Hi, I own a business that is primarily b2b, and we have a website that is pretty simple HTML/CSS/Webform, and it’s all selfhosed under our own VPS behind a nginx webserver. It works fantastically, no issues, blazing fast and for the most part static.
We are planning to expand out into a direct to consumer ecommerce web store and have been exploring my options. I don’t really like the idea of using Shopify or some of these other ecommerce providers due to price and being locked into their platform.
So i’ve been looking at wordpress/woocommerce however the drag and drop builder + plugin model seems foreign to me and somewhat bloated as it seems like plugins just change the code on the backend but it’s not clean as me self maintaining the code.
Is it possible for me to maintain a WooCommerce store via just HTML/CSS/PHP? Is that essentially what wordpress headless is?
I’d love some feedback from people who are doing this without drag and drop builders.
Thanks so much in advance.
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Are you also a web developer? If not, then I would really recommend having a custom WooCommerce website built by a reputable development company (look around your local area for some companies, you’ll probably find a few).
If you’re not a developer then anything you build will likely be pretty terrible and wouldn’t be very well-optimised (harsh, but true in the vast majority of cases). Many non-technical people just expect to be able to throw a load of plugins at a WordPress site and it’ll be the greatest thing ever built, but that’s rarely the case.
Despite WordPress/WooCommerce being relatively easy to use, an ecommerce store is a whole different ball game (especially one that is fast, well-built and not filled with bloat – i.e. random plugins, which also add in additional weak points in terms of security / speed).
Headless WordPress/WooCommerce is something else. That’s essentially a WordPress/WooCommerce backend, but with a completely different frontend instead of a WordPress/WooCommerce theme (e.g. React, Nuxt/Vue etc…). These are connected together by utilising the WordPress REST API to display the data from the backend. That’s probably a bit more complex than just developing a well-built WooCommerce website, and would probably be overkill unless you’ve got thousands of products each with hundreds of variations (but even then, a regular custom-built WooCommerce theme is still good enough in that situation & can handle 10s of thousands of products).
Edit: How good your servers are would also play a big part in how well a website with 10s of thousands of products would function.
Outside of the WordPress/WooCommerce theme, you should be utilising server-level caching (e.g. Redis, but there are also some others). If you expect, or already have, a lot of visitors then perhaps a more optimised web server setup with a load balancer to spread traffic over a few servers (and a separate database server, instead of having the database running on the web server) as well. A decent web development company would be able to suggest the necessary requirements for a busy ecommerce store.
It’s WordPress + WooCommerce + Theme.
If you’re handy with coding and want to take an Udemy course on wordpress theme development you can make your own and just raw dog it.
Just make sure you’re considering WordPress.org , NOT [WordPress.com]). [WordPress.com]) is basically like Shopify in that it locks you into their platform and nickle and dimes your for features. [WordPress.org]) is free and open source and you only pay for premium plugins if you want them.
If you’re not a developer, I would highly recommend you hire one. Building an E-Commerce store is a pretty big lift.
We run a WooCommerce shop site to sell association memberships and the books we publish. Leaving aside the question about what “headless” is, we have been comfortable using a fairly stock WooCommerce theme (“Storefront”), and adding some customization through a “child theme” (adding some CSS to customize some font selections). The site runs under Apache on a VPS.
Given what you’ve said I’m sure you’ll be able to brute force a simple wp/wc build and manage the shop. Depending on the scope you could even stick it on a subdomain or in a subdir and keep the existing site as-is.
For something more complex I would look towards a domestic development company, or at the very least a developer to consult with. Performance is a key conversion factor that can be easily overlooked.
Also, do be mindful of your plugin choices. Just because a plugin says, “I can do X” doesn’t mean it can do X well – nor does it mean it isn’t also doing Y, or introducing vulnerability Z.
If I was in your shoes I would consider the scope of the project, available budgets, interest in learning server/db admin and the wp ecosystem, and whether or not my time would be better spent developing another aspect of the b2c business.
The combination of WordPress (.org!) and Woocommerce, with a good host, a lightweight theme, and sound code (either yours or from a plugin), is quite good.
If you use that in a “single” install, you’d use WordPress the “normal” way. If you use it only for the WooCommerce product data and have a separate installation for the users to see (that you build with PHP, NodeJS, VueJS, or anything else) you’d be using Headless WP.
WooCommerce alone works well, there are plenty of good plugins, but there are more that are quite bad. So look out for those, most of the time look like over-bloated plugins and such. Same, if you’re looking into having your “own” eCommerce site, don’t host it on a cheap server, the performance will take a heavy toll.
Now, if the headless setup looks interesting, I’d recommend you to be sure you’re a proficient developer or have some time to learn the ropes of it. It can be quite convoluted to work on if you don’t know what’s what and how it works.
Hope it helps!