the Block Editor.

“GAME CHANGING!” and “Incredible!” were two of the dozens of positive reactions. We hope that our prototype spurs productive conversations within the core community.

We’re also making it easier for you to make money. For example, through our Automattic for Agencies program, freelancers and agencies can create a custom cart with a hosting plan and/or plugins, and then send the link to the client to check out. No need to worry about handling client credit card information or billing clients separately—it’s all done within a slick, easy-to-use interface.

What do you want to see next?

This is just a quick preview of some of the big, impactful improvements you’ll be able to use soon as someone who hosts WordPress sites on WordPress.com. We’d love to know what other pain points you’d like to see us solve or features you’d like us to build! Either:

Original illustrations from David Neal (aka Reverent Geek). Come get a free avatar from him at the WordPress.com booth at WCUS next week!

Starting a new online store can feel intimidating, especially if you’ve never done it before. There are a lot of things to keep track of, from choosing the right eCommerce software to promoting your products.

However, following an eCommerce launch checklist ensures that you don’t miss any crucial steps that could impact your store’s success. This list can help you stay organized, prevent errors, and boost efficiency.

In this article, we will share the ultimate eCommerce launch checklist for WordPress.

Why Use an eCommerce Launch Checklist for Your New Online Store?

An eCommerce checklist allows you to check your online store’s security, pages, checkout options, SEO, and other features without forgetting anything before you launch it.

It acts as a safety net, catching any potential errors or snags that you may have overlooked while preparing your website for launch.

Plus, it keeps you on track and helps you avoid any delays. This physical or digital product launch checklist allows you to prioritize tasks based on importance and deadlines.

If you are working with a team, it also ensures that everyone stays on the same page and tasks are divided effectively. Other than that, it can also be used to evaluate your launch and identify areas for improvement.

Having said that, you are now ready to follow the ultimate eCommerce launch checklist to prepare your store for success. Here is a breakdown of the steps we will cover in this guide:

1. Choose a Website Builder and a Hosting Plan

To start an online store, you will first need to select a website builder. We recommend WordPress because it is the best website builder on the market with over 43% of all sites using it.

It is free, flexible, has several customization options, and is super scalable for businesses of all sizes. This makes it the ideal choice for your eCommerce store.

Note: Keep in mind that we are talking about WordPress.org, which is an open source platform. There is also WordPress.com, which is a self-hosted software. You can view our comparison on WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com to see the difference.

Now even though WordPress is free, you will still need to purchase a hosting plan and domain name for it. Hosting is where your website stores all its data while a domain is your store’s name on the internet, like www.shoppingonline.com.

If you plan to sell physical products, then we recommend Bluehost WooCommerce hosting. This is a WordPress-recommended company that also offers a free domain name, SSL certificate, and pre-installed WooCommerce.

Plus Bluehost offers a huge discount to WPBeginner readers. To take advantage of this offer, just click the button below.

However, if you want to sell digital products, then SiteGround’s managed hosting for Easy Digital Downloads is the better option.

It comes with a free SSL certificate, EDD pre-installed, all the optimization features, and a huge 81% discount, making it a great choice.

To get this discount offer, just click the button below.

Once you purchase hosting and set up a domain name, WordPress will automatically be installed for you. You can now head to your dashboard to start creating your store.

For more details, see our guide on how to make a WordPress website.

2. Choose the Right eCommerce Platform

The next step in creating and launching an eCommerce store is to select a platform that allows you to build a store without any coding.

For this, we recommend WooCommerce because it is the best eCommerce plugin on the market and is completely free.

The plugin allows you to easily add products, integrates with numerous payment gateways, and supports multiple currencies and languages, making it a great choice for creating your store. For details, you can see our guide on WooCommerce made simple.

However, if you plan to sell digital products on your eCommerce platform, then we recommend Easy Digital Downloads instead.

It allows you to sell eBooks, music, PDFs, and any other digital products you want. Plus, the plugin is beginner-friendly, integrates with a lot of different payment gateways, has in-depth reporting, and connects with email marketing solutions.

For details, you can see our tutorial on how to sell digital downloads on WordPress.

Note: If you have created a store that sells digital goods, then the following list will still work for you as a digital product launch checklist.

3. Create and Check All the Pages for Your Store

After you have added your products to your store, it’s time to create some pages on your website. We recommend starting with the home page and making it attractive because it will be customers’ introduction to your website.

