James Kemp: Hello, welcome to Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce. I’m James Kemp, the core product manager for WooCommerce.

Katie Keith: And I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2. And today we are talking about WooCommerce themes. It’s a very timely time to be doing so because James is going to be presenting the official new theme.

James Kemp: Yeah, I’m, I’m looking forward to it. Um, we’ve also got a couple of special guests who we will introduce in a moment, but if you’re watching live, then feel free to ask your questions wherever you are watching, and we will try to answer them. Uh, and also you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, uh, at Do the Woo Podcast, to our X account at Do the Woo, and you can find other links at dothewoo.

Katie Keith: Absolutely. So let’s get into WooCommerce themes. For that, we’ve invited Simon and Colm from, from Commerce Gurus and the Shoptimizer theme. Hey.

Simon Tomkins: Hey, James.

Colm Troy: Nice to meet you.

Katie Keith: Hey.

James Kemp: Uh, do you want to introduce yourselves? I don’t know if you have a particular order that you like to go in.

Colm Troy: Whoever shouts first, I guess. James is probably the order. Uh, first of all, thanks to both of you for having us back on. I think we were on Do the Woo about 4 years ago, which feels like it was about 10 minutes ago, but somehow it’s over 4 years ago at this point.

But yeah, so I’m Colm, co-founder along with Simon of Commerce Gurus, been building websites almost 30 years now. It’s hard to believe. Next year I wrote my first HTML, next year, 30 years ago. I did e-commerce for about 25 of those years. Started working with WordPress around about 2007, 2006. Before working with WordPress, I also built themes for the likes of Joomla. And for those who are ancient dinosaurs like me, PostNuke and PHPNuke, which even predates that. So I’ve been building themes for content management systems since about 2001.

We’ve been working with WooCommerce since before it was WooCommerce. So since the Jigoshop days, and I think even the last one was on Do the Woo, I talked about when Jigoshop first came out, it was kind of a real jaw-dropping kind of moment for ecommerce with WordPress. Because for the longest time, there was a lot of other ecommerce plugins, Cart66, I think. Does anyone remember Cart66? And even outside of WordPress, the likes of OSCommerce. And they were always kind of like, okay, but like Jigoshop was just like a real kind of blow-your-hair-back moment for for e-commerce.

James Kemp: Yeah, there was WP eCommerce as well. That’s right. I imagine EDD was around.

Katie Keith: Possibly. I think so.

Colm Troy: Yeah, possibly. So, so yeah, our roots in the WooCommerce kind of ecosystem go right back to those days. And obviously, we kind of saw the platform go from strength to strength under the stewardship of WooThemes, which then obviously entered into Automattic. So we’ve been there right since the very beginning.

And Simon and I, when we started, we very much were in the kind of Envato, ThemeForest space. We did a lot of work. That’s kind of really where we cut our teeth in with WooCommerce specifically. And then Shoptimizer kind of spun out of that. We went independent, so to speak, around, I think it was 2018, Simon? Yeah, September 2018. Where we sold that directly from our own marketplace, for want of a better word, on commercegurus.com.

And since then, we’ve kind of built out, you know, complementary products around that. So CommerceKit, which started off as a companion plugin to Shoptimizer, really, and that’s kind of gone from strength to strength on its own. That’s actually a separate plugin completely from Shoptimizer these days. And most recently, Commerce Gurus Turbo, which is our performance optimization plugin. So, and again, it’s very much in the same kind of thing, what we’ve kind of really stood for, which is conversion rate optimization and performance.

Outside of that, just to close off, we do a little bit of work with some larger WooCommerce merchants on some Shopify merchants directly where we do a lot of full-stack custom ecommerce development work for them. So that could be anything. That could mean from theme work to plugin work, Shopify app work, and then just really, I suppose, just giving them the benefits of our experience and expertise in ecommerce over the last donkey’s years at this point. But yeah, that’s me.

Simon Tomkins: I’m Simon. I’m from the west of Ireland originally. I also started building websites a very long time ago. Back in the GeoCities days, I was building websites with table layouts and space for GIFs and all kinds of things which would horrify people these days. So I remember I was working as a student and I built my first sort of CMS-powered website with Movable Type, which again was a cool platform back then. And I built my second one with a one called TextPattern, which introduced me to custom fields, which I thought was very cool. So I built a website with custom fields and I sent it to the head of a web agency in Ireland, in Dublin at the time, and he was impressed enough to give me a shot at working there.

And that’s where I met Colm. So we were working together at a large agency in Dublin for years, building all kinds of sites for many different types of clients. And I think, you know, as we saw over the years, WordPress began to become more and more the default stack, you know, for client work. So we could see that kind of evolve over the years. So we really kind of enjoyed working with WordPress and we decided, yeah, we’d take the leap together and go into business together.

So we started a company, as Colm said, we started on ThemeForest and we started really with e-commerce, you know, so it was WooCommerce. Our first theme was called Captiva back in the day and our second theme Adrenaline really took off. I think it had a bit of momentum. So we began, it was a really exciting kind of era as well. I think it was a very exciting time for themes. We diverged a little bit into some business kind of, you know, standard kind of business themes, but our kind of our true love was always WooCommerce and e-commerce, I think. So yes, as Colm said, we went back to that. We focused double down on Shoptimizer and we built Shoptimizer and Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of where we’ve kind of stayed. Our roots has always been on with WooCommerce and performance and conversion optimization, which we’ll get into a little bit, I’m sure, in other questions.

