There are over 60,000 WordPress plugins (paid & free), which makes it more difficult for entrepreneurs to pick the right plugin for their site. Over that, several plugins are poorly coded and can cause issues in Website security and functionalities.
That’s why we have created this complete WordPress Toolkit for eCommerce sites. In this article, we will show you the best plugins in different categories and suggest alternative tools so that you can explore yourself and decide.
To get started, here are the categories of tools we will be talking about –
- eCommerce Plugins
- SEO Plugins
- Email Marketing Plugins
- Conversion Optimization Plugins
- Store Management Plugins (Accounting and sales tax)
- Security and Backup plugins
Now, let’s get started.
Ecommerce Plugins
In this section, you’ll find the list of best eCommerce WordPress plugins that enable you to add eCommerce functionalities to your store like Shopping cart, checkout, etc.
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress that enables you to add all the essential eCommerce functionalities to your WordPress website.
Using WooCommerce, you can sell all types of products, including physical, digital downloads, services, and event bookings. Also, you can get WooCommerce-compatible themes that give you 100% customization access to design your site as you want.
Alternative: Ecwid’s WordPress plugin allows you to add a simple Shopping cart and checkout system to your WordPress site. Easy Digital Downloads is another WooCommerce alternative for selling digital products.
Further reading –
2. LearnDash
LearnDash is a premium WordPress LMS plugin using which you can create and sell online courses on your WordPress site. It comes with a powerful and easy-to-use drag-and-drop course builder allowing you to add lessons quickly and other materials to build a course.
LearnDash integrates easily with other eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads allowing you to promote and sell your other digital products on the same site.
Alternative: LifterLMS is another reliable LMS plugin that also enables you to sell online courses from your WordPress site.
Further reading –
SEO Plugins
In this section, you’ll find WordPress SEO plugins to help you make your eCommerce search engine friendly and improve search engine visibility.
If you’ve built your WordPress online store with WooCommerce, you should check out our Guide on WooCommerce SEO to get a better understanding of how to use these plugins.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that helps you configure your site for Search engine visibility and improves ranking on search results. Using Yoast, you can optimize your pages and blogs to make them search engine-friendly.
It also creates a sitemap for your site, which is very useful for submitting to Google and other search engines. Yoast comes with a free plugin, but you will need its premium version to access its full features.
Alternative: RankMath is a new WordPress SEO plugin in the market, and it is already getting good hype. Its free version has more features than Yoast.
4. ShortPixel
ShortPixel is a robust Image Compression WordPress Plugin. It reduces the size of images on your site to optimize pages for faster loading.
In eCommerce, it is very useful because you have to add a good quality of images on your site, which can be large and impact the page loading speed. ShortPixel optimizes the image size to a significant percentage and also keeps the quality of images intact.
Using ShortPixel, you can host your images on CDN servers like StackPath or Cloudflare, which will reduce the load on your hosting server and load images faster on the pages.
ShortPixel comes with a free plan in which it offers to optimize 100 images/month. For more images, you will need to subscribe to one of their paid plan, which starts at $4.99/month
Alternative: Imagify is an alternative to ShortPixel with 25 MB of free image optimization per month. You should check our list of best WordPress Image Compression Plugins.
5. LinkWishper
LinkWhisper is a WordPress plugin for Internal Link building. Internal linking plays a crucial role in search engine ranking, and LinkWhisper helps you leverage it in the best possible way.
It suggests contextual links to other pages on your site, improving the user experience and internal link structure on your site.
It comes with both free versions in which you get a limited number of recommendations, and you have to put the links manually. Whereas with its premium version, you get an unlimited number of recommendations, and you can add internal links automatically with just a click.
Alternative: Interlinks Manager is another popular WordPress Internal Linking plugin that you can try.
6. Broken Link Checker
Broken links on a site not only affect the user experience but also plays a vital role in SEO as well. So, using the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin, you can get notified whenever a broken link is detected on your site.
You can configure how often you want your site to be scanned, and it also suggests other links that you can replace the broken link with.
Broken Link is a free WordPress plugin developed by WPMU DEV, a reputed WordPress plugin developer.
Alternative: Link Checker is another free WordPress plugin to check broken links.
Email Marketing Plugins
In this section, we will find the WordPress plugins with the best eCommerce email marketing tools and others that you can leverage to grow your email list.
7. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation WordPress plugin using which you can create high-converting popups and bars on your site to drive the attention of your visitors to special offers or other onsite campaigns.
