Top 12+ WordPress Plugins for a Converting E-commerce Website

In my previous post, I have give you a guide on how to create an online store using the WooCommerce plugin. As I said, using WooCommerce is not enough to create a professional, feature-rich and highly converting eCommerce website. To get it done, you have to install other plugins or use additional code. However, with amateur WordPress users or users who have little or no idea about coding, using plugins seems to be a better choice.

With that being said, let me take you through the top 12+ plugins for e-commerce websites. These plugins will provide tons of helpful features, thereby improving user's experience, making your website really convert, and increasing your sales. These plugins will be divided into three different groups so that you can understand them easily. Let's get started!

Plugins That Directly Supports Selling Products

These plugins below will provide you features that make your selling experience more simple, effective, and professional. For example, they help you add some store features like shopping cart, tax calculation, shipping, etc. You might have a chance to display schema out to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), or add live chat, etc., thanks to these plugins.

eCommerce plugin - WooCommerce

On the top of the list is WooCommerce - the must-mention plugin. WooCommerce offers you a wide range of useful tools to build your eCommerce website, such as creating product pages, adding products, creating carts, etc. This plugin can meet all the requirements of simple or complicated e-commerce websites. That is why WooCommerce is a trusted plugin of more than 5 million users globally up to now. More than this, WooCommerce was made by the developer of WordPress, so this plugin is always up-to-date and works smoothly on the CMS.

Highlight features

• Create products
• Create cart buttons
• Online payment
• Tax calculation
• Shipping cost calculation

Alternatives: MemberPress, Shopify, Easy Digital Downloads, BigCommerce,...

Shopping Cart Plugin - Ecwid E-commerce Shopping Cart

WooCommerce integrates the built-in cart button, and it works pretty well. However, if you don't choose WooCommerce, using Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart won’t be a bad choice.

Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart offers buyers more than 40 payment options, making it easier than ever to spend some cash. Besides, this plugin provides you an "unlimited cart", and your customers can shop the whole world with it.

Highlight features

• Support 40+ payment options.
• Support 45 different languages
• Unlimited cart
• Periodical backup

Alternatives: WooCommerce, ThriveCart, Cart66, PayPal Shopping Cart, etc.

Schema Plugin - All In One Schema Rich Snippets

Have you ever surfed across a product on the result page with star ratings, user voting, and even quantity available in stock, like in the picture below?

To have some chances of having your product displayed by search tools with those kinds of information, you need to add schema for your website by plugins or coding. Wanna learn more about schema? Read more about it here.

Among free plugins available that help to add schemes, the most outstanding one is All In One Schema Rich Snippets. This plugin allows you to add almost every schema now, such as ratings, products, videos, etc. Its name doesn't lie; that's literally all-in-one!

By the way, if you want to add star ratings like in the picture above, this guide will help.

Schemas that this plugin supports:

• Ratings
• Product
• Video
• Event
• Post
• Figure
• Software application
• Recipe

Alternatives: If you are tired of learning and doing a hundred steps to get things done, try the Slim SEO plugin for free. This plugin helps you add schemas automatically. In addition, it has many other useful features that you can explore here. Besides, you can consider some others to add schemas for WordPress websites in this article.

Live Chat Plugin - Tawk.To Live Chat

You won't have hot PGs, PBs besides to consult you about products; that is a disadvantage of online stores compared to traditional stores. However, this disadvantage can be resolved with the live chat feature.

When your website has the live chat feature, your customers can discuss with your team via a chatbox, just like messaging on Facebook. Nothing can beat Tawk. To Live Chat Plugin when it comes to adding the live chat feature to WordPress websites. This plugin allows you to filter messages, send files via chatbox, talk via voice, and video. Besides, you can make the chat become more interesting with 1800+ vivid emojis.

Although it's a free plugin, Tawk. To Live Chat gives you many features, even features that often only appear on paid plugins. Sometimes, you pay peanuts and get more than monkeys; yes, that's the case of Tawk. To Live Chat.

Highlight features

• Messages filter
• Sending files via chatbox
• Support voice & video chat
• More than 1800+ emojis

Alternatives: You can find other live chat plugins here.

Add Customer Reviews - WP Customer Reviews

To online selling stores, paying attention to customer's opinions is very important. To add customer reviews sections, you can consider using WP Customer Reviews.

You may be concerned about the threat that some opponent sellers will take advantage of this review section to falsify your product. Don't worry, WP Customer Reviews allows you to censor and edit reviews before displaying them to customers. Besides, the anti-spamming features will keep you away from hundreds of trash reviews every day.

Highlight features

• Censor & edit reviews
• Anti-spamming
• Review form customization
• Add review sections via shortcodes

Alternatives: Starfish Reviews, Site Reviews, Google Reviews Widget, WP Product Reviews, etc.

Plugins Group to Improve User Experience

Besides selling experience, shop owners should also optimize some factors: website speed, communication/connection with customers, user information security, or customer behavior tracking and analysis. This is to maximize order numbers, and these plugins below will help you to deal with those concerns.

Security Plugins - WordFence

There is always a fear that haunts customers: personal and credit card information being stolen. Therefore, to protect your beloved customers, don't forget to equip a security plugin for your site. WordFence can be that unbreakable shield to keep every piece of information on your e-commerce website secure.

To an e-commerce website, getting blacklisted by search engines is absolutely not good news, and you have to deal with it as soon as possible. With WordFence, you can quickly check this issue. Besides, this plugin gives you 24/7 protection; it helps you scan for malware on your site automatically and offers intermediate solutions.

Highlight features

• Two-factor security
• Automatic malware scan
• Hacker ID blockage
• Blacklist check for website

Alternatives: You can see some other security plugins here.