James Kemp: Nice. Yeah, we had a, we have a very similar e-commerce path, I think. I too started on Jigoshop. Before that, it was JoomlaCart, which was like my first e-commerce store that I built for this sort of UK band’s merch shop, which was pretty cool. It’s like the first website I built, I think. So, yeah, other than, you know, MySpace hacks. It’s been a while. That’s awesome.

Simon Tomkins: Cool. Yeah, no, it’s, it was a really kind of exciting, I think, time, I think, as well for, yeah, we saw just so much ingenuity and creativity and, uh, the web I think was really exciting, exciting place, I think, then for, for themes. So yeah, it was, it was great.

Katie Keith: Yeah. And it’s interesting hearing you talk about the kind of history of themes. Um, because what we’re going to talk about in a bit is kind of the future of themes that, or the present of themes as well, because how you choose a theme has fundamentally changed. Um, the nature of themes has fundamentally changed. How it relates to core has fundamentally changed. So the whole theme thing has really evolved over the years, and yet a lot of people are stuck on some really quite old style, old school themes. Uh, so what we really want to get out of today is advising people on how to choose what’s right for their modern WooCommerce projects and stores.

But before we do that, um, I want James to talk about Woo’s long-awaited new theme. Uh, hands up, how many people are still using the Storefront theme. We certainly use it for all our plugin demo sites. Uh, I know James’s old company Iconic always used Storefront on all their demos. You, we always test with it. Lots of live stores use it, but it’s ever so old, isn’t it? So why are you replacing it, James?

James Kemp: Exactly like you say. Uh, yeah, I, I think when Storefront was built, and I’m, I’m not actually sure the year it was launched, but if I had to guess, it would be sort of mid, uh, 2010s. It was a different theme, a different era for themes. You know, themes were built around the classic editor. I don’t think Gutenberg even existed as a concept back then. So, it’s really, I think it’s probably why we would refer to it now as a classic theme. Like, it’s using shortcodes.

I feel like it was always seen as a bit of a base theme. Like, here’s, here’s a theme to get you started. And it was never really, you know, something with all the bells and whistles that, that a theme like, you know, Commerce Gurus might present to you. Like, they give you all of these options to actually really jazz it up. I always used it, even in my, like, agency days, as sort of a you know, a base point to begin an ecommerce project, especially when it was like a very bespoke commerce project. I would use that as like the starting point, potentially create a child theme and just build on top of that. But things have moved on, you know, we’ve got the site editor now, we’ve got blocks, we’ve got Gutenberg, and we’ve got all of these things that don’t really suit that traditional type of theme anymore. And you will find themes are weird these days. You kind of, they’re like a template for blocks, basically.

The theme that you present is mostly in fonts and colors and potentially patterns and things. I think patterns should live in themes, personally. And they’re like a collection of predefined blocks and styles that you might, you might want to use for your website. But they’re much more flexible. I really like where the site editor experience is going.

There’s definitely some things that aren’t quite there yet, especially in WordPress core itself, and also in the blocks that we have in WooCommerce core. And the Purple theme is a really good opportunity for us to actually build with WooCommerce blocks and, you know, use the site editor and experience that process as, as someone who might be building a theme and, and seeing, you know, how we can improve our core products by having this theme that we know, you know, everything should work really well with. With this theme. So I would see it as the new, the modern sort of starting point for building a WooCommerce website.

And I think, you know, AI is a thing now. And I actually think blocks and themes as they are today are very well suited for AI. Because the AI can kind of compose pages using blocks and things. Again, it’s not quite there yet. I mean, it can do it, but I think that you have to kind of give it a lot of nudging and guidance to do it really well. But I would like to see that this sort of theme era of blocks and the site editor kind of allows humans and agents to really build themes consistently and cleanly and really well. So I don’t know if that directly answers your question, but that’s Kind of how I’m thinking about our theme, which is called Purple, by the way. I don’t know if we mentioned that.

Katie Keith: Well, can we see it?

James Kemp: You can, uh, in theory. There you go. Let me move some things around. Um, so yeah, I would say the Purple theme is going to be and is, uh, sort of the best starting point for an e-commerce website. It’s, it’s meant to be used as a way to sort of configure what you want your site to look like, and a really simple entry point into having a WooCommerce website. One of the things that I’ve found in the past is you could install Storefront, for example, and then you could kind of get bogged down in actually like, what do I want my store to look like? And actually, like, choosing a theme and figuring out even what should the homepage look like. Like, what do I need to put on the homepage as a merchant who’s setting up a store for the first time? You know, I have no idea what actually makes a product sell. Like, what are people looking for when they land on a store?

So one of the things I hope Purple can achieve is to give them that, like, really nice starting point. And it’s using completely WooCommerce blocks. So that in the theme itself, I think there’s like a minimal amount of CSS overriding. There’s some things that you can’t quite do yet with blocks. But the goal is that the theme is very, very bare bones. And it’s just kind of composing the WooCommerce blocks in the best way to get you started.

So this is the demo site. I I expect this will be the demo site once it launches. It is launching in theory next week, assuming the .org, you know, process goes well. But it’s already on .org. I think there’s just a few things to get through to get it fully approved. So next week you should see it live. You can already use it. It’s on GitHub. It’s completely, you know, open source. You can dive into the code and, you know, submit issues and feature requests and things like that.

So yeah, it’s a really nice starting point. So everything you see here, some of these things are patterns that come with the theme. And some of them are blocks that come with WooCommerce. So like this little product slider is a block that’s in WooCommerce core. And then parts like these category callouts are patterns that come with it using WooCommerce blocks, and again we’ve got you know best sellers, got looks just a few sort of patterns that come with it to help you build your pages and you know be be as flexible as possible without sort of overwhelming the user.

