We've made many Woocommerce websites over the years and we've compiled a pretty big list of stuff we do to make sure the website is running as best it can be.
If you're not familiar with Woocommerce, it's a plugin for Wordpress that adds standard e-commerce functionality. It comes with everything you'd need for a complete e-commerce website but you can easily make it better with plugins and you can read our basic Woocommerce guide here.
Being one of the most popular e-commerce software options out there, there is a large ecosystem of plugins to help you get exactly what you're looking for out of your website.
Like I had mentioned, there are a few plugins available that almost all of our clients use on their websites and we wanted to compile that so you could take advantage of what we install for clients.
We've grouped them into a few categories to help to find what you're looking for - let us know in the comments if we missed anything or you'd like us to add a new category.
General
This plugin lets you login as a user on your website. You can see what they see and that means it's a great one for customer service and testing. Most of our clients use this to take orders over the phone. If a customer calls in, you can log in as them and place their order as if they had placed it and this means that it doesn't go outside of any shipping/fullfilment processes you already have in place.
Payments
These are in no particular order. Woocommerce has built-in payment systems but, honestly, we rarely have clients use them. Here are the ones that are most commonly used. Also, keep in mind that all of these work with subscriptions.
- Square - Best if you have the Square POS
- Stripe - Best if you like to be nerdy
- Authorize.net - Best if you want to connect to your bank or existing payment processor
- Paypal - Best if you like to keep things simple
Shipping
If your site has a lot of orders and you need help managing shipping labels and want cheaper prices, then ShippingEasy (and other similar services) are for you. Our clients seem to prefer ShippingEasy, but there are many options here. This service is pretty simple but harder to fully understand what it does. This does not calculate shipping costs on your website - it just provides a nice way to manage shipments and pay for them. Check out my post explaining this confusing Woocommerce shipping topic here.
Shipping Calculations
Have a preferred shipping vendor and want your customers to pay calculated rates directly on your website? This is pretty normal on all e-commerce websites so it's a no-brainer to want this. Here are our favorite plugins for doing just that:
Security
Keeping your website and customer safe and secure is a priority for any website. Wordpress being as popular as it is makes it a prime target for the ill-intentioned. When it comes to Woocommerce, you need to be even more careful because you're dealing with people's sensitive information like credit card numbers.
We like to use a combination of 2 plugins and 1 non-Wordpress tool:
- Wordfence - Firewall, website scanning, 2-factor authentication, and more. This is the go-to standard for Wordpress security. While this plugin is free, we highly suggest going with the premium version to get more out of it.
- WPS Hide Login - This simple plugin just hides the admin login by changing the URL. This way, hackers don't know where try!
- CloudFlare - this is not a Wordpress-specific thing but rather an added layer in between your website and users. It is free but requires a little bit of technical knowledge to set up. On top of added security, it also gives some Wordpress optimizations that can help speed up your website.
Subscriptions
We've only used 1 plugin for this and we've never had any issues. It's written by Woocommerce themselves so you know it's going to be good, maintained, and well-supported. It's fully featured and give you lots of options. Try it out!
SEO
Requires the base Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin gives you the necessary elements that are specific to Woocommerce/e-commerce like schema and open graph data.
Analytics
Google Analytics tracking codes don't automatically track e-commerce data and you'll need a plugin to accurately track conversions and other data.