It’s important to consider all of your business needs when building your online presence. Taking your goals and marketing plan into consideration helps to ensure you end up with a website that does everything you want it to.
If you intend to develop an online store as part of your business model, building an eCommerce site through WordPress may be the way to go. The reason this is such a popular option is because of all the WordPress ecommerce plugins that are available to help your site accomplish all of your sales, marketing and customer service goals.
There are thousands of plugins available, and they have a wide variety of uses. It can be incredibly overwhelming to choose the best ones for your site’s needs. Plugins can help you to run your store, get found in the search engines, set up your email marketing, backup your site and more.
Take a look below to learn more about the purpose of eCommerce plugins and to discover some of the best ones to help you accomplish these tasks.
What to Look for in WordPress Plugins
To keep your search for the perfect plugins manageable, you’ll first want to determine your website and business needs. Decide which features you’ll most benefit from and which aren’t truly all that necessary.
For instance, will your site contain a mix of content and commerce? If so, it’s important to find an eCommerce plugin that’s built for handling content, as well. In addition, if being found on Google is one of your top marketing goals, you’ll want to be sure you have a top-notch SEO plugin. Perhaps building your list for email marketing is imperative to your business strategy.
Take some time to identify your main website priorities. This will help make your plugin research much easier. You’ll also need to be careful to choose plugins that are compatible with your WordPress theme. It’s a good idea to look for established plugins that have a high number of positive ratings. In addition, ones from reputable sources that maintain and update their plugins regularly should be at the top of your list.
What You Need to Run a WordPress eCommerce Site
It’s important to understand that a website with the capacity to effectively run and manage a store requires a great deal of backend resources. That means you’ll need to invest in the best web hosting you can afford. Look for hosting companies that cater specifically to eCommerce websites, as they’ll offer things like a dedicated IP, SSL certificates to allow secure payments and a separate support line.
You’ll also need to come up with a domain name that reflects your business and what you have to offer. Remember, this is how people will search for you online. It’s your address and identity, so take time to choose a name that fits and that will last for the life of your business.
You’ll need to choose a domain name that is available, and then your name will need to be registered in order to secure it for yourself. Finding an available name can sometimes be a challenge, but this investment will pay off when you’ve secured a name that reflects and evolves with your business.
WordPress eCommerce Plugins to Consider
When it comes to eCommerce plugins, there’s a lot to take a look at beyond shopping cart and checkout functionality. Here are a few recommended starting points.
- OptInMonster offers several benefits, with its main selling point being the fact that it’s awesome for building your list of email subscribers. OptinMonster lets you create traditional lead capture forms and perform testing for maximum results. It also helps you to convert visitors into subscribers with effective, customizable prompts for a variety of placement types.
- Any business that sells physical or digital items is going to need forms. That’s why you’ll want to check out WPForms. This WordPress plugin is user-friendly, even for beginners. It’s also incredibly versatile, offering you the ability to create a wide variety of forms to meet your customer service needs. WPForms uses drag and drop features to allow you to customize must-haves like contact forms, order forms and email subscription forms.
- SEO is crucial to any website. Not only does it matter to your content market, proper keyword placement in product descriptions can also help your business to be found online. An SEO plugin can boost your searchability in a number of ways. Yoast SEO is a trusted source when it comes to improving your eCommerce site’s web rankings in a way that’s easy to learn and user-friendly.
- Need to make sure your site is backed up on a regular basis? Of course you do! There’s nothing more frustrating than losing all the beautiful photos, descriptions and layouts you spent hours creating for your online store. Not to mention losing all of your valuable customer information. A plugin like BackupBuddy can help you to make sure that doesn’t happen by making it easy to restore your WordPress eCommerce site if things should go wrong.
Wrap Up
These four eCommerce plugins for WordPress should give you a solid start toward creating an online store that performs well and looks great. With some time, research and dedication you can add additional plugins to suit your specific purposes. Give these popular plugins a try and have fun setting up your shop.