So yeah, I’m very excited for this. I have been using it a lot. If you follow me on X, you will see that I am rebuilding the Mercantile website for WordPress merch. And I’m using the Purple theme. And it’s a really good opportunity for us to have like an actual store. As, you know, as a brand, WooCommerce brand that we own. So, the WooCommerce team is running this store for the most part. The events team do all the shipping and product sourcing and things like that. But in terms of the website, the WooCommerce team is running it now. And yeah, rebuilding it using the Purple theme.

So there is some custom stuff that I’ve added on top, like some sort of minor CSS changes that I do on these sliders. And some, some of these effects that happen when you hover are additional code. But it’s kind of revealing that, okay, maybe we need more fancy in our blocks. Like the ability to actually, I don’t know if you saw, but as I scrolled down this page, they sort of fade in quite nicely. And we’ve got these hover effects. And I think some of this stuff we could have as options on the core blocks. Like the layout here, this first one being big isn’t something that that comes with the block, but it’s, it’s giving us this opportunity to see, like, okay, this is what I want to build. So I’m sure there’s people out there that would, would want to achieve the same thing.

So yeah, I’m very excited by the theme itself. And just using it as a way to improve not only the starting point for merchants, you know, first spinning up a WooCommerce site, but Uh, WooCommerce core itself. And some of this stuff has like led to issues that I found in the WordPress site editor itself. Um, and I think it’s a good opportunity to kind of push all of these things forwards at once.

Simon Tomkins: Absolutely. I really liked the, uh, the carousel you had on the homepage, James. That was, that was fun. Yeah, that’s cool.

James Kemp: Yeah, it’s my, it’s my pride and joy.

Simon Tomkins: You spent some time on that.

James Kemp: I did. Well, me and Claude did.

Simon Tomkins: Oh, that’s great. The, the sheen on hover is nice too. Yeah, it’s really good.

James Kemp: So yeah, that’s, uh, that’s the Purple theme. Um, I encourage everyone to try it out, to give us feedback. Um, like I say, it is a starting point. You’re not gonna install it and see a ton of, you know, exciting layouts and things like you might see on the Mercantile demo that I just gave. But the goal is that you should be able to make them. And like, I think for me, a goal would be that you can make these fancy layouts just using WordPress. Like, you don’t need to add custom code. Maybe there’s a plugin that you install to do certain things. But Yeah, I think it being super flexible is what will help WooCommerce thrive over the next few years.

Colm Troy: Well, congrats to the WooCommerce team on finally shipping Purple, because I know it’s been a while coming, and certainly Storefront was getting a bit long in the tooth. But hey, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today, right? So it’s out there, and it’s close to being out there. I took a first look at the weekend. Before you…

James Kemp: I think you have a question, right? But to touch on that, we were going to launch Purple, I think it was sometime last year, and we were pretty close to launching it, and then we pulled back at the last minute. And it’s because we found that actually, you know, some of our blocks weren’t quite ready for this yet. And we wanted to make sure that the blocks were at a good point for us to be able to release this and for it to be, you know, very usable and worthwhile. Um, so it’s been a, it’s already been like instrumental in improving those blocks.

Colm Troy: I think I’ve noticed that as well. Um, yeah, that was where my question was coming from. I, I’m curious as to, I’m fascinated to understand a little bit more about the actual process of how the sausage got made, right? Just from like, even just like the name is interesting, but just, I mean, the ethos around it being a kind of a, it’s not a blank canvas, but a really good solid foundational step is, is definitely the right route to go. But what kind, I’m sure there was a huge, you know, conversation about that internally. And can you speak to a little bit about that? Or is there any secret sauce there that you can’t tell us about, James? Or it’s like, I’m just curious to learn.

James Kemp: So many secrets. Um, I’m, I’m not directly on the team that’s been building it. So there’s, you know, uh, a fairly small team that’s been working on it. And it’s, it’s the team that works a lot with the blocks in WooCommerce core. So they have this kind of understanding of our blocks and also like how to build blocks and what blocks should be.

Colm Troy: Very good.

James Kemp: I mean, since I joined WooCommerce, it’s, it’s been a conversation like, we need a better theme. Storefront has kind of run its, you know, it’s, it’s nearing the end of its life, things are moving on. I think when I joined, Gutenberg was a thing. Maybe not as far along as it is now. But it was clear, like, we need for builders a really good starting point for block themes. We need WooCommerce to have better blocks. And for our blocks to be more consistent and more flexible. And we’re still not quite there yet. Like, as I’m theming this, you know, the checkout, the mini cart, the cart itself are all very much locked down in some ways. There’s things you can do, but it’s not as flexible as some of the other blocks.

But yeah, really, really setting a path for builders to build high-quality block-based sites and start to shift to the block checkout, block cart, eventually the block account pages. But also for merchants who install WooCommerce and have, you know, no idea really what they’re doing, to have a good starting point. Because there’s still something we need to do there. Because obviously, when you install WooCommerce, Purple isn’t going to exist on their site until they install it. So you might see us maybe during onboarding, like encouraging installing that. Um, just to really get them, get them started. Like we want to get them online without them having to spend ages trying to create their actual site.

Katie Keith: Like, I feel like it should be a default theme.

James Kemp: Uh, in what respect?

Katie Keith: Like when you install WooCommerce, it installs a theme to get you started. So you’re set up with a nice looking theme that’s fully optimized for WooCommerce. I know the other default themes are, but not in a Woo sense quite so much.

James Kemp: It would be nice. I don’t know what the .org legalities are around installing other things at the point of activating. I know that there’s some, I think they have to say, yes, I want to install this. And maybe then it can pull it in, you know, automatically.

