My long time clients at Discount Thermal Labels wanted to update their existing online store that I create for them in OsCommerce about 8 years ago. They were looking for something that would be much simpler to keep current and also meet their unique business requirements. I decided to go with WooCommerce since it provides a great backbone and is well supported by both plugins as well as online resources to customize it.
One of the most important needs was to be able to import the hundreds of products that were in the current store. I setup an import that would pull over the products and then create variations so that customers could more easily know what options are available for each label. In the previous store the variations of color were separate products. This was not ideal for search engine optimization or sales.
Site load times are always important but it’s especially important for e-commerce sites to load quickly, it helps sales conversion tremendously. Due to the way that WooCommerce handles product variations there were a lot of caching and performance tweaks to make to get the site to load as fast as possible. Using a combination of caching plugins. CDN and server side caching I was able to get the page load time to under 2 seconds fully loaded. With all the images that are on each page this is very good and a big improvement over the previous site.