You should add a CTA (Call To Action) on this page to direct users to where you want them. Additionally, you should create a navigation menu so users can browse through your store easily.

For example, this is the homepage for WPForms, a popular WordPress form builder. As you can see, it has a prominent CTA button that directs users to the online store for the plugin software.

For details on how to do this for your online store, see our tutorial on how to create a custom home page in WordPress.

Depending on which eCommerce plugin you are using, it should have already created a checkout page, products page, and cart page for your online store.

You can customize these pages using SeedProd, which is the best page builder on the market. It fully supports the WooCommerce integration and also has special WooCommerce blocks that you can add to any page you want.

The plugin also offers numerous premade templates and a drag-and-drop builder, making the process super easy.

For more information, see our beginner’s guide on how to edit WooCommerce pages.

4. Create a Seamless Checkout Process

Next, you need to create a seamless checkout process for your store. This will improve conversion rates, reduce cart abandonment, and boost your brand’s image.

To do this, you must integrate your online store with popular and reliable payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal. Customers usually trust these options, and they provide secure transactions, making them a great choice.

Plus, these gateways easily connect with WooCommerce. All you would have to do is install the plugin for these gateways and visit the WooCommerce » Settings » Payments page.

Here, you can toggle the switches to enable different gateways and then add your account details to complete the process. For instructions, see our tutorial on how to accept payments with Stripe in WordPress.

After configuring the gateways, you can add an express checkout button to offer a seamless experience to customers. This button allows users to go directly to the payment page without having to fill in any details.

For information, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to add express checkout buttons in WooCommerce.

If you need some more tips, then you can see our beginner’s guide on how to customize your WooCommerce checkout page.

5. Add Social Proof and FOMO

Now that your store has been set up, adding some social proof before launching it is important. This proof will show visitors that other customers have trusted your store and had a good experience with it.

Plus, it will develop FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) which can boost your sales. One way you can do this is by adding testimonials and customer reviews to your store.

If your customers have left reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, or Facebook, then you can also showcase these feeds on your site with the Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Plugin.

It comes with a visual editor and makes the process of connecting these platforms with WordPress super easy.

For instructions, see our step-by-step guide on how to show your Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Popups and optins are other great options for building FOMO and social proof.

You can use OptinMonster to display popups with customer reviews and limited-time offers/sales to encourage customers to take action and purchase.

For more details, see our guide on how to increase WooCommerce sales.

Another excellent way to build FOMO amongst customers is to use TrustPulse, which is the best social proof plugin on the market.

It tracks your store activity, such as purchases, signups, and downloads, and then displays notifications in real time that highlight these actions to visitors.

For detailed information, check out our guide on using FOMO on your WordPress site to increase conversions.

6. Add a Contact Form

You need to add a contact form to your online store so that customers can reach out if anything goes wrong, like reporting inappropriate behavior or having issues processing their payments.

For this, you can opt for WPForms, which is the best contact form plugin on the market. It has a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop builder, 1800+ premade form templates, and complete spam protection.

Upon activation, you can simply use the plugin’s ‘Simple Contact Form’ template and add it to any page you like using the WPForms block.

For details, see our tutorial on how to add a contact form in WordPress.

Keep in mind that this is a good solution if you are just starting your store, but as your website grows, a contact form won’t be sufficient to provide all customer support.

Add Other Tools To Contact Support

When you outgrow a contact form as the only way that customers can reach you, we recommend using a business phone service.

We believe Nextiva is the best business phone service for your site. We actually use Nextiva for our business, and you can read more about it in our complete Nextiva review.

It will allow customers to contact you over phone calls and you can also set up an auto attendant if you want.

Plus, you can use Nextiva to add live chat, online faxing, surveys, CRM, analytics, and more.

If your store grows rapidly, then we recommend picking a customer service tool like Groove, which will allow you to manage all your customer data in one place. We use Groove across a few of our brands, which you can learn about in our complete Groove review.

You can also create a knowledge base, use AI to create smart responses, and set up automated workflows.

For more information, see our top picks for the best customer service software.

7. Optimize Your Store for Search Engines

Before launching your store, you must optimize it for search engines so that it will rank high in search results and gets more traffic and customers.

This is where All in One SEO (AIOSEO) comes in. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your store in just a few minutes.

The plugin has a broken link checker, schema generator, XML sitemaps, on-page SEO checklist, keyword tracker, image SEO, and so much more. For more details, you can see our AIOSEO review.