Katie Keith: Yeah, just a checkbox or something. Do you want to install the default theme with a screenshot?

Colm Troy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that has been a huge point of pain for not just WooCommerce, right? But any ecommerce platform. It’s just that the time from I want a new store to I’m now taking transactions needs to be as small as possible. And it’s, it’s fraught at the best of times, even never mind your theme decision and your apps and your plugins and everything else just takes forever. You know, which payment gateway am I using? Which rates am I paying?

Katie Keith: Hosting.

Colm Troy: Hosting. Yeah, chargebacks, the whole kit and caboodle. And it’s Yeah, any, anywhere, anytime we can get out of the way of merchants to actually getting to the point where they can take transactions is a good thing.

Simon Tomkins: Can I just ask Katie, actually, uh, for your plugins, did you use Storefront as the default demo for everything or did you switch to something else?

Katie Keith: Yeah, yeah, we’re still on Storefront pretty much. As soon as Purple goes live, I will get Claude on the case though. It would’ve been a big project, but I think with AI it’s gonna be quite easy to change all our demos and tweak the colors to our brand. So I think we’ll switch to Purple pretty quickly.

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, makes sense. I would just want to say one thing about Storefront though. It was highly adaptable. Um, yes, you know, with the amount of hooks and filters, you could really change it in, in an extraordinary amount of ways. Um, you know, blocks are probably not quite as adaptable yet. I know they’re getting, they’re getting there, they’re getting more flexible, but But Storefront certainly was a very good approach for developers to, to really, you know, see how flexible WooCommerce could be. And, um, yeah, it wouldn’t be entirely negative either because I think it was a, it was a very, very good, um, intro certainly for me learning WooCommerce was how Storefront did things.

James Kemp: Me too. I, I don’t necessarily know that that’s all down to Storefront, if you know what I mean. Like the, the nature of how WooCommerce was presented on the front end was very much PHP and CSS and HTML. I would say it being potentially less simple now is down to like this block-based era. But I think the thing about block themes is they are just like essentially a blank canvas and everything is a block on the page. And there’s definitely some work going in to make those blocks, not just our blocks, but blocks in general, you know, more flexible. I think you can, you know, insert after and before programmatically. And I love blocks. I think it’s awesome to be able to kind of compose a site visually. But yeah, I definitely agree, like, the flexibility of, of the PHP era was very nice. I would, I would like to see some level of that kind of come back.

Colm Troy: Well, it’s interesting. Again, just obviously, and Katie, you’re in the Shopify ecosystem as well. So are we. But it was just very interesting looking at their theme editing experience has evolved, right? So for the longest time, their template system was, had, was originally Liquid, which is their PHP equivalent, then evolved to be very much JSON, blocks of JSON. They’ve now just this year brought Liquid back, right? So they’re entering this weird kind of hybrid world where it’s, it’s still JSON as today, but there’s very much, at the last major Shopify event, it was announced that Liquid and giving more control back to the developers and then kind of just having a more consistent, cohesive development experience has kind of come back a bit. So these things do tend to go in cycles, I think.

So, and I agree, I think certainly I’m surprised we’re like 30 minutes into this and we’ve only mentioned AI passing twice, which is weird for any kind of conversation these days. But certainly I do think LLMs tend to fare pretty well when it comes to just JSON blobs and being able to organize things. So that I think bodes well, certainly from a future-proofing for where things are going. But yeah, I think I agree. I think if there was a little bit more control there from a templating perspective, that might really elevate blocks to the next level.

Katie Keith: Yeah. If I could just rant about Shopify for a minute, um, which I think I’m allowed on this podcast. Uh, so I, I can’t talk from the developer’s perspective, but from a new user coming into Shopify, the theme experience is terrible compared to WordPress and WooCommerce because you can’t just have like a tick box on a settings page that will enable something in your theme, like add, say, replace the variations with a different layout, for example, which some of our apps do, you’ve got to like go into the, basically the customizer and enable blocks and templates and it’s really unuser-friendly, which surprised me. So I like that in WooCommerce you can interact with the theme from the settings in a much more user-friendly way.

Colm Troy: Yeah, it’s, it’s a very good point. I think it’s, it’s part, I think Patrick at Checkout Summit last year talked about the reality distortion field around Shopify and like people’s assumptions or perceptions that everything’s easier and Shopify couldn’t be further from the truth. Like the theming world over there, even like Again, working with some larger Shopify merchants, not a day goes by where you get one of their app vendors saying, oh, just drop this into the theme. Then they’re installing app extensions and blocks. They have a very complex development experience there that’s not frankly anywhere near as mature as what we have been benefiting from in the WordPress and WooCommerce world for the longest period of time. I think we take that for granted. You don’t realize how useful that is until you operate and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes where you don’t have that.

And I certainly see that all the time is that you also have then content managers because they’re used to going in editing the theme directly, which obviously with a block editor theme you can do that. But like, they’re like, they may be completely changing, you know, the behavior of how like their PDP works or collections works. And it’s like, they can easily break sites, you know, without, and it may be like a day before they’ve realized they’ve broken their add to cart button, for example. So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting.

James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. Um, I think I saw you, you tweeted earlier, right, about, uh, some research that you’ve done that I think lines up quite nicely with, um, this episode, conveniently. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about that? I think it, it was, uh, essentially a customer survey, right? Or an analysis of users?

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, yeah, we ran, um, our first Commerce Gurus customer survey, something we probably should have done some time ago, but we finally got around to it. We had lots of interesting feedback from our customers. So bear in mind, these are sort of Shoptimizer, CommerceKit, Turbo customers. But yeah, we asked them some questions and the main priorities I think were quite interesting for us. So the standout challenge sort of universally seems to be performance. So 77% of customers said performance is a main challenge for them. Sort of alongside that, 58% said plugin bloat as well, and 44% said checkout conversion and abandoned carts.

