Top 10 WordPress Plugins Essential for Ecommerce Sites

WordPress started out as a blogger’s paradise, it stayed and evolved as one of the best stops for bloggers for years, and has now slowly and steadily enticed the business bigwigs to sell their products through it.

And why not, its accessibility and user interface are much easier and more interactive than its many competitors. Moreover, its hands-on services are like no one out there! All you would need to do is get yourself some bang-on plugins and you are on! And if this seems like a big task to you, simply hire a WordPress developer.

What these plugins are, really? Let us check out the best ones.

Best WordPress Plugins for ECommerce Sites

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a simple, powerful, and extendable e-commerce platform for WordPress. It promises to woo your customers when they visit your online store. It has been rated at 4.1/5 by WordPress and has nearly 2 million downloads in its kitty, It sure looks like the plugin that is capable enough to boost up your store in a good way.

WooCommerce is flexible in a way that allows you to customize your store based on your products and business nature. It has the strength and advantage to be built around WordPress best practices.

The plugin offers a very user-friendly interface that allows you to keep up with the performance of your online store without much hassle of clicking and coding, as it is all available on the dashboard.

The plugin is entirely customizable, compatible with WordPress themes, and also offers a PayPal Gateway for easy shopping and payment. Apart from these, it allows credit card payment options, cash on delivery, and all other payments being secured by Mijireh.

It is even tied up with ShareThis and ShareDaddy to allow you to socially link your store.

2. Elementor – Page Builder Plugin for WordPress

Over 5 million downloads make Elementor one of the most popular WordPress page-building plugins. As its core functionality, Elementor provides drag-and-drop functionality so users can easily customize posts and pages.

Additionally, more than 100 ready-made page templates can be used to set up any website. 90+ widget options make it easy to include features such as social media icons and a progress bar without installing extra plugins.

You can use Elementor with almost any WordPress theme, but make sure to pick one Elementor-ready to avoid issues. If in doubt, use the Hello Elementor WordPress theme.

Getting a premium plan will allow you to use the Elementor theme builder. By modifying essential elements of the theme, like headers, footers, and even product pages, you can create a theme from scratch.

3. Wordfence Security

For many website owners, Wordfence is the most popular WordPress security plugin since it covers the most fundamental aspects of security, including login security, malware detection, and malicious traffic prevention.

Upon installing the plugin, the Wordfence dashboard will display several security-related details, such as an overview of the firewall, blocked attacks, and security issues.

Using the login security feature, you can integrate two-factor authentication with the WordPress admin page. All you need to do is scan a QR code provided on the admin page with an authentication app on your mobile device and enter the verification code.

Malware scanners check for malicious code in WordPress themes and plugins. Moreover, it detects security vulnerabilities such as possible backdoors, code injections, and malicious redirects. You can check for broken links on your website using the plugin’s broken link checker.

Protect your website from malicious traffic with Wordfence’s web application firewall (WAF). It prevents brute force attacks by blocking IP addresses that fail to log in after a specific number of attempts.

As soon as the plugin is installed, you can experiment with all the firewall’s features and prevent false positives, ensuring more efficient protection of your site.

Read Also: 6 Essential WordPress Tips to Save Time and Boost Productivity

4. All-In-One SEO

This SEO toolkit plugin from AIO SEO has many powerful features, such as its TruSEO feature, which checks the keyword, meta description, links, and content length. The software then provides an overall SEO score and suggests ways to improve it.

Another noteworthy feature of the plugin is the redirect manager, which supports your site by ensuring that your website visitors are redirected to the correct page.

As a final benefit, the embedded schema markup provides valuable information on search engine result pages, including suggestions for improving your site’s ranking and click-through rates.

5. Easy Digital Downloads

This plugin caters to a specific market. It allows for easy digital downloads. If your business is all about the digitized era and your store sells digital media, then this is the go-to plugin for you.

This plugin is not like others that are loaded with features. It is more character-specific and focused on catering to a very specific market. All its features are integrated to help make that experience better.

It boasts 200,000 downloads and 4.8 ratings. Having said it is not loaded with the whole bag of features, but it still does come with the basic ones that are needed to get your store online. Easy digital downloads include various payment gateway options – Obviously – Promotional code system if you happen to have offers and things, the option to download multiple files, bulk purchases, etc.

Even though this is not a plugin for all, it does cater to your needs.

6. Contact Forms by WP Forms

WPForms is a powerful contact form plugin for WordPress. The form editor’s drag-and-drop functionality and pre-made templates help you quickly create forms for your website.