In eCommerce, you can use OptinMonster to increase page views, grow the email lists, recover card abandonment, recommend products, increase sales, and more.
Its easy-to-use drag-and-drop form builder allows you to create a campaign hassle-free within a few minutes.
Alternative: Convert Pro is another great lead generation plugin by Brainstorm Force, the team behind the WP Astra theme.
8. Drip
Drip is a popular eCommerce email marketing service, and its WordPress plugins give you access to Drip’s all email marketing and automation features.
With the Drip plugin, you’ll be able to track the behavior of your website visitors and subscribers. You can also apply tags and trigger automation when one of your contacts visits a page.
Basically, with the Drip WordPress plugin, you can connect your site with a powerful automation tool that can result in an increase in sales and conversions.
If you are using WooCommerce as your eCommerce plugin, you can download Drip for WooCommerce plugin which includes the entire product catalog, order history integration, revenue tracking, and much more.
Alternative: Brevo is a powerful email marketing tool that comes with all the essential CRM and automation features for an eCommerce site. Also, it doesn’t charge you based on the number of contacts you have in your database.
Conversion Optimization Plugins
Here, you will find the best WordPress plugins that you can use to increase your sales and boost website conversion rates.
9. Outgrow
Outgrow is a powerful conversion optimization tool for the eCommerce site. It lets you convert website visitors into leads with interactive content like quizzes, calculators, polls, chatbots, etc.
In eCommerce, using the Outgrow interactive builder, you can recommend products and other resources to the users based on how they interact with your content.
Outgrow WordPress Plugin is only to help you with embedding your Outgrow content on WordPress pages. It doesn’t allow you to edit or create the content from the WordPress dashboard.
Alternative: OptinMonster is a great alternative, but it is not as powerful as Outgrow in creating interactive content.
10. TrustPulse
TrustPulse is a powerful social proofing WordPress plugin that allows you to show FOMO notifications to your website, visitors, to win their trust and boost sales and conversion.
It comes with an easy-to-use social proof notification builder using which you can create beautiful, high-performing FOMO popups for your site.
Alternative: If your online store is built on WooCommerce then, WooCommerce Notification by CodeCanyon is a great alternative to TrustPulse. It shows notifications of purchases for different products with images available in your store.
11. Elementor
Elementor is one of the best WordPress page builder plugins. Using Elementor, you can create beautiful convertive landing pages and customize other essential pages on your site to generate leads and increase sales.
On an eCommerce site, you can use Elementor to customize the product pages, checkout pages, and catalog pages to make it more user-friendly.
Elementor comes with a free version that allows you to create pages using basic blocks. To get access to its full features, you will need to use Elementor Pro, a premium version of the page builder.
Alternative: Brizy is an excellent alternative with an easy-to-use visual builder.
12. PushEngage
PushEngage is a powerful web push notification tool that allows your visitors to subscribe to your website updates via push notification. It is a great tool to send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors to boost sales and conversion.
PushEngage comes with powerful features like drip campaigns, A/B testing, dynamic user segmentation, goal tracking, etc. that make it an excellent conversion optimization tool for eCommerce sites.
In eCommerce, you can use it for cart abandonment recovery, special offer alerts, inventory alerts, and more. Its WordPress plugin makes it easy to enable web push notifications on your website and send push notifications right from the dashboard.
Alternative: One Signal is a push notification plugin for WordPress but it doesn’t provide advanced targeting features like PushEngage.
13. Weglot
Weglot is a multilingual translation tool for websites. It can translate all your content into 100+ languages and generate language-specific and SEO-optimized URLs for all the translated pages.
Its WordPress plugin, Weglot Translate, comes with a one-stop dashboard to control translations to ensure that your translations are of the highest quality.
Today more and more internet users are consuming content in local languages, and this is where you can leverage Weglot to enhance customer experience on your eCommerce site.
Weglot can translate WooCommerce products, checkout pages, and even order emails, which is a great feature that you can utilize to improve conversion rates and increase sales.
Alternative: WPML is another popular WordPress multilingual plugin that comes with only 40 languages. It is useful, but its automatic translation is not as powerful as Weglot. You can also check our list of best WordPress translation plugins to find more options.
14. LiveChat
LiveChat is a popular live chat plugin for WordPress sites. It can be a powerful conversion optimization tool for your eCommerce site because it allows you to interact with the customers in real time and help them with any issue they face while placing orders.