So yeah, I was expecting, you know, performance to be up there, but 77% was very interesting. It’s really almost everybody is sort of, you know, finds performance an issue. But kind of alongside that, 92% of customers are actually checking Core Web Vitals, you know, at least occasionally. So they’re aware of performance. And but it’s despite being aware of it, despite checking it regularly, it’s still a massive challenge. So, you know, people are using performance plugins, but despite everything, it’s a complicated problem. And it maintains the case, particularly with WooCommerce. I think there’s a lot of very specific WooCommerce performance issues that are a challenge to solve.

James Kemp: Yeah, it’s an interesting topic, because I think performance in our space is very much defined by multiple things that we don’t have control over. Like, you know, a lot of the time when, when performance is an issue, it’s because the hosting is, you know, bad. Essentially, you’re on a shared host, it’s not got enough, enough power to actually serve your, your users to the site. And maybe you have multiples of plugins installed that are slowing it down in some way. And it’s kind of hard to identify all of these things. and actually, you know, improve it without being more technically minded. Do you have an idea of what type of user was answering, or what type of user you were looking at in these results?

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, so, well, 52% were store merchants. So about half of them were actually merchants. The other 50% were agencies or developers, or some people, you know, ticked multiple boxes, but at least 50%, 52% were…

James Kemp: Did you notice a shift in the sort of priorities for each segment of users?

Simon Tomkins: Performance was still like very, very high for both. I think it was slightly higher if you were a developer, but it was still very high for merchants too. So I think even store merchants are battling performance as an issue, but developers was even slightly higher again. So I think it’s, but Yeah, maintain.

Colm Troy: I think that may be more a reflection that developers are aware it’s something, right, more than a merchant, you know, maybe ignorance is bliss sometimes. So, you know, right, right.

James Kemp: And do you, do you cater towards any performance improvements? I know you have an extension for that, right?

Colm Troy: We do. Yeah, we have, we have a plugin called Turbo, which essentially is, it goes the full gamut of trying to isolate and eliminate performance bottlenecks across the full stack, right? So what you just said, James, is obviously the most important. Like, if you’re, if you’re building a site on a poor foundation, right, which fortunately is the reality, I think that is probably the number one thing that leads to the perception that WordPress WooCommerce is quote unquote slower than other competing platforms. And I think if we magically solve that overnight, that would actually go a long way to dissuading a lot of those things.

So what you end up having is the likes of us or any other vendors we’re fighting against that with one hand behind our back before we start, right? Because you’re essentially in many cases having to cover up or mask for some of those problems. True whether it’s page caching, edge caching, you know, name your flavor. Like we always say, the first thing you got to do is make sure that your uncached add to cart times and your checkout times are as fast as possible. Because if they’re not, you’re always going to end up losing at some point. Like you can edge cache out the wazoo for for all of the users who are not engaging with your store. But what happens to the ones who do engage? Like, as soon as you have someone click a coupon or add to cart and they’re suddenly now bypassing your caches, if they’re having a slow experience, then all that work is for nothing. Not for nothing, but, you know, you’re effectively just pushing the problem further downstream.

Um, so I, that is definitely the biggest problem. I think it’s gotten better over time, right? And obviously, just as I think more people in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem get improved, the quality of products that consumers are using or merchants are using is becoming less of an issue. But it is still the biggest problem that we see. So everything that we do in Turbo, I mean, we use Turbo on our own website and we’re performance specialists who’ve been doing it for a long, long time. Our uncached add to cart times are very, very fast. They’re a couple hundred milliseconds tops. But we still use it because it helps to make things easier. Right? So where we can do things in our own themes and our own plugins, we’ll do them. But this is essentially trying to make not quite one-click, but as close as possible one-click, where you’re getting lazy loading of images, deferring scripts, all those tips and tricks. And we could have a dedicated, you know, series of podcasts on each of those topics individually. So I won’t go into any further. But, um, yeah, it’s, it is a challenge. It’s, it is, you know, and it starts with having really strong foundations, no matter what set of themes or plugins you’re using.

Simon Tomkins: And that as well, maybe, you know, sometimes with performance, it’s a trade-off, you know. I mean, if you want, say, like a large video in your hero, you just got to be aware that that is going to make your site a little bit slower. But maybe some brands, that’s what they want to do in e-commerce. Like, we would suggest it’ll be a negative for performance, but there’s always a trade-off for these things. But certain brands will want to, you know, accept that trade-off and, you know, go for something that’s more more visual and, and, you know, for them more effective, um, despite the, despite the performance hit.

James Kemp: For sure. I think, um, there’s a comment from Ian in the chat, uh, that we should name and shame in admin notices. Uh, I, I think that’s probably something we should do actually. Um, maybe not in a controversial way, but to, yeah, to make it more obvious when your site is slow because of something. Because I think there’s a perception, like, if you have your store set up and then your users are saying, like, I can’t check out, it’s super slow, the merchant and potentially even the builders are going to be like, okay, you know, WooCommerce is slow. When really we haven’t identified that actually there’s some, like, super old script that’s running that’s causing everything to be slow.

And I do think, you know, identifying those to the user, to the merchant, or to the builder more obviously. We do some of this in like the status page, but it’s kind of comparing numbers. It’s not directly saying like this is causing your site to be, you know, 5 seconds at checkout versus less than 1. So I think some sort of whether it’s a WooCommerce level or WordPress level, uh, like health dashboard would be very useful.