Plus, AIOSEO offers a GTIN, ISBN, and MPN schema that allows your individual products to rank in search results.

You can also write product SEO titles and descriptions, optimize slugs, enable breadcrumbs, and add alt text for product images.

For detailed instructions, see our ultimate WooCommerce SEO guide.

8. Set Up Email Marketing

Before opening your store, you must choose an email marketing service and set up your account on it. This is an important step of your physical or digital product launch checklist because it allows you to start building an email list as soon as your store goes live.

You can then send cart abandonment, welcome, birthday, or discount offer emails to customers to bring them back to your website and earn their loyalty.

For your online store, we recommend using Constant Contact because it is the best email marketing software for small businesses.

It allows you to add signup forms and comes with automation tools, email segmenting, split testing features, drip campaigns, and a visual builder for workflows. 

The tool also offers easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, a free image library, Facebook ads integration, and amazing customer support.

For details, you can see our guide on how to connect Constant Contact with WordPress.

However, if you plan to consistently send automated emails for order confirmations, abandoned carts, and invoices, then FunnelKit Automations is a better choice.

It is the best automation marketing plugin for WooCommerce that comes with a visual funnel builder, premade email automation templates, A/B testing, and more.

For complete details, see our tutorial on how to send automated emails in WordPress.

9. Set Up Google Analytics

Another crucial step to making your store customer-ready is installing Google Analytics. This will allow you to track your store’s performance and give you real-time insights into how users interact with your website.

You can then use this data to improve your marketing strategy and drive more sales.

To make using Google Analytics super easy, you can use MonsterInsights, which is hands-down the best analytics solution for WordPress.

It easily integrates with WooCommece and lets you track product performance, shopping cart abandonment rates, and checkout behavior. You can easily identify products with high abandonment rates and take steps to improve those product pages.

For more information, see our step-by-step guide on how to set up WooCommerce conversion tracking.

10. Create a Backup of Your eCommerce Store

Once you have added all the features to your online store and feel that it’s ready for launch, we recommend first creating a backup.

This will allow you to safeguard your data against security threats and let you recover it in case of data loss due to malware or hackers.

For this, you can use Duplicator, which is the best WordPress backup plugin. It has features like scheduled backups, recovery points, cloud storage integration, migration tools, and more.

With this plugin, you can create a backup right from your WordPress dashboard in just a few minutes.

For step-by-step instructions, see our tutorial on how to back up your WordPress site.

11. Secure Your Online Store

Once you have followed all the steps in our eCommerce launch checklist, your store is ready to go live. However, you can still take some extra steps to secure your online store from malware or hackers.

To do this, you can use Cloudflare, which the best security solution for WordPress. It comes with a powerful firewall to filter out bad traffic, prevents DDOS attacks, and has a browser integrity check to block hackers.

Plus, it has an amazing CDN (Content Delivery Network) that improves your page load time by caching static content across multiple servers worldwide.

Cloudflare also lets you optimize your images for reduced bandwidth, add page rules, manage SSL certificates, perform email routing, use fast DNS services, and identify and block malicious bots.

However, if you have a small business or blog, then Cloudflare may not be the best option. In that case, you can pick Sucuri, which is a popular firewall plugin that comes with a free plan.

For more tips, see our ultimate WordPress security guide.

Keep in mind that once you implement these security measures, you will still need to monitor your site regularly for threats or malware, which can be time-consuming and a bit annoying.

That is why we recommend WPBeginner’s Website Maintenance Service. Our team of experts will provide 24/7 maintenance and support to your website.

We will consistently update WordPress core, themes, and plugins, monitor uptime, remove malware, create routine cloud backups, prevent slow-loading page times, and even give you detailed maintenance reports.

Plus, we offer affordable pricing, making us an ideal choice for small businesses. For details, see our WPBeginner Pro Services page.

Frequently Asked Questions About Launching an eCommerce Store

Here are some questions that are frequently asked by our readers about starting an eCommerce website.

Is WordPress good for eCommerce?

WordPress.org is an excellent platform for your eCommerce store because it is open-source, free, scalable, and beginner-friendly.

It is used by 43% of the sites on the internet, has a massive community, and gives you complete freedom to build an online store according to your liking. To learn more, you can see our guide on whether WordPress is good for eCommerce.

Do I need any coding knowledge to launch a WordPress eCommerce store?

You do not need any coding knowledge to start an online store. All you have to do is select an eCommerce plugin and configure its settings to launch your store in just a few minutes. Plus, you can use a drag-and-drop page builder like SeedProd to design your store without coding.

