7 Cloud Computing Benefits for Your E-Commerce Site
There is a lot of competition in e-commerce. Every day, more and more online stores open, and you have to compete with Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Even a one-second delay can cause you to lose business. Cloud computing can help your e-commerce store in many ways.
As a WordPress store’s stock grows, the site may slow down. Cloud computing will help you get things done faster and use a content delivery network to its full potential (CDN).
How Does E-Commerce Benefit From Cloud Computing?
Gartner recently said that end users would spend around $600 billion on public cloud services by 2023. This year, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is growing by 30.6%. The service has helped organizations in so many ways that it has grown quickly.
Reduce Costs
Costs can be very high when you have an IT team. When a lack of workers and competition for jobs are added, many small businesses can’t afford to stay in business.
With cloud computing, you can use the IT skills of a company that already has them. Use their third-party services instead of hiring someone to watch over your servers. You’ll save money on cybersecurity because they protect your data with the best people and software.
Improve Uptime
With cloud computing, there are always people ready to help with problems. It’s like putting money together to hire the best people and keep them busy all the time. If your online store goes down in the middle of the night because the server crashed, you could lose a lot of money. With cloud computing, the team will work to get the server back online as soon as possible. The delay may be slight enough that it doesn’t hurt sales much, if at all.
The last thing you want is your WordPress site to go down all the time and cause you to lose customers. Cloud computing makes sure that doesn’t happen. You can even set up alerts if your site goes down, so you can keep track of it and take steps to prevent it from happening again.
Scale up Easily
One of the best things about cloud computing is how easy it is to grow as your business does. When you have more customers, you have to store more information. The basic package, which worked well initially, may need to be improved.
With cloud computing, you can tell your service provider that you need an upgrade, and then you have more space to store customer information, add new products and images, and do much more. Cloud computing saves you money in the long run. When you know you can add more storage space anytime, you won’t buy more than you need.
Update Automatically
You won’t have to worry about updating your software or getting the latest virus protection. All of these things are taken care of for you by a company. Updates happen on their own.
Depending on your web hosting company, you can even set up your WordPress site to update itself. You’ll get an email about the update so you can make sure everything is still working as it should.
People with more than one WordPress e-commerce site will find that automatic updates save them a lot of time and hassle.
Meet National Security Standards
Do you want to get contracts from the government? When you work with government agencies, security worries are much higher. Since cloud computing improves security, you may have to work less to meet the Department of Defense (DOD) and other requirements.
Only a few e-commerce sites will have to worry about defense industrial base (DIB) compliance. Those who do must meet the requirements in FAR52.204-21 and do annual self-assessments to ensure they are compliant. Cloud computing is a good idea if you sell things that the government or military might want to protect.
Stabilize Traffic Spikes
Have you ever had many people visit your WordPress site at once and cause it to break? If hackers try to get into your website with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or you do a lot of marketing and people are coming to see what all the buzz is about, a downed website will cost you sales.
When you use cloud computing, the servers will change their resources to handle peaks in traffic. If you go over a certain limit, you may have to pay a fee, but you won’t lose sales because your site is down.
Most cloud computing providers have data centers that are up-to-date. They are made to handle a lot of traffic, so it won’t make them too busy. You might want to warn them that it could happen because of a new product, but you should be fine if it does.
Speed up Your Load Times
How fast your site loads significantly affects how many people buy from you. The typical page with a load time under two seconds has a 9 percent bounce rate. If you make the load time five seconds, 38% of people will leave your site.
Whatever you can do to decrease load times would help. Some sites’ plugins, themes, and scripts can make WordPress pages load more slowly than they should. Since you probably use a shopping cart and a payment gateway, the numbers can quickly increase more than you’d like.
If you use a server in the cloud, your site will load faster than if you use a standard shared server. You can also easily switch to a dedicated server, giving you even faster speeds.
Is Cloud Computing Right for You?
Most online shops that sell things can use cloud computing. But you need to compare rates and determine where your brand is growing. If you wait to use cloud computing for now, at least you’ll learn about its benefits and be able to make a smart choice as your business grows.