Katie Keith: Well, there is precedent as well. I’ve seen WordPress themes that will have a dashboard notice to advise you that your memory limit is lower than the recommendation for the theme, for example. So that is a thing. And I think it would need to be WooCommerce level in a way, because the requirements for WooCommerce are probably a bit more stringent than WordPress. A WordPress site has a lot less on it if it’s a simple one. So I think it would be on the Woo level.

Colm Troy: Ian’s obviously very confident that none of his plugins are going up on the name and shame list. So kudos to Ian.

James Kemp: That is true. I would never do that to Ian. Have you noticed any sort of trade-offs that you have to make in order to make a site performant, but maybe not achieve the aesthetics that you’re looking for?

Colm Troy: I deal with this every single week, James. So dealing with some of those bigger merchants where, um, they want to have, I think Simon alluded to one there in particular, which is right, we’re dealing with right now, which is a video hero, right? So for 5, 6, 7 years ago, you had every major D2C e-commerce store having a nice big full-page video hero. They look cool, marketing loves them, they spend, you know, tens of thousands on these great promo reels. They’re terrible for performance. And it’s just like, it’s just physics, right? There’s just too much too many megabytes in the pipe and it’s going to hurt your LCPs.

I’m working with someone on this at the moment where we’re squeezing every last microsecond out of it and it’s just like we’re trying all the tricks with FFmpeg, we’re doing all the handbrakes, every different encoding type and it’s just, look, there’s no, then someone like, we’re like, okay, can we go with a 10-second video? Can we give you, no, we want 30. Well, actually, can we try 5? Actually, no, they want 15 now. It’s just like, that is something that’s a real example of, and in a way I understand it, right? Because they’re in like, they, those videos work really well top of funnel. Like if you’re doing an Instagram campaign or a TikTok campaign or Facebook, they’re incredibly immersive. They, they’re attention grabbing. They work. It’s natural that you would then as a brand or a merchant think we want to put our best foot forward when people land on our homepage.

But actually, you know, a lot of our job then is they don’t like being told don’t do that, and here’s why. So you’re trying to produce as much evidence as you can. Like a lot of what we do with Shoptimizer is like every single pixel we have on the screen is there for a reason, and that’s it. Like everything, we overthink things to a fault about like what the colors of buttons are, the position that things are. So when you then encounter somebody who has the best intentions for their for their brand, and that’s diametrically opposed to what’s best for conversion, that’s a difficult conversation to have. And quite often you’re having to present, you know, evidence based on real numbers, which can be easy in some cases to find. There’s lots of conversion rate optimization studies about what color your add to cart button should be. I can tell you from direct experience this week, there’s a lot less about the impact of video heroes on homepages because I’ve looked to try and find them and they’re thin on the ground and it’s probably worthy of a, you know, a decent decent-sized split test by one of the major brands.

But what I can tell you is based on anecdotally, if you looked at 100 DTCs 7 years ago, most of them had video heroes. Today, I looked at about 50 of them the other day and there was only about 4 or 5 of them. And reebok.com had a video hero about 2 weeks ago. It’s gone now. So they’re obviously running a split test. Maybe I’m just in a different B group, but that’s a really good example. I mean, there’s others like that and it tends to be things where it’s like, may be a really good idea from a branding and marketing perspective, but may not be a great idea from a performance perspective.

And then you have to lean on where you don’t have direct evidence in your existing analytics somewhere. You have to lean on, well, what are the big guys, the billion-dollar DTC companies doing? What’s adidas.com doing? What’s Reebok? What’s Nike doing? And then actually saying, well, they likely have fairly big teams of people who are growth engineers, data science people looking at what’s happening. I sometimes lean on Amazon, but I don’t like leaning on Amazon because Amazon, I think, is its own unique ecosystem.

Simon Tomkins: It’s exceptional.

Colm Troy: You know, and like, you know, it’s like, it’s almost a necessary evil at this point. It’s part of, you know, it’s like the electrical grid at this point in time. Like everybody knows and they’ve learned the ecosystem, but there is still benefits to it there in terms of they don’t, they don’t go crazy with immersive video on their homepage, for example. You know, it tends to be very specific calls to action. So, it’s, yeah, there is always friction there. And I think there always will be.

James Kemp: I agree, yeah. With the carousel that you saw on the Mercantile homepage, there was some serious performance issues with that. And I had to kind of strip it back quite a bit to make it to a point where I was okay with whatever issues. And there’s like some settings that if you don’t have as powerful of a device, it will kind of strip it back a bit further. Have you noticed anything recently that’s changed in terms of what a theme needs to be able to handle versus, you know, what you might expect a plugin to handle in terms of the, you know, the last 10 years, I guess?

Colm Troy: Yeah, I mean, that, that one, I think ebbs and flows, right? It does change. I mean, historically, themes were just a presentation layer. Then they started taking on more and more functionality. Then certainly even in our Envato days, they really, to their credit, I mean, lots of people dissed on Envato back in the day, but the one thing they did encourage strongly was get all functionality into a plugin. Try and have the theme be the presentation layer. We’ve pretty much stuck to that where we can, where CommerceKit has bundled up a lot of the features and functionality that we actually present via Shoptimizer.

And I think where you’re going with Purple and with WooCommerce in general, where the platform has as much batteries included as possible within reason, and then the theme becomes the presentation there, I think that’s a very, very, very smart direction to go. And it’s great to see. Um, and I think, you know, the likes of yourself dogfooding it on the store, you’re obviously then getting to see where the gaps are with the existing blocks, which I think is is also a really good thing because then internally WooCommerce has another voice directly inside, right? The person working on the themes are also working on the blocks. They could say, okay, well, like you alluded to earlier, you could say, well, maybe we need a few more knobs and dials on a few of those blocks to make sure that the theme can stay presentation specific.

So that I think is going to continue to evolve, right? Because even in the back to scary old AI world and LLMs. LLMs will, they’re text prediction engines. They’ll copy the foundations that are there. If they see there’s lots of logic wrapped up in a theme, they will continue to duplicate that and that will grow and spread like a contagion. If they see that the fundamental underlying platform has a lot of that extensibility in place, then it’s in a much better place. I think that’s something I’m fascinated to see how this all evolves. Anyone who claims to know the answers, you know, isn’t close to this stuff. It, it, it’s anyone’s guess as to how this all evolves. Um, and certainly I know what I’d like to see, but like whether that ends up happening or not is, is anyone’s guess.

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, I just add to that as well that I think the More in Core initiative is, is a good one in general. I think, I think WooCommerce was lacking a little bit too much out of the box. Um, and I think bringing in some sensible sort of additional features for merchants who just want to get up and running is actually, you know, a much, it’s a sensible approach, I think. You know, when we built CommerceKit, the companion plugin, it really was a lot of the pieces that, you know, WooCommerce was missing. So we had order bumps, we had variation images, we had countdowns, we had wishlists, we had waitlists, we had an advanced kind of search, you know, search suggestions.

So, you know, for us, even with CommerceKit, it’ll be very important for us as Purple has developed that CommerceKit becomes compatible with Purple as a really good default experience that I think we can still, and other plugin developers can still bring additional functionality to core Woo because core Woo will never have everything. And particularly like we’re looking at, particularly CRO, we’re looking at conversion features. We don’t expect core Woo to have everything. So that’s where I think, you know, other plugin developers can look at how can we enhance it, particularly Purple compatibility, I think will be very important.

Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So in terms of Purple, you have your own theme. Purple’s kind of the new default theme for a merchant that is choosing a theme for their store, or it’s a developer choosing for a client. When would you recommend using something like Purple and when should they go independent? How would you address that balance? Because I think there’s a role for both.

Colm Troy: I think there’s probably a workflow chart. I love my workflow charts, Katie, right? So there’s almost like you choose your own adventure based on where you are, right? And I think if you’re a developer and you want to be at the frontier of what James and WooCommerce are doing, I think Purple is your natural starting point, right? It is literally just about to go live. James has clearly shown earlier on in the episode, you know, some great work he’s doing. So it’s, it’s ready, right? It is the right place to be. Wire up your LLMs, steer them the right way, and that’s probably the right solution for certainly if you’re a developer, right?

If you’re a merchant, and I have a lot, I speak with merchants daily, and you’re not technical, and I don’t care how many LLMs you have, if you don’t want to be on the hook for developing and managing and supporting your own theme, then it makes more sense maybe to look at something like Shoptimizer or another established theme that has support team behind it who you can ask questions about conversion rate optimization, everything else. I think e-commerce merchants are really busy. As we all know, it’s not for the faint of heart. They’re doing 1,001 things. Their website and what it looks like is just one small line item of 1,000 things that they have to do on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s like, okay, I have Claude, I have ChatGPT, I have all the tools, but maybe I need to deal with the other 55,000 fires that need to be put out running an e-commerce business every day of the week. just want the theme, quote unquote, taken care of, then I think it makes more sense to look at something off the shelf.

But certainly, and then like beyond that, in terms of like completely custom from the ground up, I think you need to be much further on. I would delay that as long as possible. Like, I’ve worked with some big ecommerce merchants that did $50-60 million a year plus. And they’re like either running stock WooCommerce themes or stock Dawn and the Shopify ecosystem, you can get really far. You know, just going and using what’s out of the box. I think it starts to make sense when you can afford to manage a team internally. And maybe that looks different in the world of AI where your team is just a bunch of bots instead of physical meat proxies sitting at computers. But like, it, it, you’re now on the hook for managing all that.

You know, I think there was a great tweet, uh, Simon, we were talking about yesterday where it’s like, Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. That was a great tweet. Congratulations, you’ve built your own LMS. Now you’re on the hook for it. It was the longest list I’ve ever seen in my whole life. It was all the edge cases of all the things that they’ve built into their platform. I think that’s the key here. It’s like, what do you want to spend your day? LLMs are multi-threaded, but humans aren’t. You only get the same amount of waking air. We don’t all want to be sitting at computers all day, hopefully, even though we seem to be spending more and more time at them than ever. But the idea is like, choose the right path for where you’re at. It would be my strong opinion on it.

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, just one added point as well. I think we market it as well, Shoptimizer and CommerceKit, as a 1,000-hour head start. So you’re combining years here of e-commerce decisions and bug fixes and browser quirks and accessibility work and performance work with real customer feedback as well, all baked into this. So you’re buying more than just a theme. I think you’re buying access as well to a group of makers that knows their stuff. So I think that’s a very important aspect, I think, of whether you go for a premium theme or a premium plugin. It’s access to the makers who have all of this knowledge baked in, which I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as an LLM kind of actually vibe coding solutions isn’t quite, doesn’t have this sort of in-depth knowledge just yet.

James Kemp: I think that’s kind of been the case for a long time as well. Like, I know Iconic, my previous company, did really well because our support was always there. Like, we were very hands-on with support. And we typically just, you know, whatever someone wanted, within reason, we were able to kind of implement and ship. And I think maybe we were the agents at the time. But yeah, like you say, I don’t think merchants particularly would want to be building their own things, maintaining that. Like you say, we could do that all day and not have time to actually run our business.