How much does it cost to launch a WordPress eCommerce store?

Your eCommerce store costs can add up as you choose a hosting provider ($5-$25/month), domain name ($10-$15/yr), and eCommerce plugin (free-paid) for your store.

In our opinion, costs will start at about $100 to build a basic online store, with costs adding up as your store grows.

Related Guides to Help You Build an eCommerce Store

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

John Kostak has been building websites for longer than most social media networks have even been around. So splashy features don’t interest him much—he’s far more into performance, reliability, and compatibility. Which is why he and his company, Web Development USA, have been using WordPress.com from the start. 

In this fun Q&A, John shares more about his WordPress journey, what matters most to him as a developer, and a few of his favorite sites (in spite of the fact that it was like making him pick his favorite child). Note: The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

If John’s love for WordPress.com has you reconsidering your current hosting environment, you can learn more about our specs and get started at WordPress.com/hosting. 

Jeremy: How long have you been using WordPress and WordPress.com?

John: I have been building websites for about 15 or 16 years and started in a corporate environment for a large company. We never had an internal digital team and we basically created our own digital agency within this big corporate company. And that was pretty innovative back then. 

Then out of that, I spun off and started Web Development USA. That began in 2015, and so next year will be our 10th year, which is crazy to think about. But it went quickly because we really do enjoy this. And we look for people who find this to be a passion, as we do. 

Jeremy: Have you been using WordPress.com the entire time?

John: Yes we have. We started doing some testing with SiteGround and Elementor hosting, but we still like WordPress.com the best. You know you can go through a McDonald’s three miles away or 10,000 miles away on the other side of the planet and your lunch is going to be reasonably what you expect. That’s what WordPress.com feels like with its consistency and the familiarity of the UI and getting around. 

Jeremy: What do you like most about WordPress.com? Is it about ease of use on your side as a builder? Convenience for the customer? Both?

John: Resiliency. With Jetpack at the core and all the updates that it does, we just don’t have that much of a risk of things exploding, especially when we bring contractors in and out. We can always fall back to a previous state, and we have an exact record of it. We can get into PHP code. We can get into the very, very back end if we want. We can really be dangerous if we want, without being too afraid of it. 

Overall, it is certainly the all-around performance, security, and cadence that you use for backing up sites. 

Jeremy: What are some of your favorite features when building sites on WordPress? Do you have go-to themes, blocks, plugins, etc.?

John: Well, it’s changed over the years. We used to use standard old-school wireframe and theme templates that were very basic. And then we went into more “custom designer” mode, I would say, with templates and flashy designs. We graduated from Walmart t-shirts to Gucci t-shirts. And, you know, we enjoyed that for a while. 

Now we’re going back to robust wireframes and doing more from scratch. What’s more important now is really the entire stack, including performance and compatibility. You know, we just don’t have time to troubleshoot when we have some whizzy feature on the site. We don’t have time to go in and look for why the thing is down. So, we are sort of simplifying certain things and then standardizing on a certain stack.

Jeremy: What excites you about the future of WordPress.com? Are there any new features you’re especially excited to try out and use?

John: Honestly, we just don’t have time to get into a lot of that. We don’t look much to experimental features or anything like that. We’re trusting that by the time the feature or tool makes its way into being a standard of WordPress, it will be tried and true. We’re not looking for early adopter types of things anymore. 

The reality is that our value add is more about custom coding for integrations—maybe for a particular reservation system that has to shake hands and stay for a while on the site before it goes out to a third-party point of sale. It takes some custom coding there. That’s where our focus has really been—managed services and then a lot more programming. We’ve been onboarding more programmers in the last 18 months than we did the first eight years of the company.

Jeremy: Do you have a few favorite client sites that you can share?

John: Well, Jeremy, it’s like asking you who’s your favorite child. 

Jeremy: Depending on the week, I can give you a pretty good answer. 😊

John: Yeah, that’s a good point! Sure, I have a few:

TuckMusic.com

appalachian-air.com

kdmconsults.com

Get started at WordPress.com today 

Even though WordPress.com provides the freedom and tools to create stunningly beautiful and innovative websites, that’s not why developers choose us. Folks like John Kostak rely on WordPress.com because we have the most performant, secure, and compatible infrastructure out there. If you made it this far, you already know that you don’t have to take our word for it. 

Learn more about our top-notch hosting and get started: