You can be your own worst enemy, run your WordPress e-commerce site safely

Take a few steps to protect your site from yourself.

This is not all about evil hackers, this is about evil you!

Backup

Set up a good automatic backup system. Don’t just rely on your host to do it. Even if they do you are at the mercy of their response time. Be self sufficient. You do not want to enter those 2000 products again if something goes wrong. Backup your site to a remote location, not on your own server. If something goes wrong on your server you may not be able to get your backups! You can set up your site to backup everything automatically once a day and keep say the last 7 backups. You can have it automatically send those backups to a Amazon S3 storage account. A S3 account will cost you about 14 cents a month! Thats right $1.68 a year for peace of mind. You use BackupBuddy which I would call the must have plugin. $75

Updates, don’t click that button!

A point that people just ignore too often. Updates. It is all well and good to update WordPress or a plugin and have something go wrong putting your blog on obscure mid western mountain grasses of the pre cambrian era out of action for a couple of weeks. Not so with your online shop. downtime is money and customers lost. People seem to have an irresistible urge to click the update button. Basic rule don’t update if there is nothing you really need. If your shop works leave it alone.

Of course that is not a long term strategy, eventually there will be a feature you need or a security patch you must have. BackupBuddy to the rescue again. You can make a full backup of your site. Make a subfolder and then with a few clicks unpack a perfect copy of your site into that folder. No need even to install WordPress. There you can try an update, see if it breaks anything, like WordPress 3.3 did for lots of WP e-Commerce users! If it does, delete the whole test site and unpack an older backup to have your test site back up and running in minutes. You just saved yourself some big pain.
In fact all those poor people who are having problems with WP e-Commerce after updating to WordPress 3.3 could have wound their actual shops back with this method. My site has more information with videoson using Backup buddy for various problems.

Hosts, you get what you pay for!

Location, location, location! The mantra of commercial real estate. Well it applies to online commerce too. Use a good host, you get what you pay for. People come to me all the time saying I want to use caching plugins, cloud storage etc etc to speed up my site because it is so slow. Well I see hundreds of sites running with WP e-Commerce and Storefront themes. I see them horribly slow and perfectly normal. They are all basically the same thing, the variable is the host. Hostgator is pretty well regarded. GoDaddy is not. DotEasy seems good. Want to move? BackupBuddy can save you again. You can just pack up and move your site in minutes. Check first if your new host will just do it for you.

They will not buy what they never see

SEO (search engine optimization). Read about it. Find out how it works. I have a site owner who lives and breaths it, his tiny site now comes up on page 1 of search results in the crowded space of books and reading. You must start with a good SEO plugin from the start, luckily this time it is free, so no excuses.
Take the time to learn a bit about what Search Engines look for, how their algorithms rank sites. For example, they rank sites with changing content higher. If you have a blog and add an article once a week, you will rank higher than the same site which stays the same. Static sites disappear from Google.

Test it Local

You can setup a local web server. Sounds scary, is not really. It has become a pretty much regular software install. This is a bit more geeky and not as important as the previous points.
For a Windows computer you use WAMP
for a Mac you use MAMP.
Then you can run your test site on your computer and not on the internet. You can work on it anywhere. It is much faster than being online doing edits.

So take the time people, a little effort can go along way.