I’ve touched on that before as well with, there was a thread, I think it was Rodolfo, the other day asking about if plugins are dead. And my answer is no. I don’t think so. But I do think some of the smaller plugins that maybe do one, one thing don’t necessarily need to be updated all the time. I do think, I don’t think they’ll disappear. Like, they’ll still exist. I just don’t think people will need them as much. But again, I’m not sure, like, right now, maybe in the future that a merchant would still be able to create that thing themselves, even if they don’t have to update it. Um, so I don’t know, it’s, uh, it’s…

Colm Troy: And it’s changing by the day, James, right? So like, as each, as the models get smarter, you know, that bar is getting higher and higher all the time, you know, with a frightening pace. Um, but yeah, I, it’s, it’s going to be very interesting to see how it all plays out.

James Kemp: Oh, for sure. Um, if you’re choosing a theme, I think a lot of the time people choose a theme based on how it looks. Like, does this theme look how I want my website to look? Or can I tweak it, you know, within a day or two to make it look how I want my site to look? Is there anything else that you’ve heard that people look for, or that you believe they should be looking for when choosing a theme?

Simon Tomkins: Performance.

James Kemp: And how do you, how do you, how do you know that? Like, other than the site saying this theme is performant?

Colm Troy: I mean, you can run it through Lighthouse just to get a some field, like, so just real light field data. Look at Core Web Vitals. If the, if the theme vendor has example stores that are using the theme, you can look at the CrUX data for, for that theme for the last, I can’t remember what the CrUX period is now. It’s probably got to be a year’s worth of data there that you can actually see how those themes have performed over that time. So those 2 things, look at, you know, the uncached add to cart time on their own demos. If a vendor hasn’t gone to the bother of making sure their demo is super fast, then, yeah, likely they don’t really understand e-com. Like, they might know how to make a very visually appealing theme, but speed is vital for e-commerce.

Simon Tomkins: And check product page performance. It’s not just the homepage. Check, check PDPs.

Colm Troy: Yeah. And then the quality of the vendor. How long have they been doing this stuff? How many reviews have they got? Do your due diligence just like you would with any plugin or anything. To me, that’s more important. That is our sustainable competitive advantage, if we have one, is that we’re all experts at what we do. And we have teams of people who are here to help people when they run into issues that their, you know, their agents of choice can’t help them with, or if they need advice on how to extend things, you know. So yeah, I would look for those things. Who are the people behind the product?

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, I’d also just add to that, just look at the changelog. How many updates are there? Are the updates actually meaningful? Do the updates actually include things like accessibility? Are they, do they care about keyboard navigation? You know, you can see from the language of the changelog, are these things actually important?

Colm Troy: Yeah, EAA compliance has been a thing in Europe for accessibility, and in the US, obviously, it’s even more litigious where you’ve got ADA lawsuits popping up all the time. And that is something that, you know, it’s kind of almost seen as an inconvenience, like, for a lot of merchants, but it can be a very expensive one now. And I think as Simon said, in Ireland you can actually end up in jail for accessibility compliance issues with EAA. So yeah.

Simon Tomkins: Yeah. And as Colm said, reviews. I think looking at particularly reviews that mention support, and that’s actually very important to have a human on the other end that actually understands your problem. And as you all know, and James, I’m sure you know as well, is that good support doesn’t just support the product, but I think sometimes we’re almost WooCommerce support as well. We’re WordPress support. We’re giving advice on, you know, other tools, other vendors, you know, other examples that people should learn from. So I think we, we do a lot more than just support our own products. It’s supporting the ecosystem, I think, as well.

Colm Troy: Like recommending Barn2 products, for example.

James Kemp: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we, we used to do a lot of them.

Katie Keith: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And actually, one tip would be to send a support ticket before you buy just for the sake of Um, and I think theme support’s really important. This is largely why I’ve never launched a theme. It feels really all-encompassing, like hosting support, whereas plugin support, yeah, sure, you end up helping with WooCommerce, but not all the aspects of the website. Um, so yeah, the theme company that you use is really important because the theme does touch all the parts of, certainly of the backend, but also the frontend. front end of the site. So you do need to test out that support.

Colm Troy: Yeah, we get asked a lot more questions about our themes than our plugins, that’s for sure.

James Kemp: And it’s a huge job as well to, to come from, you know, one theme to another and, you know, make it, make it work how you want it to. Awesome. This has been a really cool conversation. I feel like we could dive even deeper into it. But we have come up to our time here. Where can people find you both online?

Simon Tomkins: Yeah, well, we can find us on commercegurus.com. On LinkedIn, you can find me on Simon Tompkins. Twitter or X, it’s Commerce Gurus.

Colm Troy: Still call it Twitter.

Simon Tomkins: Still call it Twitter. One little plug I’ll give is that our newsletter every Friday is available at commercegurus.com/newsletter, and we’ve just published our 361st issue today. So our newsletter features WooCommerce, CRO, SEO, all kinds of interesting tips, I think, for, for merchants and developers. So we would love you to, to sign up at commercegurus.com/newsletter.

Katie Keith: Nice. Next time will be on the 3rd of November. We’ll be talking to a WooCommerce merchant, Mike Maloney, about the realities of building a multi-vendor marketplace on WooCommerce.

James Kemp: Yeah, I’m looking forward to that one. He’s, um, he’s, uh, essentially a photographer. He’s made like loads of filters and things which, uh, I have used in the past, which is very cool. Um, as always, subscribe on dothewoo.com, uh, YouTube at Do the Woo Podcast, and on X or Twitter as we like to call it, uh, @DoTheWoo. Thanks for watching.

Colm Troy: Bye. Thank you. Bye.

Simon Tomkins: Bye.