Next Steps with WooCommerce

We’ve built and customized every aspect of an e-commerce business built on top of WooCommerce. In this chapter, I want to provide you with three ways you can continue to develop your skills. All of these are important topics in very different ways and could be how you specialize as an e-commerce developer.

Security is important for any business; building an inaccessible website is risky and isn’t the right choice, and if you are building your business on top of WooCommerce, you want to have some agency over the direction it goes in.

We’re going to cover the following topics:

• Why and how to make your WooCommerce Store accessible
• Keeping WooCommerce safe and secure
• Staying up to date with WooCommerce and open source software

Once you’ve explored these topics, you’ll know more about WooCommerce than most developers.

Technical requirements

This chapter is a bit more forward-looking. We’re going to cover the following topics at a slightly higher level.

Every one of these topics will be important for a WooCommerce store owner.

If you’re a developer who understands WordPress code, there will be even more you can do in this chapter.

We’ll be digging into GitHub (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-WooCommerce-/tree/main/Chapter14) to manage a code base. It is not required, but it may be helpful to create a GitHub account.

Why and how to make your WooCommerce store accessible

Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites in a way that ensures that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the content effectively, regardless of their abilities or impairments.

In the e-commerce world, there are four major reasons to care about accessibility:

• Inclusivity
• Legal liability
• Business benefits
• Preparing for demographic trends

Inclusivity

One criticism of accessibility that you’ll see online is this: why spend so much effort to make a website accessible to blind users? Couldn’t you spend that same effort to grow your business even more?

Everyone will have a disability at some point

If you look narrowly at the term disabled, I can understand the roots of this argument. But if you look a little more long-term, everyone will be disabled at some point or in some contexts:

• Everyone ages: Eyes age...

Keeping WooCommerce safe and secure

This whole book has been guiding you to build an incredible WooCommerce store that will make a lot of money for you or your client. But that store won’t do you any good if hackers can get easy access to your site and siphon money from your business or turn the whole website into an ad for cryptocurrency.

There are several steps you can take that make your site much more resilient.

Check your hosting before you launch

Before you launch your store, it’s worth double-checking that your website host is both reputable and has modern technology.

We talked about hosts back in Chapter 9, Speeding Up Your Store. It’s worth talking about website hosts again in the context of security. A website host is the infrastructure for your site. If you want to have a secure website with an insecure host, it’s sort of like rolling up the windows of your car but leaving the door unlocked.

Here are some of the features I’...

Staying up to date with WooCommerce and open source software

When you build your business on a particular piece of software, it’s worth the time investment to follow the development of that software and have an idea where the software is heading over the next 1–3 years.

Besides just staying up to date with software, WooCommerce is open source. That means anyone can view the code and can choose to contribute new and improved code.

Contributing code is something for developers and engineers, but staying up to date with software is useful for anyone running an e-commerce business, even if you aren’t a coder. Let’s start with the ways you can stay up to date with WooCommerce.

Follow the Developer Blog

WooCommerce actually does a really good job of communicating where the software is going through their Developer Blog: https://developer.woocommerce.com/blog/.

Figure 14.5: Woo Developer Blog

This blog is how I find out...

Summary

Security is important for every business. By configuring a few best practices now and working with the right host, you’ll have a pretty secure business. You also know where to start in the wide world of website accessibility. By knowing how to contribute code to WooCommerce, you actually have the agency to affect all of these not just for your site but for all WooCommerce sites.

We’re at the end of the book and you are well on your way to mastering WooCommerce. You have the essentials documented in this book.

You can build your own WooCommerce store, sell the products you want to sell, display those products how you want, and customize a theme for your brand, including landing pages and customizing the product page.

You can also understand what’s happening in your store by viewing WooCommerce sales data, you can accept payments in person with a POS system, you can configure any number of shipping services to fulfill your packages worldwide, and...