Our list of most useful WordPress plugins can add great value to your e-commerce, optimising the user experience and allowing you to personalise the appearance and functionality of your website. Selecting the right plugins for your e-commerce will differentiate you from the competition and will make it easier to apply your ideas to the site.

In this post we'll tell share some of the best WordPress plugins for e-commerce that we install when we create a site or online shop, as well as our recommendations on how to use them.

The criteria for selecting the right plugins depends on the needs of each e-commerce. The plugins are very practical and make it super easy to manage everything from your platform as a complimentary tool.

We choose WordPress because its content management system (CMS) is intuitive, easy to use, and most of all, it's a cost-effective option to amplify your online presence.

How to install a plugin in WordPress

3 Options for plugin installation:

• Search in WordPress: include a keyword and select from the search results.
• Reserved plugin: if you already have a plugin downloaded in your computer, go to "add new" and upload the .zip of the plugin.
• Via FTP: this option is most often used by developers because it's very easy to update the plugin. You can use Filezilla, a free programme that makes this task easy.

In addition to the installation method you choose, make sure that what you download has positive reviews, is a popular plugin and that it was recently updated to avoid gaps in the security.

WordPress Plugins: recommendations for updates and installations

Before getting into our list of must-have WordPress plugins for e-commerce, we recommend the following:

Updates: one at a time

Updating plugins is a delicate subject. On one hand, it's crucial for maintaining a high level of security and preventing open access. And on the other hand, every update can possibly deconfigure aspects of the Woocommerce. If an incompatibility exists it will be easier to find if the updates are done one at a time. Finding an error in a collective update is much more difficult. Consider entrusting external programming support just in case.

Backup

Before starting the plugin update, make sure you have a complete back up of your entire website.

Plugin settings

Once you've downloaded the plugin, invest some time setting it up for the best performance.

Free and paid WordPress plugins

Most of the plugins are free and have a paid version with additional features.

In addition to extra features, paid options tend to offer the best technical support for installation and problem resolution.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is a must-have, free plugin for WordPress. The fact is, in terms of functionality it is much more than that: it's an integrated e-commerce platform in WordPress with hundreds of options.

Its potential to develop an online shop is almost unlimited: it can support online shops with thousands of references and has tonnes of developers all around the world.

It's simple, powerful and has additional extensions to create sites that compete with bigger CMS's such as Magento or Prestashop.

Most useful WordPress plugins for your e-commerce

BackWPup

A good backup of your e-commerce will protect you against security threats as well as your own mistakes.

BackWPup stores everything in the cloud (Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc). With the premium option you can have the support of Drive.

The free version is enough as well, although if you need extra features, the value of pro plans are affordable if you compare it to the catastrophe that could occur if you lost your e-commerce data.

Duplicate post

This plugin is for cloning contents and formats. It's ideal for copying the structure of product sheets, templates or pages in your e-commerce.

It makes work easier and saves time when duplicating the typical structural elements as templates.

Remember that each time you upload a new element in your online shop you have to do it from scratch to create the section's structure. Duplicate Post does this for you: you create a standard page that will be your main template, then you duplicate it and personalise the information and images.

Total Cache 

Optimise your WordPress performance

Get the fastest load speed. The caché is a piece of computer memory that stores recent data.

When we enter a site for the second time, certain elements such as the pages, files and images remain stored and the site loads quicker because it only recuperates the information instead of downloading everything again.

WP-Optimize

To keep your WordPress database clean this is necessary for a healthy e-commerce.

WP-OPTIMIZE works in regular intervals to eliminate redundant and duplicated data that affect the site's good performance.

By database optimisation we mean the revision of mails and templates saved automatically that accumulate weight in the global database and which need to be eliminated.

The plugin cleans the unneeded revisions saved by WordPress: if you edit and save a publication 10 times, you have 10 copies of the same document. This occupies space.

Clean out all later revisions.  Keep in mind that each time you save a publication, WordPress maintains a revision of the old publication by default so that it can restore the older version in any moment.

It also eliminates email spam that remains in the trash bin.

WP-Optimize is one of the most simple plugins that will help you with these tasks:

• Check the size of the database.
• Delete subsequent revisions.
• Delete all automatically saved draft messages.
• Clean spam comments.
• Clear unapproved comments.
• Optimise the tables in the database.

You can choose to use all these functions or only select a few.

Mayo-login screen

Mayo Login Screen is a simple aid that personalises the sign in page in WordPress. It lets you improve the appearance to give it a more professional look without touching any code.

Instead of seeing the WordPress logo and colour scheme in the background you can include your own logo and colours.

Here we'd like to show you a few examples using the Mayo plugin:

Idea Instituto de Estudios Aplicados

La Vendetta Pizza

Escoge Personal Shopper Inmobiliario

Do you use any WordPress plugins you'd like to share with us?