Top 5 WooCommerce Plugins
Choosing plugins for your WooCommerce website can be a more difficult task than you think. You may miss out on improving your online store by running a vanilla WooCommerce store. Or, if you end up adding a lot of unnecessary plugins or extensions, your website may perform poorly. In this article, we are going to provide a list of the top 5 WooCommerce plugins.
Disclaimer: Kindly note that the purpose of this article is to solely provide you information related to WooCommerce plugins and extensions. Digital Lime Green is not affiliated directly or indirectly with any of the plugins and/or extensions mentioned below. We do not take any responsibility for any plugin-specific problem.
What is a WooCommerce Plugin?
For starters, if you don’t know about WooCommerce altogether, it is an e-commerce solution provided by WordPress. WordPress is a widely popular CMS tool that powers up around 40% of websites across the globe (Source: Search Engine Journal). You can use it to publish blog articles or make websites for different industries. But what about selling items through your WordPress website? You may try, but WordPress is very limited in that aspect. This is where the WooCommerce plugin shines. It converts your WordPress website to a fully functional e-commerce store.
And of course, it comes with its own variety of themes, plugins, and extension options too!
Choosing an appropriate WooCommerce plugin or extension depends on certain factors. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I actually need it?
- What purpose is it going to serve on my website?
- Is it going to improve my website functionality?
- Is it going to make my website management easier?
And of course, you should always consider looking for alternatives for a plugin or extensions. Who knows? You may stumble upon an even better one.
Before we get into the five best plugins/extensions for WooCommerce, let us see the standard installation process.
Installing Extensions on WooCommerce
Although some extensions on WooCommerce may need extra steps to set up, this is a standard process that will work with almost all the extensions. Please note that this is a guide for installing extensions to your WooCommerce website. If you need to know how to install the WooCommerce plugin itself on your WordPress website instead, please follow this link.
WooCommerce extensions allow increased functionality and efficiency of your online store. Just like WordPress plugins, WooCommerce extensions also come in free and premium (paid) versions.
On the other hand, when you talk about WooCommerce plugins, you are actually talking about WordPress plugins. These plugins are compatible with the WooCommerce platform that may make quality of life additions to your website.
Steps to add WooCommerce extensions
There are two ways to get a WooCommerce extension: on WooCommerce’s official store and third-party websites.
- To download an extension from the official WooCommerce website, you need a WordPress account.
- Log in to WordPress and go to the Extension Store.
- Search and download your desired plugin by simply clicking Download Now (Click on Buy Now in case it is a premium plugin).
- Now, login to your WordPress backend. Go to WooCommerce > Extensions > WooCommerce.com Subscriptions. You need to connect your WordPress account to WooCommerce to manage your extensions.
For third-party extensions, you can simply download the file given. This file can be uploaded via the Plugins section. Go to Plugins > Add New, select Upload Plugin, upload your desired plugin and you are done.
IMPORTANT: If you are unsure about how a plugin functions, it is always a good idea to make a backup of your website before trying it out.
Top 5 must-have plugins for WooCommerce
An excellent and free plugin to improve the SEO and user experience of your website. W3 Total Cache helps in increasing website performance by reducing load times. It has benefits like 10x improvement in site performance, browser caching, optimised progressive render, reduced page load times, and much more.
Facebook is one of the best Social Media platforms to advertise your business with. This is the official Facebook plugin that connects your e-commerce website to Facebook. Install Facebook Pixel, upload your online store catalogue, create a shop on your Facebook page, and do more with this plugin. It is a completely free-to-use plugin.
This is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin that has compatibility with WooCommerce. While you can make the most out of the free version, you need the premium version to use Yoast SEO with WooCommerce. Easy to use and easy to understand plugin, Yoast SEO provides details on how the SEO on your website is performing and where you can improve your strategy. They have a strong support system and a good record as well.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool. It allows you to generate performance insights for your website based on metrics and dimensions set. Connect your store to your Google Analytics account with this free WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration. You get all the basic insights regarding your site’s performance. For advanced statistics, you have to subscribe to the GA Pro version.
Cart abandonment recovery does what it exactly states: providing cart abandonment recovery-related solutions. It sends periodic emails to the users who have not completed a purchase within 15 mins of initiating a transaction. It has unique checkout links for email notifications, pre-crafted templates for follow up emails, webhooks, coupon code system, and more. This plugin is 100$ free-to-use.
Conclusion
By now, you must have got a general idea about the top 5 WooCommerce Plugins you must use, where to look for more plugins and extensions, and their installation process.
If you need any help with setting up your WooCommerce store, please feel free to check out our E-commerce Website Design Package or consider contacting us anytime. Digital Lime Green is well-equipped to provide you with all the necessary solutions.
We look forward to hearing from you!