Image Compression Plugin - ShortPixel

Online stores always use tons of images as illustrations for their products. These images might take huge sizes, make the memory storage to overload, and directly affect website operation. Thus, you need to compress them using a specialized plugin like ShortPixel.

This plugin allows you to compress pictures under many formats like JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF. You can choose among 3 compressing modes: lossless (keep the original quality), lossy (reduce image quality), and glossy (almost the same as original quality). I have tested the image quality using free image compression plugins, and ShortPixel worked out to be the most effective.

Highlight features

• Easy to set up & use
• Automatically compress new pictures
• Adjust image size
• Compress image without quality reduction
• WooCommerce compatible

Alternatives: EWWW Image Optimizer, TP Image Optimizer, ShortPixel, etc.

Contact Form Plugin - WPForms

There are many ways customers can get in touch with website owners; using contact forms is one of the simplest ways. Via contact forms, customers can give feedback, report issues, request a refund, etc., to website owners. To add contact forms, you can use the Meta Box plugin mentioned previously or use another contact form plugin. WPForms will be my recommendation since it is simple, user-friendly, and easy-to-use.

This plugin provides you more than 100 form templates for various different purposes: surveys, membership registrations, giving feedback, etc. Besides, this plugin also has an effective anti-spamming feature, helping website owners avoid hundreds of trash forms a day.

To learn how to use WPForms, please check out this post.

Highlight features

• Simple & easy to use
• Anti form spamming
• More than 100 form templates available
• Allows file upload and post in the form
• Quick and simple survey form creating

Alternatives: Contact Form 7, Gravity Form, Happy Form, Ninja Forms, etc.

Call To Action Buttons Plugin - WP Call Button

On product pages/landing pages, website owners often add some Call to action buttons like "Buy Now", "Check Out Now" or just a simple call button with a phone number. These call-to-action buttons effectively stimulate users to take actions like buying, calling for consultations, etc. In this post, WP Call Button will be my suggestion. You can use this plugin to add the call button to your e-commerce website.

WP Call Button plugin allows you to add call buttons on any position on your site. You can change colors, adjust button size, and change the message on the button easily. Besides, the call button will be pinned to stay in the same position (or pop-up). Even if users scroll the page up or down, the button is still there and they can click it with ease.

Highlight features

• Pop-up call button
• Add "Call Now" as a widget on the sidebar
• Shapes, colors & content customization for call buttons
• Smart Phone fields help avoid entering wrong numbers
• Add fixed call buttons using shortcodes and Gutenberg block

Alternatives: Thrive Ultimatum, WP Notification Bar Pro, Simple Side Tab, etc.

User Behavior Tracking & Analysis Plugin - MonsterInsights

For business holders, understanding the user's needs, behaviors, and interests is very important. To achieve this, MonsterInsights can be a useful plugin for you. This plugin displays statistics from Google Analytics (a popular tool to track website traffic) and provides in-depth analysis based on these statistics.

With MonsterInsights, you can track your shop statistics, such as total sales, conversion rates, average order value. Notably, it can point out user's behaviors: how they reach your site, their searched keywords, how they are introduced to your site, or which products they often click on. These statistics will be helpful for you when building marketing campaigns, selling, or optimizing your site.

Highlight features

• Simple general website statistics tracking
• Advanced tracking for e-commerce website
• Display Google Analytics statistics on Dashboard
• Data update every second
• Advertisement & affiliate click tracking

Alternatives: There are some other plugins to track user's behaviors here.

Other Plugins

This plugin group offers you many features to improve both the selling and buying experience. These plugins are:

Jetpack

If you don't want your site to have tons of plugins installed, let's try a multifunctional plugin like Jetpack. This plugin brings various basic features you need: speed optimization, backing up, security, anti-spamming, website statistics (views, orders, etc.), automatic post/product sharing to social networks, etc. What if you don't need all of them? Jetpack allows you to disable/enable feature modules quickly and easily (you have to link a WordPress account to configure Jetpack). There will be quite a lot for you to get to know as a newbie; however, Jetpack is not that hard to master, as far as I can see.

GretaThemes has published a detailed instruction about using Jetpack to speed up websites; please feel free to check it out!

Highlight features

• Add lazy load for images
• Website speedup with CDN
• Website backup & duplication
• Anti-spamming
• Website security

Alternatives: It's hard to find a comprehensive plugin like Jetpack. However, you can still install some dedicated plugins for each feature, such as website speeding up, data backup, security, etc.

Custom Fields Plugin - Meta Box

The next plugin in the group to be introduced is Meta Box. This is a powerful framework for WordPress users to easily and quickly create custom fields and meta boxes.

With the help of the Meta Box plugin, you can use custom fields to add many useful features for e-commerce websites like:

• Add custom field for products in WooCommerce
• Create FAQs page
• Create dynamic landing pages
• Create contact form
• Creating user profile
• Add guest author
• Create a product pages
• Create related post sections

Moreover, Meta Box plugin has some useful and cool case studies updated on their blog every Tuesday. You can check it out here!

Highlight features:

• Support 40+ field types
• Support creating custom fields, custom post types, custom taxonomy, views, etc.
• Drag-and-drop intuitive user interface
• Compatible with most WordPress themes & plugins
• Lightweight & doesn't affect website speed.

Alternatives: ACF, Pods, Toolset. Also, you can check out the two comparisons Meta Box vs. ACF and Meta Box vs. Toolset.

Verdict

You can pick out the plugin you need from the list above based on your needs and purposes. If you have any other suggestions to create a truly perfect e-commerce website, please mention them in the comment section below!

Besides plugins, themes are also important factors to e-commerce websites. If you are looking for a beautiful WordPress theme for e-commerce websites/online stores, please hesitate no more and check out this post.