Setting up your own website with OpenCart ‘premium themes’
We get regular enquiries from people who have set up their own sites with cheap hosting, one click installs of OpenCart and OpenCart premium themes that they bought for £30 off the internet. While it might seem like a cheap, easy way of getting started with ecommerce, the stories we hear indicate it’s not always plain sailing.
Cheap hosting
Cheap hosting is cheap for a reason. The servers are often ‘oversold’, which means that they contain far too many websites to run fast enough to keep up. This results in slow performance for all sites on that server and makes your site take longer to load. This annoys customers and they may leave for another site if they have to wait too long. Our green web hosting is not only environmentally friendly, but fast and well supported. It’s not much more than the bargain basement hosting either!
OpenCart Premium Themes – full of clutter?
The flashy themes with thousands of options cheaply available online can look like a really tempting shortcut to a great looking site. There are two main issues with these themes – editing them, and the bloat of all those features.
Editing somebody else’s code means learning how they have built things before you can safely edit it. Especially with mobile responsive templates, editing one thing can have drastic effects on other parts of the site or the mobile templates. In some cases, dodgy code means redoing it from scratch is quicker!
Adding tons of sliders, fonts, social sharing buttons and other such clutter increases the page size. When a theme includes all of this stuff on every page, your site can be slow loading and seem unresponsive. It’s often better to just include what’s needed for your particular project and leave the rest out.
Using a ready made template also means your shop looks like all the others that use that theme.
How we can help
Rather than getting in a pickle with cheap hosting, so-called OpenCart premium themes and unfamiliar systems, we can design and build you a beautiful, lean OpenCart ecommerce website. With our low overheads we can offer better value than many agencies – call us on 01636 812 551 and we’ll be glad to discuss your project.