Setting up your online store for success means making it easy for users to navigate your site and find the products they want. If you’re a WordPress user, WooCommerce, the world’s most popular ecommerce plugin, has the tools you need to create and customize product pages that not only help visitors locate the products they’re looking for, but also streamline your store’s appearance and boost search engine rankings. Whether you’re a new WordPress user or an experienced coder, you can create and manage your WooCommerce product pages for maximum exposure and sales.
WooCommerce Is a Complete Online Store
Online shopping now outstrips brick and mortar retail in overall sales, with more than half of online shoppers accessing sites on mobile devices. What is more, it has never been easier to create an online storefront to meet those shoppers for sales of both physical and digital goods thanks to WordPress and its powerful ecommerce plugin, WooCommerce. Unlike third-party ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify and BigCommerce, that charge a monthly fee to host a shop, WooCommerce is a free and open source plugin. It can also be installed on any WordPress site to give an online entrepreneur full control over every aspect of the store.
WooCommerce comes with all the components necessary for setting up a fully functioning online store that replicates all the functions of traditional brick and mortar retail, complete with calculations for shipping fees and support for a variety of different payment gateways and portals. WooCommerce also includes all the tools you need to set up product listings for your entire inventory, and to arrange and optimize those listings for maximum search visibility.
Getting your WooCommerce store up and running starts with setting up product pages to showcase your wares, with options ranging from the product page editor on your WooCommerce dashboard to custom templates and plugins for managing product and category pages.
Product Pages in WooCommerce
The basic WooCommerce online shop setup includes several ways to organize and present your digital or analog goods. Each product can be placed on its own unique single product page, or similarly themed products can be grouped into category pages that make it easier for visitors to locate particular product types. It is also possible to create landing pages for special events and for selling featured products. WooCommerce doesn’t limit the number of product pages you can create and product pages can be modified and edited at any time.
Creating Pages With the Product Page Editor
The single product page editor in WooCommerce is similar to the familiar WordPress post editor, with fields for titling the product and adding a description – but the product page editor also includes all the tools you need to specify every parameter related to the product. To set up a single product page from your WooCommerce dashboard on the core WordPress site, select Products>Add Product.
After entering the product’s title and brief description, you’ll find options for entering other information about the product, including whether it’s a physical product like a T-shirt, a digital product such as an ebook, or a virtual product, such as a service offered or a membership purchase. Here, you can also add product specifics such as prices, and for physical goods, information, such as weight, dimensions, and shipping information.
The product page editor also includes advanced options, such as Linked Products, which links the current product to similar ones on the site, and Grouping, which makes a product part of a larger collection of similar products. Here, too, users can add custom attributes and metadata for search engine optimization, as well as set up up-sells, cross-sells, sale prices and special promotions.
From the product page editor, every product can be assigned to a category, and these categories can then be organized into dedicated category pages featuring only selected subsets of products. When all attributes, metadata, and other information have been added to the page editor, clicking Publish places the product into the store for sale.
The product page editor includes some options for customizing the look of a page, such as font and text color. Other aspects of the page’s overall appearance can also be modified by customizing your store’s overall theme – either a dedicated WooCommerce theme or the general WordPress theme that covers the entire site. Additionally, it’s also possible to customize your product pages directly by modifying the code of the WooCommerce page templates.
Customizing Product Page Templates
WooCommerce product pages exist as templates in the WooCommerce core code that is installed as a plugin in WordPress, and those templates can be edited by users with coding and web development experience to modify the appearance and functionality of the site’s product pages.
Configuring WooCommerce product pages for a custom look and specialized functions is similar to modifying a WordPress theme by creating a child theme. From the WooCommerce plugin files, users can create a copy of the existing template file and make any necessary stylistic modifications or layout changes to the copy, rather than to the original template. In that way, updates and changes to the core WooCommerce code won’t affect the new templates, which can be accessed from the product page editor and modified as needed.
Setting Up Product Pages With Plugins
WooCommerce itself is a plugin, but it can also be modified and enhanced with a number of extensions – other kinds of plugins that add specific functions to the basic WooCommerce installation, such as payment gateways or landing pages. Along with those functions, a number of WordPress plugins are available for configuring product pages with custom layouts and other features.
For example, Elementor is a WordPress compatible page builder that also has a version for WooCommerce. This visual page editor allows users to create a variety of custom page types for WooCommerce and save them as templates for future use.
Other plugins allow users to add features, such as video, magnifiers, sliders, and galleries to basic WooCommerce product pages for unique looks and functions not available in the basic WooCommerce package. Available from WooCommerce, the official WordPress plugin directory and third-party developers from around the world, plugins can be customized both from their settings panel and by modifying code to get the right look and feel for the store.
Appealing, functional product pages are the key to sales in any online store. With tools for both new users and online entrepreneurs with development skills, WooCommerce makes it easy to create and manage user-friendly product pages for online stores of all kinds.
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