There are several levers you can use to optimize WooCommerce. From the right growth strategy and targeted performance measurement to increasing performance. This will make your online store more successful.

Our interview with eCommerce expert Franz Sauerstein reveals the most important tips, tools and methods. He helps companies optimize their WooCommerce store every day.

Franz, what do you think are the most important approaches to optimizing WooCommerce? How can store owners improve their conversion without significant effort?

Optimization can mean many things - but for our customers it's about increasing the margin before overheads and profit. Both can be improved by reducing costs - but spending less than nothing is not an option. 🙂 That's why, after discussing possible cost savings, we focus on increasing sales.

To increase sales in a WooCommerce store, there are only three levers. Either you increase:

1. The total number of customers or
2. The turnover per order or
3. The orders per customer

For the successful, rapid growth of a store, you need to know exactly which of these three levers will generate the greatest additional margin (or profit). And what effort is required for implementation.

An example: A store with 1000 customers, 50 euros turnover per order and no regular customers generates 50,000 euros turnover. The marketing costs are 14 percent, the costs for purchasing, handling and shipping are 43 percent. If this store concentrates on acquiring new customers and increases this by 30 percent, then the margin and profit will also increase by 30 percent.

Leverage: Sales per order and regular customer

However, if the store focuses on more sales per order (30% increase), the margin rises by 49% and profits by as much as 94%. If the store finds ways to turn customers into regular customers (we again calculate with 30 percent), the margin increases by 57 percent and profits by as much as 120 percent.

"More sales per order and new regular customers increase profits more than acquiring new customers."

You can easily carry out this analysis yourself by looking at your operational evaluation of the last 12 months and examining this data with a scenario analysis in Excel. You can find out more about the background and a ready-to-use calculator in my article Growth levers in eCommerce. Or here as a video on YouTube:

Once you know the potential of the individual levers, the next step is to estimate the effort required to implement them. A good indicator is always when no efforts have yet been made to implement the greatest possible lever. For example, the acquisition of regular customers. Then the Pareto principle applies. If, on the other hand, "everything" has already been tried to pull a lever, you should talk to other store operators and look for further possibilities together. Or get an hour or two of help from an expert in eCommerce marketing.

In all likelihood, you will still find ways to pull a lever when talking to colleagues or experts. Then you should test them one after the other. Once you have exhausted all the options, you look at the next lever. You repeat this whole process every quarter so that you are always pulling the currently "longest" lever.

I see again and again that only a few online entrepreneurs measure their success consistently. Which key performance indicators should they monitor regularly? And what conclusions can be drawn from this?

Everyone defines personal success for themselves. Anyone who opens an online store wants to make a profit in the long term. For example, if the profits are to be distributed to employees, customers or society. In the short and medium term, however, the margin can also be the most important key figure for success - if the store is to grow faster, for example. Of course, with a higher margin, you can invest more in growth in the next step.

This means that we already have three figures that should be constantly measured: The margin before overheads, overheads and profit. The margin is calculated from the turnover, minus the overheads.

• Product costs
• The costs for handling and shipping
• The costs for marketing

These figures should also be constantly measured. The turnover itself consists of the three components mentioned above: The total number of customers, sales per order and the number of orders per customer.

Measuring success needs a goal

If you measure these figures on a monthly basis and recognize their trends, you are laying the foundation for your own success. In addition to these absolute key figures, the following values can be derived as required:

• The contribution margin per customer over the lifetime (lifetime value)
• Relative key figures such as marketing costs per customer acquisition
• The relationship between marketing costs and lifetime value or
• The amortization period per customer generated

Further evaluations can be added as required. For example, if you have determined that the marketing focus should be on generating new customers, then it is worth taking a close look at the webshop's user numbers and its eCommerce conversion rate. If a qualification strategy is set up or optimized via email marketing, lead opt-in rates and conversion rates of emails to purchase must also be analysed.

These granular key figures should always be linked to a purpose. The motto "just collect it because you can" is a waste of time.

What role does the performance of WooCommerce actually play? Does Google really penalize slower portals? And what do you advise your customers to do to achieve a faster PageSpeed?

A fast webshop is naturally more fun for the customer than a slow one - the experience is simply better. Who likes to wait? I like to use the Pingdom tool to measure loading speeds; it should be better than 2 seconds.

Slow portals are penalized by Google - but the ranking factor pagespeed only comes into play when two search results compete for the same place in the results list because both are equally "good" in Google's eyes. So you should take pagespeed optimization seriously, but don't let it drive you crazy.

Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights in particular play in the premier class when it comes to "driving people crazy". In some cases, aspects of a store's loading speed are tested that make no sense. Or the tools suggest measures that cannot be implemented with modern content management systems such as WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify & Co.

Not all measures make sense

For example, Google suggests using the WebP image format. But Chrome does not yet support this at all. The test also complains if you use content delivery networks (CDN) - because the requests are routed via an additional server. This is despite the fact that a CDN speeds up the delivery of international stores anywhere in the world.

