Build Your New eCommerce Store With Avada and WP Engine

In this article, we’re going to look into how you can build a great eCommerce website using the Avada WordPress theme hosted at WP Engine (which comes featured packaged for eCommerce setup).

COVID-19 pandemic shook the whole world, and it’s still hitting the economies of countries. The most affected people are the daily wagers and jobholders. Specifically, the restaurant and tourism industries are widely affected. However, the global pandemic also came as an opportunity for numerous businesses, including the online arena. I have witnessed the boom in the IT industry in the past 15 months; most specifically, the eCommerce business has boomed massively. If we talk about food, many restaurants never had a website, but in days of COVID-19 and the lock-downs, an online presence has come up as the basic necessity of those restaurant businesses. There was a massive increase in eCommerce Web Design, and Avada also catered to this need in the early days as they offered eCommerce prebuilt websites for multiple niches.

What Does Avada Offer?

Right now, Avada has 20 eCommerce prebuilt websites that can be used as a starting point for your eCommerce business. Five of them are food-related, including Avada Takeout, Avada Winery, Avada Restaurant, Avada Bakery, and Avada Nutritionist. All these are built using the WooCommerce plugin that is the top plugin for WordPress eCommerce. Thus, they have a complete ecosystem to support the eCommerce system; we’ll not go about it but instead focus on Avada for what it offers.

With the latest version of Avada 7.4.1, ThemeFusion provided a complete set of options for a custom eCommerce website. The update was a massive step towards the Avada theme’s ecosystem and quite a successful one since that has significantly doubled the sales of the Avada theme. Let’s talk about the options.

Custom Headers
Custom Page Title Bars
Custom Shop Page, Custom Product Archive Pages (Product Categories, Product Tags, etc.), and Custom Single Product Page
Custom Footer

1. When we talk about the custom header, my favorite for eCommerce is from the Pet Supplies Prebuilt Website. It gives you a complete sense of an eCommerce header, and it’s custom-made, meaning you can add anything anywhere you wish to and target any page. So this is one of the huge advantages of Avada to build any custom header for any page of the website.

2. Page Title Bar mostly holds the first H1 title of the page and the breadcrumbs. This can be completely set up dynamically; you can add any sort of content, including secondary navigation, the title of the page, a sub-title, or breadcrumb.

3. Pages for eCommerce like the shop page and product archive pages can be completely custom-built using the new Post Card Archives Element of Avada Builder. A glimpse of this feature can be seen on the newly built Retail Prebuilt Website. The Post Card can be completely dynamic and support custom fields, too, so this is not limited to few options. Although Post Card provides many required options, still there’s more to come for it in future development. To add further, it does not stop here, you can make custom cart and checkout pages. So sky is the limit with the extensive options of Avada.

4. Footer is always for the secondary content and links, including copyright information. Just like the header, you can build a footer as per your own needs.

What Does WP Engine Offer for eCommerce Setup?

WP Engine has always lived up to its reputation when it comes to WordPress Managed Hosting. WP Engine is always my go-to host for the WordPress environment and Theme Fusion recommends WP Engine with Avada theme. I do feel their pricing is expensive for small businesses, but good things come at a good price. Despite the fact they offer great hosting, the thing I love the most is their customer support. At the same time, I do work in customer support, so I know what it takes to provide good support. For seven years now, I have always forwarded good words for WP Engine, and that’s entirely based on my personal experience with them. Their support is always willing to help and get to the bottom of things. So this is one of the reasons I recommend them to my clientele.

They have now launched an eCommerce hosting that takes care of the business seriously. You can check this demo to see the speed accuracy of how fast it loads. The results speak for themselves, as can be seen on Page Speed Tool. From a conversion point of view, speed has been my #1 priority, and that test is always passed by WP Engine. Slow speed means lost sales, and that hurts a business. So the primary reason for their eCommerce hosting is their speed and security. They always take care of the security side and updates of WordPress Core and plugins. The main features are listed below;

A wide range of eCommerce features like Instant Store Search