7 WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Ecommerce Store
If you’ve decided to use WordPress to launch your ecommerce store, you’ll need to leverage the right plugins to build your business. There are hundreds of plugins you can install that make it possible to build an online store with robust features, a beautiful design, and consumer-friendly navigation, but choosing the right ones is crucial.
If you’re just opening your online store, or you want to boost conversions on your already-existing site, take a peek at these 7 epic plugins.
WooCommerce was developed to transform WordPress sites into online stores, allowing store owners to customize their sites with all the necessary features and functionality to run a successful ecommerce site. The all-in-one plugin helps you with everything from designing a homepage to creating menus and product pages to payment processing to shopping options
WooCommerce also has its own marketplace where you can search for free and paid extensions to further enhance your WordPress store and help with specific areas like marketing, conversion tracking, and fulfillment.
If your store has physical locations or partner retailers who sell your products, your website can be used to increase offline sales as well as online sales.
A store locator is essential for omnichannel retailers for multiple reasons, the biggest two being that it grows sales in your stores and makes you more relevant in local searches. A store locator app like Storemapper can be installed on your WordPress site in a matter of minutes, customized to match your brand, and the higher plan tiers come with a powerful analytics suite that can help you decide where you should be stocking products or opening your next store location.
This plugin is all about helping you improve your store’s conversions. By growing your email list with pop-ups on your site, OptinMonster makes it super easy to stay in touch with customers and convert potential buyers. You can tailor your opt-in forms to match your goals, complement your website design, and make special announcements through lightbox popups, coupon wheels, floating bars, and more.
The plugin also tracks the success of your forms with comprehensive analytics and insights, as well as retargeting and A/B testing.
Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for blogs and ecommerce sites alike. It makes optimizing your store for SEO a piece of cake. After installing Yoast SEO, you’ll get step-by-step directions on how to improve your website’s pages and get them ranking on Google.
There’s a free and premium version, but the free version has a ton of helpful features you can test out before committing. If you invest in premium, you’ll get features like internal linking suggestions, schema assistance, readability checks, breadcrumbs, 404 redirect manager, and tons more. If you’re going to splurge on a paid platform, this is definitely one to look into.
This ecomm plugin helps you sell your products, market your store, and manage your online business all in one place. It’s one of the more affordable ecommerce apps and has a free plan with everything you need to get your store up and running.
One of the most popular features Ecwid offers is its integration with other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay so you can get your products on all the top places to sell. You can also use Ecwid to set up Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Snapchat ads, as well as use Mailchimp for email marketing. We’ve barely scratched the surface here for what this plugin can do, but it’s one we always recommend to ecomm store owners look into it if you’re interested in multi-channel selling.
Once you start to install plugins and grow your store, you may notice things are loading more slowly than they were before. And if your site doesn’t load lightning fast, you’re automatically at risk of losing customers. WP Rocket is a caching plugin that was built specifically to make your site load more quickly. There are other WordPress plugins out there that do the same thing, but WP Rocket is definitely the leader in its category, mainly for its ease of use, excellent support, and of course the results it produces.
If you’re looking for simple ways to increase your online store’s sales, we’ve got one — the Cart Recovery plugin targets customers who added your products to their carts but never followed through with the purchase. Regardless of the reason for abandoning their cart, it’s a lost opportunity if you don’t follow-up with the potential buyer. Cart Recovery automates this process by tracking the customers that enter the checkout process, emailing them about the products in their cart, and repopulating their carts when they visit your website again.
