Online stores and e-Commerce business are smart ways to engage with the audience and generate profits from sales. Unlike physical stores, e-Commerce companies have the benefit of reaching out a wider segment of the audience at lesser cost and efforts. To further their possibilities for profits, many custom e-Commerce development companies and platform developers suggest an array of tactics like an appealing layout, attractive discounts, and offers, engaging content and plugins.

So, what are plugins?

Plugins are a component of software programs that can be installed to the sites to add or extend functionalities. For example, plugins help add sharing buttons, photo or image gallery, linking to social media accounts, etc.

Almost all websites have important plugins for security, optimization, backup, and other staple functions.

Why Plugins are Popular?

Ever since businesses have gotten digital, the need to engage and connect with the ‘always-on’ audience through websites and web platforms increases.  For affordability and customization benefits, many businesses, as well as individuals, have been building websites using open-source content management systems like WordPress. Interestingly, only 27 percent of the websites around the world are built using WordPress.

With more than 3.8 billion internet users across the globe, the competition to seek audience’s attention for engagement, conversion, and profitability has gotten intense. Moreover, in the current times, the website owners comprise of bloggers, e-Commerce companies, individuals and businesses with different end-goals and challenges. To stand out and evoke appropriate responses, websites need plugins.

Plugins solve oversights made by even some of the best custom e-Commerce development solution providers.

e-Commerce companies are always open to plugin suggestions to increase their earnings, track users, measure users’ offline activities and extend functionalities.

Website creation platforms like WordPress have about 50,000 free plugins in their directory to install on the site. But not all of them are a great fit for every e-Commerce business. Also, it does lack in-built stats feature to track and measure traffic. However, it can be optimized to impact site performance and boost conversion.

Listed below are important plugins that are must-haves for every successful e-Commerce website:

• WooCommerce: One of the most popular plugins for every WordPress website, WooCommerce is useful in tracking inventory, making swift billing calculations and automatically compute tax amount. This plugin is necessary for e-Commerce and online stores with a wide customer base and helps the website to scale up with business growth.
• Shopify: The robust, all-in-one e-Commerce platform and plugin that supports WordPress integration, Shopify is simplified a digital store. From integrating e-Commerce site to popular social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook to having a shipping system that links directly to postal services, Shopify is a great plugin for e-Commerce success.
• Google Analytics Plugin: Data analysis for timely insights on website performance and visitor’s activity is very important for e-Commerce businesses. Google Analytics Plugin makes it easier on the WordPress dashboard to measure and rank content based on their performance, impressions, and engagements. With the Google Analytics plugin, website owners would be able to know which of their blogs, image and video content are performing well, who are the site visitors, site referrers and more.
• Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms helps businesses capture leads and their contact information through sign-ups for newsletters for free.
• Image Optimizer: Having great quality images is important for e-commerce sites that sell physical goods and merchandise. Image Optimizer helps websites to optimize the image size and preventing the website from loading image content in its original file size.
• WP Super Cache: Website’s loading speed is an essential key for website success. e-Commerce websites with poor loading speed majorly impact user experience as well as SEO. WP Super Cache plugins help store cache files on the users’ device to reduce loading time thereby guaranteeing users to have a better experience on the website.
• Shopp: Shopp boasts of a powerful set of features needed by every WordPress e-Commerce to install, customize and manage different WordPress themes.  It is best for sites that sell physical goods and digital products and add options to view past orders, make product searches and input discount codes.
• Cart 66: Cart 66 is an out-of-the-box solution that helps e-Commerce companies that sell services, memberships, and digital products besides physical goods. This also helps print out shopping labels and generate real-time shipping quotes.
• WordPress Shopping Cart: This plugin is a magic wand when it comes to creating different options for product viewing like size, colors, similar designs, etc. It simplifies collaboration with a shipping company and offers multi-language support to engage the audience at global, local and national levels. WordPress Shopping Cart is robust and easy to implement the plugin that can handle any requirement for increasing functionality of the website.
• Wordfence: Besides having a website that is up and running, ensuring there are no risks and security attacks are equally important for any e-commerce website. Wordfence is a popular security plugin that helps businesses save on expenses on hiring dedicated personnel to manage security aspects of the website.

The list of plugins for the success of an e-Commerce website is lengthy. A combination of the plugins mentioned above works well given the current climate of e-Commerce industry and always-on customers with limited attention span.

If you have more plugins that need to be included to the above list, let us know by leaving a comment in the section below.

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