Congratulations you have a new WooCommerce website. I've helped a number of people and companies migrate to or launch new WooCommerce websites. This article is as much as a reference for myself as it is for anyone else who wants a little guidance.

Your WooCommerce Checklist:

There are plenty of guides, including the built-in WooCommerce wizard to help you configure things such as shipping classes, payment gateways, store location, etc. I'll assume you've already done all that.

Create A Changelog and Prepare To Manage Updates

If you are new to WordPress an important part of ongoing maintenance will be updating the various plugins and themes that make up your website. The primary motivation for managing updates is to get access to updated technology and to close security gaps that can leave your vulnerable to hackers and malware.

Your site is not a single piece of software but is more akin to your phone. A base operating system with a number of apps. These apps are known as plugins on your WordPress site and they all get updated often. Managing these efficiently and carefully matters because you run the risk of these plugins conflicting with each other and causing all sorts of problems on your site.

Read my guide to managing updates.

Configure and Test Email Sending and Deliverability

Your website is going to send emails for various reasons. Order receipts and notifications. Comment notifications. Password reset emails. You get the idea. Well WordPress, the software, has very little control over emails actually getting sent and getting into the inbox of your recipients.

If you find emails are not getting to the inbox here are some potential tools and suggestions to help:

The WP Mail SMTP plugin can be helpful to send test emails. It is a comprehensive tool kit for managing email but as a starting point if you need a way to send test emails it includes an email test tool.

Contact your host and ask them to ensure that all email-related functions are turned on. Ask them to help you troubleshoot sending challenges.

If you are finding the emails in junk/spam folders there is likely nothing wrong with your host. Your IP address (server where your host keeps your website) either has no sender reputation or it has a bad sender reputation and that is causing the email service providers (gmail/hotmail/etc) to flag the email as spam. There are things you can do with your hosting provider to better “sign” the emails in a way that will enhance the likelihood of getting into the inbox.

If push comes to shove and you cannot overcome this deliverability issue; you can pay for a 3rd party email service such as SendGrid or SMTP.com and use the WP Mail SMTP plugin (linked above) to bypass your host's email services and route all emails through the 3rd party.

Optimize SEO

SEO is one of the most critical marketing strategies for any online store. Proper setup on your site can be easy with the use of a quality SEO plugin like RankMath. RankMath has a free version of their plugin and it is a great starting point.

Installing a plugin like RankMath helps some as it changes some structural things to help you optimize your site better. However, the real power comes when you take advantage of its features. Specifically, I recommend these critical steps:

1: For every page, post, and product use the tool provided by your SEO plugin (like RankMath) to write your Meta Description and keyword tags. RankMath calls the Meta Description the “Snippet.”

2: Use your SEO Plugin to match up and configure your various types of content (WordPress calls these post types) with search schemas. A schema is a configured set of data used for search engines to identify content on the internet and index and present it properly. For example, search engines index a recipe differently than a video, a local business listing, or a product.

3: Whatever SEO Plugin you use no doubt has a tutorial article or video to walk you through all their recommendations of how to best utilize their software to optimize your content. Find that tutorial and follow it. Here is a good one for RankMath.

Setup Analytics

A good marketer needs data to inform marketing decisions. Data such as how many people are coming to your website, how they are finding your website, what pages they are looking at for how long, etc.

I generally recommend and use Google Analytics because it's free and pretty dang amazing. Setup Google Analytics and integrate it into your website using your SEO plugin. RankMath and similar apps generally have a built-in tool to integrate your Google Analytics into your site's code.

Optimize Checkout, Bumps, and Upsells

The default WooCommerce checkout page is lame and in my opinion not very good at optimizing conversion. There are a number of plugins that can improve your checkout page. I prefer FunnelKit because in addition to giving you incremental and higher converting checkout pages, FunnelKit also gives you the option to add bump offers and upsell offers. You can build dedicated funnels around specific offers and products.

In some months 15-20% of my revenue comes from bump and upsell offers.

Setup Legally Required Pages

Because of laws and stuff, I advise you to set up the following pages and make sure they can be found on your website:

-Privacy Policy (and make sure there is a way for users to request the deletion of all their data on your site)

-Terms of Use

-Affiliate disclosure. If you have or will have links on your site that are affiliate earning links you need this page

-Return and refund policy

-Shipping and delivery policy

There are plenty of other things that over time are worth doing but I think this is a good starting point and task list for your brand new website. I'll update this post as I have additional thoughts. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.

Also, check out my Evergreen list of my favorite WordPress plugins.