The free plugin comes with 22 pre-made forms, including a contact form, registration form, and newsletter signup form, but you can also design your own.

This plugin creates forms that are responsive, which means they work well on mobile devices and have spam protection features such as hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA.

Using the included block or a shortcode, you can embed any WordPress form into a page or post.

7. Lite Speed Cache

To ensure a top-performing website, WordPress caching is essential, and LiteSpeed Cache is a must-have plugin.

With this free WordPress plugin, you can manage the site cache easily through the intuitive interface and take advantage of advanced caching features.

For example, several cache controls allow you to turn on or off certain aspects of the site, such as logged-in users, PHP resources, or the login page. Specific URLs can also be cleared of cache.

Aside from caching tools for speeding up your website, the plugin includes a feature that optimizes CSS and Javascript files. In addition, QUIC. Cloud CDN can be enabled using the CDN settings on the site.

8. Member Press

MemberPress is a premium membership plugin that helps you monetize your paid membership site by selling online courses, membership-based digital downloads, and other exclusive content.

It is easy to set up and has a professional support team. It is also compatible with plugins such as bbPress for creating a password-protected forum or Easy Affiliate for creating an affiliate program.

For the membership program, you can set up multiple plans, and the pricing page can be customized. In addition, you can limit membership access to pages, posts, files, and categories by using the content restriction feature.

Users are quickly reminded when their plans are due for renewal, thanks to the automated billing system. In addition, revocation or renewal of membership will be automatically handled via the plugin.

9. Mailchimp

Mailchimp for WordPress (MC4WP) lets you build a mailing list for your Mailchimp account using a WordPress plugin. The free version supports a list of up to 2,000 subscribers.

Using this plugin, you can easily create subscription forms. A variety of pre-made fields are available in the user-friendly interface. To display them, select them from the list. A form preview will be shown, while the code view is helpful for rearrangements or adjusting prebuilt texts.

You can customize the form appearance using basic or predefined themes in the free version. It is also possible to inherit the form’s styles from the active theme. To access the style builder, upgrade to the premium plan.

10. WP Mail SMTP – Best Newsletter Plugin

The WP Mail SMTP plugin works best when combined with Mailchimp for WordPress. For marketing campaigns, you can use this plugin to send emails to your subscribers.

The WordPress site often fails to send emails correctly to website owners. By configuring the wp_mail() function to use a proper SMTP server, WP Mail SMTP solves this issue.

You can also choose among many SMTP providers, such as SMTP.com, Sendinblue, Microsoft, and Google. Then, a few clicks are all it takes to set up the SMTP server. Alternatively, you can follow the wizard to set up SMTP based on your preference.

11. Monster Insights

MonsterInsights offers seamless integration with Google Analytics and quick configuration, making it one of the most popular WordPress plugins. Moreover, your WordPress dashboard will be equipped with several tools to track the performance of your website.

Using the setup wizard, you’ll be able to connect to your Google Analytics account once the plugin has been installed. Then go to your WordPress admin panel and access the MonsterInsights dashboard.

The plugin will display site statistics in real-time, allowing you to identify and resolve any issue.

Several websites can benefit from MonsterInsights, such as affiliate tracking, demographic tracking, post tracking, and more. You can also set up analytics for your online store using the WooCommerce integration.

12. UpDraft – WP Backup Plugin

It’s imperative to back up WordPress sites to prevent data loss in case of system failure, hard drive failure, or security breach. Regarding WordPress backup management, UpdraftPlus is one of the leading plugins.

Using the plugin’s intuitive interface, you can easily create a backup and restore your website data. In addition, through the settings panel, you can schedule automatic backups of your files and databases.

UpdraftPlus can be connected to several remote storage solutions, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, as well as FTP and email for simple data transfer.

A premium plan is required to access UpdraftPlus Vault, the plugin’s remote storage. UpdraftPlus Vault seamlessly stores and restores website data. Another excellent premium feature is database encryption to ensure the security of your website data.

In Conclusion

With the abundance of plugins available for WordPress, adding features and functionality is easy. The only thing you need to do is choose one that suits your needs.

Creating a powerful website with WordPress is not limited to how many plugins you install. As a result, you should be cautious when installing WordPress plugins.

If you activate too many WordPress plugins, your site may load slowly and present a security risk. It would be best if you also chose plugins that you can trust.

It is, therefore, a wise idea to always check the number of active installations and user reviews in the WordPress plugin directory. It would help if you also chose frequently updated plugins as they are more secure and less likely to cause compatibility problems.