Online selling, Canali

Marco Pericci /

WooCommerce: the best plugins to boost your e-commerce

Once your WooCommerce-built online store is up and running, your journey has reached an important point, but it’s not over. In fact, it is necessary that you start optimizing the functions of your commerce.

WooCommerce: the best plugins to boost your e-commerce

illustration of Francesco Zorzi

As a company grows, so do its needs hand in hand. This is why WooCommerce is a scalable solution, designed to adapt to the future needs of your organization, through additional products that are an extension of the functionality of an online store. 

This platform offers numerous ready-to-use features, but it cannot contain all the ones you might need. If the core program included all the potential WooCommerce features, then its complexity would increase to the extent that it’d become more difficult to learn and manage.

This brings us to WooCommerce plugins, which add extra features to your e-commerce, giving you the opportunity to improve sales and optimize your customers’ shopping experience.

In this article, we will show you the best plugins for WooCommerce, selected from hundreds available, which will prove to be tools that you cannot do without if you hope to boost your e-commerce.

We’ve also prepared a list of specific plugins that will allow you to easily manage variable products, the shopping cart and your online store’s orders. 

The best plugins to install for WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for e-commerce. But how can you choose which plugins to install for your online store among the hundreds available?

First, let’s identify the key functions of an e-commerce. Specific features can really make a difference and help you, for example, simplify the purchase, payment and shipping processes or manage the post-sales relationship with customers via promotions or reviews.

Each of these functions corresponds to a plugin: there are WooCommerce plugins that manage coupons or gift cards, while others are specialized in affiliates or the optimal management of the checkout process. 

Some plugins are responsible for payment with Paypal, while others collect and publish user reviews: once installed, you will have a number of tools available that will facilitate your work and help you develop and optimize your e-commerce.

Trustpilot for WooCommerce

Trustpilot for WooCommerce allows you to automatically manage your reviews. You can set up the automatic sending of an invitation to review your products when the order status is in progress or complete.

This WooCommerce review plugin also allows you to add a TrustBox to any page on your site.

WooCommerce PayPal Payments 

The PayPal plugin for WooCommerce improves the customer’s shopping experience, who thanks to the functions of this extension can pay with PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, payment methods and local country-specific payments using any device. WooCommerce PayPal Payments also allows you to offer subscriptions with discounted trial periods or flexible payment plans.

​​Discount Rules for WooCommerce – PRO 

With the coupon code plugins for WooCommerce, you can create dynamic and diversified discounts according to the different categories of users, launch special offers on some products or add a free product upon reaching a minimum order amount.  

Loyalty Points, Rewards and Referral Plugins for WooCommerce

This plugin allows you to create various loyalty programs for your e-commerce customers.

You can increase user engagement and loyalty by rewarding specific actions, such as signing up to the newsletter, reviewing a product or assigning points when users purchase from your online store. 

Email Customizer for WooCommerce 

The Email Customizer for WooCommerce plugin allows you to personalize your transactional emails thanks to 11 predefined templates, allowing you to easily modify by adding text, images and other elements adapting the layout to your brand with a simple drag and drop.

With this transactional email plugin for WooCommerce, you can easily modify all elements of the email template: the header, customer details, order, billing and shipping details.

Affiliate For WooCommerce

Thanks to the Affiliate Plugin for WooCommerce, you can manage your affiliate program directly from your store, which will be fully integrated into your site. Affiliate for WooCommerce allows you to register users as affiliates, approving them and managing their settings to receive commissions, while simultaneously monitoring the performance of campaigns.

HookMeUp – Additional Content for WooCommerce

And if you want to personalize the WooCommerce template, perhaps by adding a registration form or a thank-you page? HookMeUp is a template and content personalization plugin for WooCommerce, designed to make it possible to change the layout even for those without coding knowledge. 

MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress  

MC4WP makes it as easy as possible for users to subscribe to the Mailchimp newsletter from your WordPress website. This plugin provides you with mobile-friendly registration and opt-in forms to insert directly on your pages. All functions can be integrated with any other plugins on the website, including WooCommerce, contact and payment forms, event managers and many others.

Permalink Manager Pro 

This plugin is a WordPress URL editor that optimizes and modifies the permalink structure, making the URL architectures of your site clean and tidy, ready for excellent SEO performance. With Permalink Manager Pro, you can add keywords, remove parts of URLs and reorganize the link structure of your site through bulk changes. Finally, you can add SKU numbers to the URLs to accurately identify the correspondence between the products in your e-commerce store and those stored in the warehouse.

