Five Essential Plugins for WooCommerce

WooCoomerce can easily be added on to almost any WordPress website making it one of the most popular online eCommerce platforms available. There are hundreds of plugins for WooCommerce available – some good, some bad, five that I have found invaluable are listed here…

LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed has been enabled across our network and is available on our shared, reseller and optweb servers. It is also available as an add-on for cloud and dedicated server customers. When choosing a cache plugin for an online store it is important to configure it properly. Common problems include browsers caching pages meaning stock levels aren’t updated after purchases are made and newly added products aren’t shown at all.

LiteSpeed works out of the box with WooCommerce:

LSCache has built-in logic to handle everything WooCommerce determines to be cacheable, which makes a separate WooCommerce caching plugin unnecessary!

For starters, if WooCommerce says something is cacheable, then LSCache will cache it. Alternately, if WooCommerce doesn’t want something cached (like, for instance, the Cart, My Account, and Checkout), LiteSpeed will automatically respect that, and will not cache those pages. There’s no extra configuration required.

Another great feature of LS Cache is it’s ability to compress and optimise images. Your online store will have many photographs of products in a variety of thumbnail and larger image sizes, in just a few clicks you can reduce file sizes saving on data transfer and ultimately improving page speed.

Code Snippets

If like me you have customers who are very particular on how their WooCommerce shop should perform, you may find yourself needing to add to the core functions.php file. Writing directly on to the file is not advised – when updates are made changes could be lost and an incorrect entry may take the website offline.

Code Snippets is one of the great plugins for WooCommerce in that it removes the need to add custom snippets to your theme’s functions.php file. Instead code is added via an easy to use interface and can then be activated/deactivated as you wish.

Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer

It has to be said that the default email templates provided by WooCommerce aren’t very attractive…! Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer provides a number of free templates with elements that can be customised, allowing you to send much more professional looking emails to customers.

Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce

On my most recent WooCommerce venture I have been surprised by the number of users reaching the payment page and not completing the check out process.

With the average shopping cart abandonment rate as high as 70%, Abandoned Cart Plugin helps you recover those carts from your WooCommerce shop.

It works in the background, sending email notifications to your guests customers & logged-in customers, reminding them about their abandoned orders.

70% abandonment rate means that out of 100 potential customers, more than 70 of them are leaving without transacting on the store. Email Remarketing has proven to recover on average between 20-25% of abandoned shopping carts.

Emails are editable and settings can be configured to set emails to send at your own intervals – ie 1 hour after the abandonment or as little as 10 minutes.

Refer a Friend for WooCommerce

This is a plug-in that does exactly what it says it does straight away. The look is great and it was in place and running in just a few minutes. It works by generating a unique referral code for each customer. When a new customer then goes on to purchase after being referred, a discount coupon is generated and emailed to the referee. It’s a great low cost way of boosting awareness along with rewarding loyal customers. The premium version at roughly £35 is well worth paying for.

WooCommerce is a great add-on for WordPress and is an easy progression for somebody who knows their way around the Content Management System. For WooCommerce installs on our hosting we recommend our Shared-Plus / Optweb plans due to the additional resources the add-on requires.