How to Choose the Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Your Needs

Businesses have a lot of WordPress plugins to choose from – over 54,000. But when running an ecommerce site, you’ll want to choose the best plugins and leave the rest behind. Adding more plugins than you need will slow down your site, and it can have a negative impact on customer experience.

You should first start with choosing an ecommerce plugin, and then add in any additional plugins you need to fill in the functionality gap.

What to Look for in Ecommerce Plugins

There are a lot of WordPress ecommerce plugins, but the right one will meet these three key criteria:

1. Continued Support for New WordPress Versions

Three major WordPress versions were released in 2019: 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. Major updates don’t include the minor updates to fix bugs and security issues. In total, there have been over 14 updates to WordPress this year (both major and minor).

Active, continued development ensures that a plugin will continue to work with new platform releases.

Major core version updates need to be tested with plugins to ensure compatibility and that the plugin will not break your site. WordPress will allow you to find and install plugins that are outdated, but a warning will be posted for plugins that have not been updated in two years.

Check the development changelog on the plugin’s official page. Once there, view the information on the page for last updated and see which versions of WordPress the plugin has been tested up to.

2. Test Site Speed Impact

Site speed is an essential part of a website’s performance. If a plugin bogs down your site, it can cause visitors to leave your site before ordering. It’s important to test your site’s speed before and after installing the plugin.

You can also read through reviews for the plugin to see if anyone is complaining about site-related issues.

GTmetrix will allow you to test out your site speed before and after installing your plugin. You can use this information to see what’s causing your site speed to suffer. After installing a caching plugin, optimizing files and possibly using a CDN, test your site again.

If it’s still slow, you may want to reach out to the developer – if they offer backend support.

3. Backend Support for the Plugin

When issues happen on the backend, like your site’s speed slowing to a crawl, support may be able to help. You’ll want to see if the developer offers any backend support. The support may be paid, but the developer may go on your WordPress site and troubleshoot what’s wrong with your site.

Paying for support should give you personalized, fast service.

You’ll want to use a plugin that has a great community, too. Forums are a great place to troubleshoot issues without having to pay a developer. Go to the plugin’s main site or do a search to see what type of community exists.

A thriving community allows you to reach out to others using the plugin and can be very insightful when it comes to installing and debugging anything that’s wrong with your plugin.