Google Feed Manager

After installing the Google Shopping feed management plugin on WooCommerce, your catalog feed will be configured to satisfy the Google Shopping requirements. Once the catalog is ready, it will be sent to your Google Merchant Center and placed in its marketplace.

If you have more than 100 products in the catalog, you will have to use the premium version of the plugin, which will allow you to highlight your products by modifying the title or category and selling them on other channels such as Amazon, Bing, PriceGrabber, Nextag, Shopping.com or Connexity.

Plugins for variable products

There are numerous WooCommerce plugins that help you optimize the management of variable products, i.e. those that differ from each other based on certain attributes, such as size, color or dimensions.

Here are some plugins that manage variable products:

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce

This WooCommerce plugin manages variable products by offering numerous functions: for example, it converts the default drop-down menu into a button that is used to select product variations. Therefore, for variations in size, color or dimension, buttons will appear to help the user view the variations of the product available for purchase as clearly as possible.

Additionally, this plugin helps you, among other functions, replace the default image of a product with a photo showing a different attribute of the product, flag out-of-stock products with a cross or a blur and personalize the text according to the variant. 

Variation Swatches and Photos

Similar to the previous one, this plugin also replaces the drop-down menu of product variations with buttons, which will improve the user’s navigation and shopping experience because they are easier to view and give an orderly appearance to the online store.

WooCommerce shopping cart plugin

Optimizing the cart of a WooCommerce store is the work of a series of useful plugins, which make the checkout experience straightforward, easier and shorter. This is a particularly important aspect, one of the most crucial moments of the online shopping experience, which is why it’s important to treat it carefully.

Here are some plugins we recommend to manage the WooCommerce cart: 

Smart Cart for WooCommerce 

This plugin shows the customers the list of products that he/she has added to the car, the partial or total price, as well as the shipping fees. In addition, a button with a call to action leads users to the payment page. The goal is to reduce the steps needed to complete the purchase.

You can also customize the color of the cart and button so they are integrated with the e-commerce store.

WooCommerce Fast Cart Plugin

Pop-up carts and instant checkouts are the strengths of this WooCommerce cart plugin. The goal is to increase conversions by simplifying the checkout process.

In fact, from each page the user can instantly access the cart or order a product, paying with a few clicks. In addition, the plugin offers upselling options to increase sales.

The appearance of the cart can be customized in order to better integrate it with the e-commerce site.

Plugins for order management

The order management plugins on WooCommerce are particularly useful for optimizing the administrative aspects of an e-commerce site and logistics.

There are WooCommerce plugins for managing shipments, for printing and downloading orders, or plugins for automatically changing the order status, for example to “completed.”

We believe that those exporting data to spreadsheets and numbering orders sequentially are of particular importance: here are two that we recommend.

Advanced Order Export For WooCommerce

If you need to export data from the product, order, customer or coupon fields of your online store, this is the plugin for you. You can choose which format to export the data that suits you. You can choose the export format you want to use between CSV, XLS, XML and JSON, bulk export the data you have selected to save time, rename the labels and reorder the columns.

Sequential Order Numbers Pro 

As many of you may have noticed, WooCommerce assigns random order numbers to the online stores it manages. 

How to assign sequential order numbers to a WooCommerce e-commerce? Simple: just download the plugin Sequential Order Numbers Pro. Its functions allow you to personalize order numbers to your liking, by setting a starting number, the length of the order number and customs prefixes and suffixes. 

WooCommerce and isendu

If plugins optimize and enhance the functions of an online store built with WooCommerce, isendu does even more.

In fact, the isendu technology allows you to manage WooCommerce orders even easier than a plugin and provides you with a platform that communicates directly with WooCommerce. 

Unlike plugins, the isendu platform takes advantage of the Woocommerce API and updates you on orders in real time, minimizing the risk of losing data. 

isendu connects directly to WooCommerce, notifying you of new events immediately, while a plugin must make a request to the system on a regular basis, raising the risk of delays and errors.

We’d like to offer you a free demo; you’re guaranteed to love using our product!

Marco Pericci

Written by:

Marco Pericci

Head of Growth

User explorer. I dream of a world where automation makes humankind happy.

Illustration of:

Francesco Zorzi

Illustrator, Visual Designer, Creative Director

Illustrator, visual designer, creative director with a multidisciplinary background in architecture and graphics divides his time between Florence and New York. His works are published in newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, AdAge, La Stampa among others. He is the creative director of isendu, for which he oversaw the redesign project.

Francesco Zorzi