But how do you make webshops and WooCommerce faster? Simply put, the speed depends on the page size and the number of requests from the browser to the server. The smaller the page is and the fewer requests are made, the faster the page loads.

The page size and the number of requests can be read out using Pingdom Tools or the Chrome Developer Tools. Both tools also provide waterfall charts to quickly visualize which loading processes take how much time.

Optimization options

With this knowledge you should then:

1. Compress images and adjust their display
2. Activate lazy loading
3. Use caching
4. Keep all themes, plugins and WordPress itself up to date
5. Deactivate and delete plug-ins that are not needed - or replace them with better alternatives
6. Avoid or reload sliders and videos in the store header
7. Only load scripts on pages where they are actually needed
8. Compress JavaScript and CSS files
9. Load non-critical scripts only at the end of the page structure
10. Update the PHP version
11. Fix server errors, broken links and JavaScript errors

We do this regularly: we were able to reduce the loading time of the Stixxie.de portal from 15.1 seconds to 1.1 seconds.

Every online store needs a unique selling point, a niche. What can that be if you sell very generic goods? Do you have any examples for us?

No, seriously: the unique selling proposition is not the same as the niche! A niche is typically defined as a (demographic) group of people: Single cat owners, realtors, young moms, car enthusiasts... The problem is: even within these niches, people differ extremely! But real groups of people form when people share similar opinions and world views.

A unique selling point is the distillation of an understanding of the customer's problems and solutions - as well as their current situation. Added to this is knowledge of the competition, their offerings and the differences to your own offering. Finally, you decide which aspect of your own offering you want to be known for.

Unique selling proposition vs niche

The communication of these parts forms the unique selling point. And people feel understood when this communication expresses similar opinions and world views. This is also the secret to successfully differentiating generic goods: The company, the brand of the company, must have opinions and express and live them.

A simplified example: our target group thinks climate protection is important. That's why we sell our washing machines with an extended warranty, free repair service, compensation for their manufacture and operation as well as CO2-free delivery - on request by self-collection on a cargo bike from the nearest warehouse.

Our target group also believes that climate protection should cost something. This allows us to push through higher sales prices - or even subscription payments. And if our target group is very socially minded, our company could even consider distributing profits to employees (and even customers). This behavior can be used to reach our potential customers where they are. And where they talk to other people with similar world views or challenges (online).

What advantages do you generally see with WooCommerce, but also what disadvantages?

WooCommerce benefits from the fact that the software is free and, above all, open. These two factors have created a large ecosystem. There are plenty of ready-made themes and plugins, access to skilled developers is easy and the community helps each other. Just like in the WooCommerce Germany community on Facebook.

Due to the openness of the software, it is fully customizable and can be adapted to any need. The high level of flexibility makes WooCommerce a solid choice for stores in any industry, products of any kind and all legal environments.

Another advantage of WooCommerce is the security and innovation of new features through active further development. However, this is also necessary, as WooCommerce is not only popular with store operators, but is also an attractive target for hackers.

Selection of plugins and WordPress hosting

The disadvantages of WooCommerce are the downsides of the advantages: There is no guarantee of support for WooCommerce itself, the core - after all, you don't pay for it. At the same time, the high level of flexibility and the mature ecosystem make it easy to "get carried away". I've seen stores with 100 plugins too often by now. It is problematic when the performance of the store and sales suffer as a result of such actions.

If you are looking for (good) additional functions, you will quickly end up with the paid premium providers. Their plugins are still cheaper than hiring a developer. But you often have to test many different plugin alternatives to find the right one for your store.

This is because there is hardly any pre-selection of plugins. To add a booking system (hotel rooms) to WooCommerce, you have the choice between the official plugin, the plugin from Tyches Software and 4 other alternatives. For a layman, the selection means a lot of hard work.

Which areas are easiest to outsource if you don't have any technical expertise yourself? Or if the online store is to be operated alongside the actual retail business?

The business model in eCommerce consists of the main areas of purchasing, logistics, marketing and sales - supported all the way by the software. These core areas of the business model should be managed in-house, but their subordinate tasks can be outsourced.

A few examples: No store operator should take care of hosting, backups, updates, testing and data recovery (in the event of a disaster) themselves. These tasks can be outsourced for 50 to 150 euros per month. Or you can opt for WordPress hosting or specialized WooCommerce managed hosting with good support.

Outsourcing with WooCommerce

The logistics - storage, shipping, returns - can be handled by Amazon's warehouses (Amazon FBA). Or by logistics start-ups such as ODC. Purchasing planning no longer has to be done on demand, by feel or using an Excel spreadsheet.

Software such as Inventory Planner automatically sounds the alarm, makes purchasing suggestions and can even place orders automatically. Even the majority of marketing and sales work can be outsourced: website optimization, the development and implementation of marketing strategies, reporting or work on advertising campaigns are all suitable for this.

I always offer our clients two options: Strategic marketing support or strategic-operational takeover. In the first option, we develop the strategy together with the client and provide support with implementation and management; in the second option, we take over the entire process.