Starting a WooCommerce website? You’ll probably want a website with lots of useful features that will help attract and keep your customers. While the basic WooCommerce setup is quite handy, there’s a lot more you can do by extending WooCommerce with useful plugins.
There are hundreds of plugins to consider, so you won’t be able to use them all. We’ve done the research, though, to help you pick just the right combination of plugins that will enhance your WooCommerce website without overdoing things.
Before we get into the list, here are a few points to consider when choosing plugins for your WooCommerce website, especially when growing your WordPress site into the future.
How to Choose the Best Plugins for your WooCommerce Website
In theory, all WordPress plugins should work well together–particularly if they have been coded following WordPress best practices. In reality, plugins frequently conflict with each other. Additionally, too many plugins can harm site loading speeds.
So how do you know which ones you need? A useful way to answer this question is by thinking of all the different needs any e-commerce store might have.
These needs can probably be grouped into these five areas:
Marketing Needs
The reason you’re building an e-commerce website is to attract prospects and make sales. There are several plugins for WooCommerce that help with this by supporting lead nurture, improving conversion, and so on.
Security
If you follow WordPress security best practices, your store should have a higher than average level of security when compared to the average WordPress installation (unfortunately, not everyone follows security best practices).
However, e-commerce stores have more intense security requirements as you will likely be collecting data such as your customers’ credit card information.
Needless to say, data breaches will be a hassle you really don’t want, and you can prevent these simply by using a reliable WordPress security plugin.
Sales Needs
If you’re wondering why Sales is a separate point from marketing, it’s because, while often used interchangeably, they’re really not the same thing.
While marketing plugins will be used to help nurture visitors to your website, sales tools will be used more in the process of managing transactions.
Design Needs
Millions of websites use WooCommerce. This means that while your theme may give you some leeway for creativity, most WooCommerce websites tend to look the same. Design tools will give you more power over your WooCommerce website, allowing you to create a completely custom look.
Performance Needs
E-commerce websites typically have more data than other types of websites. Depending on how large your store is, you may have hundreds to thousands of products, each with its own featured image, and possibly with a gallery too. You’ll need to devote some resources to making sure that all of this weight doesn’t slow your website down or you’ll run the risk of losing some prospects.
The 27 Essential Plugins For Your WooCommerce Website
Now that we’ve covered a few important points to keep in mind as you choose some plugins for your WooCommerce website, we’ll jump into our picks of the most important plugins for any WooCommerce store.
You don’t necessarily have to use all 27 of them, as some will be more or less relevant depending on the nature of your business, the markets you serve, and so on.
That said, here is our list of the top 27 WooCommerce plugins every website should have (in no particular order):
1.WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips helps to automate invoices once a purchase is made. It also gives you several useful options such as creating and printing packing slips, individually or in bulk. The plugin is fully customizable and available in over 18 languages.
Other great features include the ability to generate sequential invoice numbers, downloadable invoices, email automation, and fully customizable HTML/CSS templates.
WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips Pricing
WooCommerce PDF Invoices and Packing Slips is free to download from the WordPress plugin directory.
2. Uncanny Automator
E-commerce sites tend to have a number of tasks that are repetitive by their nature. Uncanny Automator makes it possible to create powerful workflows that automate repetitive tasks, and improves your productivity. It does this primarily by enabling better communication between the various plugins that you have installed.
You can create commands that will execute once an event is triggered either by a user action or by WooCommerce. For example, with Uncanny Automator, you can automatically create a new customer account once someone fills a form on your website. Ordinarily, these would be two separate actions.
Using an automation plugin like Uncanny Automator not only saves you some time, but also offers a better user experience to your customers.
Uncanny Automator Pricing
- Pro (for one website) – $149
- Business (for 10 websites) – $249
- Unlimited (for unlimited use) – $299
3. YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Sometimes your customers will love a product but may not be ready to buy just yet. Instead of letting them walk away and potentially forget about it, you can use wish lists to remind them to make that purchase at a later date.
That’s what YITH WooCommerce Wishlist does. Your customers can make wish lists and check back in to find them whenever they are ready to pay. This will likely help improve your store’s conversion rates.
The plugin allows you to customize the wishlist template and show an add-to-wishlist button anywhere on your site. There’s also an option for users to share their wishlists on social media.
Yith WooCommerce Wishlist Pricing
Yith Woocommerce costs €94.99 per year.
4. WooCommerce Customizer
To make any design changes to your WooCommerce store, you might need to work with custom code, or use a dedicated WooCommerce design plugin like WooCommerce Customizer.
As its name suggests, the plugin provides a few additional WooCommerce features that allow you to customize the design of your e-commerce store without having to write a single line of code.
WooCommerce Customizer Pricing
WooCommerce customizer is free to use.
5. WooCommerce Multilingual
While English remains the world’s most popular language, there is still a huge market to be served in other languages. These days it’s as easy as installing a plugin like WooCommerce Multilingual.
WooCommerce Multilingual leverages the power of WPML. With this plugin installed, all your products, categories and product attributes are easily translated into other languages. The plugin also lets you display prices in different currencies based on users location or language.
WooCommerce Multilingual Pricing:
WooCommerce Multilingual is available for free.
6. Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce
When people make orders, they typically like to know when to expect the delivery of their package. Tyche Software, the makers of Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce claim that just offering this feature can help halve cart abandonment rates. While this figure cannot be independently verified, it does make sense.
The Order Delivery Date plugin, allows your customers to choose their preferred delivery date and time—you can set the minimum range on the backend, as well as factor in days when you will be away on holiday, and so on.
Order Delivery Date Pricing
- $99 for a single store
- $199 for five stores
- $249 for unlimited use
7. Booster for WooCommerce
Booster for WooCommerce is a multi-purpose WooCommerce plugin with over 100 features. The plugin is designed to provide many of the features you might seek from other plugins all in one place.
This means that you won’t have to install so many plugins that might potentially cause problems. One of the best things about Booster is that you can switch features on or off so your website won’t necessarily carry any unnecessary weight.
Booster includes popular features like wish lists, template editor, custom shipping management features, pdf invoicing, and so much more. For a smaller store, WooCommerce plus a plugin like Booster for WooCommerce might be an ideal combination to take care of most of your WooCommerce needs.
Booster Pricing
- Pro – 9.99
- Elite – 19.99
- Agency – 99.99
8. Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce
Modern e-commerce stores are expected to have some tracking capability. While WooCommerce does offer some inbuilt product tracking, a more robust solution might be preferred.
Advanced Shipment Tracking offers some nice features such as tracking info widgets that allow customers to keep tabs on their delivery, shipment tracking API to allow real-time updates from third party fulfillment providers, and links with over 300 shipping providers.
Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce Pricing
- One site – $129
- Five sites – $249
- 10 sites – $399
9. SearchWP
One thing you don’t want is your customers leaving your site after a few minutes because they can’t find the product they’re looking for. Using effective product filters such as SearchWP is a more effective way to do this than relying on the WordPress default search bar.
SearchWP automatically replaces the default search feature on your WooCommerce store. This extension makes it easy for customers to search your online store by relevance, and quickly find the products they would like to search for. One great advantage of using this plug-in is that you can also get metrics to see what your customers are searching predominantly for, so you can gain insight into new product ideas and boost your conversions.
SearchWP Pricing
The plugin starts at $99 per year.
10. RafflePress
RafflePress is the most powerful WordPress giveaway and contests/rewards plug-in in the market. RafflePress helps you turn your visitors into brand ambassadors. As a result of this, you get more website traffic, email subscribers and social media engagement faster without paying for ads.
Here’s some of how it works;
The free gifts being offered on the giveaway captures your visitors attention, visitors use their email addresses to enter your giveaway, hence helping you grow your email list. Visitors are encouraged to share giveaways (to get more entries into the contest) using incentives. This increases your social media engagement, leading to more followers, and eventually, more sales.
RafflePress Pricing
- Pro- $99.50/yr
- Growth- $199.50/yr
- Ultimate- $499.50/yr
11. WooCommerce Waitlist
As a store owner, running out of stock is inevitable. The problem arises when you begin to lose potential customers to competitors simply because certain products are unavailable at a given time. This occurrence can be minimized by adding a product ‘waitlist’ feature plug-in to your store which will alert customers when wanted items are back in stock.
This simple plug-in also helps you track demand for out-of-stock items so you can prioritize restocking. Users can also review and edit their waitlists if the need arises.
WooCommerce Waitlist Pricing
The plugin costs $49.00 per year.
12. Beeketing for WooCommerce
Beeketing is an All in One Marketing Automation platform built to integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce. This plug-in has a lot of powerful features (all backed by AI) that help turn visitors into paying customers.
Two of these features include: increasing order value and preventing cart abandonment.
Increasing average order value can be done by showing Best Sellers, Recently Viewed, Who Bought This Also Bought; suggesting more related products at certain pages right before checkout, up selling and cross selling related products.
Cart abandonment prevention features comprise offering cart level discounts, free shipping, or free gifts if customers complete order. These offers can be limited using countdown timers- customers must check out before time runs out to get the reward.
Beeketing Pricing
- Beeketing offers free and subscription-based services.
- Forever free features have unlimited access, update, and support.
- Paid features have a 15-day free trial, and then subscription is charged ranging from $8-$49/month.
13. Stripe for WooCommerce
WooCommerce comes with a few default payment options, but these do not include Stripe, one of the most popular ones today. This can be fixed by using the WooCommerce Stripe Extension. This plugging also allows you to accept all major credit and debit cards, Google and Apple pay, all in over 135 different currencies.
As a plus, this plugin is made by WooCommerce so you can expect seamless integration with the main WooCommerce plugin.
Stripe for WooCommerce Pricing
Stripe for WooCommerce is free.
14. All in One SEO Plugin
Like every other online business, SEO will be a key part in how you find customers for your WooCommerce store. While there are several highly rated SEO plugins for WordPress websites, All in One SEO is our top pick.
The plugin currently has over 3+ million users, and includes local SEO, product image SEO, support for Schema markup, and other features that are particularly useful for e-commerce.
All-in-One-SEO Pricing
- Basic- $49.50/yr
- Plus- $99.50/yr
- Pro- $199.50/yr
- Elite- $299.50/yr
