What eCommerce Companies Need From a WordPress Hosting Provider
eCommerce or electronic commerce refers to buying and selling of products or services using the internet. Often called Digital Retailing, Electronic Commerce or eCommerce, this type of shopping has become mainstream as more and more people are discovering the benefits of online shopping. In 2017, global eCommerce revenues were estimated at US$458 billion.
For a world of eCommerce enthusiasts, Wordpress is the perfect platform to host their websites. With its intuitive user interface and massive documentation base, bloggers, eCommerce start-ups, and even individuals looking to build a side hobby website can get up and running with a Wordpress installation in minutes. If you’re thinking of launching a small eCommerce store, or are already running one and looking for ways to expand it, then this article is for you.
Why Should You Host Your Website on a WordPress Platform?
Before we get into the specifics of what a Wordpress hosting plans include, let’s discuss the general strengths of the platform itself.
From the very beginnings of the internet in the ’70s, Wordpress has remained one of the most popular and most trusted website platforms. Developed by the team at Automattic in 2006, Wordpress is a combination of HTML and PHP powered by a MySQL database. This makes Wordpress one of the most flexible and most user‐friendly website platforms around.
WordPress is an open source project, which means that the code is available for download and modification by everyone. As a result, Wordpress has a massive community behind it with the capability of accommodating anyone, from individual bloggers and small businesses looking to publish a side hobby site to large companies seeking a custom made platform for their entire website.
The Multitude of Features
WordPress is a multifaceted project. Thoughts and opinions are always welcomed, the platform is deeply inclusive with a massive documentation base, comprehensive plugin repository, and a wider community of developers and contributors ready and waiting to help you build your site perfectly if you just have a question.
WordPress supports a wide variety of creative websites. If you look at the official Wordpress website, you’ll see that the platform can be used for just about everything from personal blogs all the way up to small businesses, ecommerce sites, and even marketing and community websites.
WordPress is a full fledged content management system (CMS), which means that it provides all the tools you need to manage the content on your site. This includes everything from building a website to managing blogs and posts, assigning them to specific channels and creating different blog styles to achieve a customizable look and feel.
Perhaps the most important feature of Wordpress is that it is extremely mobile friendly. Though search engines like Google have started to prefer Responsive Web designs and mobile first thinking, Wordpress maintains that traditional desktop first methods of design and functionality.
Security Is At The Forefront
Though Wordpress is open source and therefore has a wider community of people modifying and improving the code for the better, that doesn’t mean that security isn’t a concern. Because of this, the team at Automattic has abundantly extensively covered this topic in their blog. You’ll find security tips and tricks, as well as a massive FAQ section in case you haven’t found the answers you need to know about Wordpress yet.
The Extensibility Of The Platform
It’s a common question among Wordpress users: How can I make my site do this or that? With Wordpress, the answer is quite simply: I can extend the platform to achieve whatever I want. This extensibility is one of the major strengths of the platform, and it allows for almost any creative imaginative website to be built.
If an enthusiastic user wants to create a blog about Pokémon Go, for example, they can get access to all the tools they need to create a site that functions and looks just like the official Pokémon Go site in a matter of minutes.
Flexibility Worth Noting
Though the extensibility of the platform is one of the major strengths of Wordpress, it doesn’t come without some concerns. One of these is the issue of free hosting. If you want to create a blog, you’ll want to secure a free Wordpress hosting plan. As a result, you’ll see that the average Wordpress blog hosts on the internet charge about $13 per month. If your site is just starting out, this may not be a problem, but for established blogs, the price of free hosting may become a burden.