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:
- Choose a Website Builder and a Hosting Plan
- Choose the Right eCommerce Platform
- Create and Check All the Pages for Your Store
- Create a Seamless Checkout Process
- Add Social Proof and FOMO
- Add a Contact Form
- Optimize Your Store for Search Engines
- Set up Email Marketing
- Set up Google Analytics
- Create a Backup of Your eCommerce Store
- Secure Your Online Store
- Frequently Asked Questions About Launching an eCommerce Store
- Related Guides to Help You Build an eCommerce Store
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.
Expert Tip: If you are just starting your store, then you can use our WPBeginner Free Business Name Generator to come up with your company name.
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.
Bonus Tip: If it feels like too much work to create custom pages for your store, then you can opt for WPBeginner’s Website Design services instead. Our team can create a beautiful and functional eCommerce website tailored to your specific needs, complete with a seamless checkout process and optimized for conversions.
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.
Note: We use Cloudflare at WPBeginner to protect our site from hackers and malware. Overall, we have had an amazing experience with the tool and have even observed improved page load times since we started using it.
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
- How to Make a WordPress Website (Ultimate Guide)
- How Much Do eCommerce Websites Cost? (Real Numbers)
- Best WooCommerce Plugins for Your Store (Most are FREE)
- How to Speed Up Your eCommerce Website (14 Proven Tips)
- How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online (Beginner’s Guide)
- Impressive eCommerce Statistics You Won’t Believe
- Best Shopify Alternatives (Cheaper and More Powerful)
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