Choosing WordPress for your eCommerce website will not only save your eCommerce development cost but will also help you to get a robust & easy-to-use CMS for running your eCommerce business.
Here are but a few major reasons for choosing WordPress to build your eCommerce website:
- There are more than 60 million installations of WordPress.
- WordPress is a free open source that’s being built & maintained by volunteers.
- You can easily integrate themes to customize the appearance of your eCommerce website front end.
- You can also integrate plugins with your eCommerce store to enhance its functionality too.
- WordPress is constantly updated to cope with new technologies, thereby making it more secure.
Now that we already know the major reasons to choose WordPress for developing an online store, let’s have a look over 9 important plugins that you must integrate & use with your WordPress eCommerce website.
#1 WooCommerce
Why WooCommerce?
Although there are several WordPress plugins that you can use to build an eCommerce website, WooCommerce is the most popular and reliable among them.
What are the major benefits of WooCommerce & why you must choose it?
- WooCommerce is totally free to use. You can easily install it and after making a few settings, you can start selling online, almost instantly.
- WooCommerce is flexible. It simply means no matter what your requirement is, you can easily achieve it by customizing the WooCommerce plugin. There are plenty of WordPress developers available who can help you to customize the WooCommerce plugin to match your needs.
- It’s Simple. As I already mentioned above, it takes only a few minutes to install, activate and set the preferences of eCommerce pages in order to start selling your products.
- There are many themes available for WooCommerce exclusively that you can use with your website and give it a new look.
- There are also several plugins that are compatible with WooCommerce and can help you to extend the functionality of your eCommerce store.
#2 OptinMonster
What can OptinMonster do for your eCommerce website?
OptinMonster is perhaps one of the most powerful conversion optimization & lead generation software available today.
How OptinMonster can help you:
- Reducing cart abandonment rate.
- Growing your email list. By providing optin forms like Exit-Intent® popups, Fullscreen Welcome Mats, and Scroll boxes, OptinMonster can help you dramatically boost conversions and get more email subscribers.
- Their smart targeting features allow you to display relevant promotions, thereby improving your overall sales conversion rate
#3 Yoast SEO
If you have an eCommerce website but no traffic on it, you are not going to get any sales.
So if you are really serious about your eCommerce business, you must think about getting organic traffic to your website and getting more sales.
Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins available to improve the visibility of your website on search engines.
Yoast SEO allows you to choose a focus keyword on every page of your site, and then gives you suggestions to use it appropriately on that page. Needless to mention, when you focus on the important keywords and write the content appropriately on those keywords, your website gets a higher chance of ranking in the top positions of search engines.
#4 Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery helps you create a great-looking & responsive gallery easily for your WordPress eCommerce website.
With this plugin, you can set up multiple galleries & albums for your products to sell more.
#5 UpdraftPlus
Backing up your website regularly is as important as its existence in the very first place. No matter how secure your website is, you must ensure that you always have the latest copy of your website backup.
UpdraftPlus is one of the great WordPress plugins that help you to back up your website regularly & automatically. You can easily restore these backups, when required, in case of any emergency.
#6 Quick & Easy FAQs
Having a FAQ section on your eCommerce store helps your potential customers to resolve their pre-sales inquiries.
Perhaps you can list out all of the frequently asked questions by your past customers, write their answers and post them on your website. This will help your new potential customers to make their decisions quickly.
While it’s true that in case of any inquiry, your potential customers can still call or email you, by providing a FAQ section on your website itself, you can eliminate the time that they will take to contact you and get their queries answered.
#7 Product Countdown
Do you intend to provide some offers or discounts on your products? If yes, then you must consider displaying a product countdown on each product page that has an offer associated with it.
A product countdown can create a sense of urgency for your potential customers, encouraging them to make their decisions quicker than they would have taken in the absence of a countdown.
Product Countdown is one of the best WordPress Plugins that you can integrate with your eCommerce website and start showing the countdown.
#8 All In One WP Security & Firewall
WordPress, being one of the most popular & commonly used open sources worldwide, is also on the hit list of most hackers. If you don’t pay attention to the security of your WordPress website, there will always be chances that your website could get hacked or infected with malicious codes.
The “All In One WP Security & Firewall” plugin is a great plugin to secure your WordPress website.
Here are some of the useful features of the “All In One WP Security & Firewall” plugin:
- It enhances the user accounts security by changing your default login URL and username.
- Enhances user login security by providing protection against “Brute Force Login Attack”
- Enhances user registration security by restricting the open registration ability for anonymous users.
- Enhances database security by modifying the default database prefix.
- Enhances files system security by setting appropriate file permissions.
- And a lot more…
#9 WP Fastest Cache
Even if your eCommerce website looks great & has all the advanced features but loads too slowly, you will still get no or low conversions.
How to optimize the loading speed of your WordPress eCommerce website?
You can install and activate the “WP Fastest Cache” plugin and make your website load faster.
To learn more about improving the loading speed of your WordPress website, read one of my previous blogs where I shared 7 actions that you can take to reduce your website’s loading speed.