LiveChat comes with powerful features, including personalized chat invitations that allow agents to send messages automatically to visitors when they meet predefined criteria, e.g., the number of visited pages or time spent on the website.
It supports seamless integration with a range of popular CRMs, including Freshdesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, allowing you to store customer data quickly and use it for marketing purposes.
Alternative: Tidio is another powerful chat software that comes with a free plugin for WordPress & WooCommerce.
Store Management Plugins
Here, we will look into some of the WordPress plugins that you may need to make your life easier by automating the accounting and sales tax filing process.
15. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is the best accounting software for eCommerce sites. It allows you to track income, and expenses, and create and send invoices after the customer completes the checkout process on your site.
Quickbooks comes with powerful account reporting features where you can get a real-time view of your cash flow and see how your business is doing at any point in time.
There’s no official WordPress plugin by QuickBooks, but there are QuickBooks apps like WooCommerce by OneSaas that you can use to connect your online store with QuickBooks. You can also integrate it easily using tools like Zapier and Automate.io.
Alternative: Xero is a powerful bookkeeping software that comes with a lot of features like QuickBooks. It is an alternative to QuickBooks that you can consider.
16. TaxJar
TaxJar is a sales tax reporting and filing plugin. It makes collecting sales tax easy and automatically submits your returns to the states/regions/countries where your business is registered and ensures you never miss a due date.
TaxJar integrates seamlessly with major WordPress eCommerce plugins, other marketplaces, and payment gateways, including Paypal and Stripe, allowing you to compile and analyze all the data on one dashboard.
If your online store is based on WooCommerce, you can download TaxJar for WooCommerce to configure it easily in no time.
Security & Backup Plugins
In this section, we will look into the best WordPress security and backup plugins to protect your website from brute force attacks.
17. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress Backup plugins. It allows you to set up an automatic backup of your site and store it securely on any cloud storage location, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive, etc.
In case your website is hacked, or you are facing issues because of any recent updates, UpdraftPlus makes it easy for you to restore your website data from the last backup.
UpdraftPlus comes with a free version that allows you to create a backup and restore it whenever needed, but you will need its premium version for advanced features.
Alternative: Jetpack Backup is another popular WordPress backup plugin built by the team behind WordPress. But it doesn’t have a free plan.
18. Sucuri Security
WordPress is the most common platform to build websites, making it an easy target for hackers. iThemes Security Pro works to fix common WordPress security issues you may not know exist.
Sucuri Security is the most powerful WordPress security plugin to protect and secure your eCommerce site. And by adding an extra layer of protection, it helps give you peace of mind—and keeps your site protected.
Alternative: Astra Security is a cheaper alternative to the WordPress security plugin, suitable for anyone just getting started. However, as your business grows, you must consider using Sucuri as your security plugin. You can also check our article on the Best WordPress Security Plugins to find other alternatives.
Other Important Plugins
Till now, you have seen all the essential WordPress plugins that you must install to keep your site safe and grow your business.
Now, in this section, you will find WordPress plugins that are good to have as they will help you boost performance and provide a better user experience to the visitors.
19. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It helps you properly connect your site with Google Analytics and shows all the essential traffic analytics reports inside your WordPress Dashboard.
20. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin. It helps you improve your website speed and performance with no technical skills required. It automatically turns on recommended WordPress caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading. It also comes with useful features like lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS prefetching, minification, and more that you can activate to improve page loading speed on your site.
21. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery helps you create a responsive and beautiful gallery easily in WordPress. With this plugin, you can set up multiple galleries, create albums, open images in lightbox popups, and so much more on the product and other pages.
22. WP Forms
WPForms is a popular WordPress form-building plugin that lets you set up a contact form quickly on your site. It is beginner-friendly, and using its drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily create contact forms, order forms, payment forms, email subscription forms, and more with just a few simple clicks.
23. Social Warfare
Social Warfare is a popular WordPress social sharing plugin that allows your visitors to share your articles or product pages on social media or other channels. It comes with a free version in which you can add up to 5 social channels in the sharing panel, and to add more channels and design options, you will need its premium version.
Wrapping Up
Regardless of which eCommerce plugin you are using or what you are selling on your online store, you must install these 23 plugins on your WordPress site to make sure they function well and keep your business running.
We hope this article helped you with picking the best WordPress plugins for your eCommerce site. If you like this article, please do share it on social media among your community and fellow entrepreneurs.
