WooCommerce powers more than a quarter of all online stores. It’s not that surprising since the platform is free and designed to work with WordPress, the Web's most popular CMS platform.
But if you just download WooCommerce and set it up, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Especially when it comes to landing page conversion, site speed and exporting your data to shopping channels. A basic WooCommerce site isn't geared with all the bells and whistles that can help influence shoppers to make a purchase. And, if your pages take a while to load shoppers are more likely to get frustrated and take their business elsewhere.
If you plan on selling on shopping channels, you may also find that a basic WooCommerce site lacks an easy and efficient way to get your data out to these channels.
We've compiled a list of WooCommerce plug-ins to improve your site functionality and customer shopping experience, all with the goal of helping you bring in more shoppers and close more deals.
Make Your Landing Page Conversion- Friendly
Are you getting plenty of visitors, but few actually buy? Maybe you need to “trigger” them into converting.
That’s what XL WooCommerce Sales Trigger aims to do. It uses “sales hacks” designed by big, successful retailers, including warnings about low stock, deals that will expire soon, product guarantees, and more.
These triggers create a sense of urgency that encourages people to buy now while they still have the chance.
People want to shop for the names they know. WooCommerce Brands makes it easier for customers to locate the brands offered on your site.
The plugin can add an A-Z brand filter, display the brands you offer in a variety of ways (including by list, carousel, and thumbnail grid), and display products by brand.
Pictures are worth a thousand words? When it comes to having great product images, they could be worth even more than that.
Zoomifier allows potential customers to magnify and slide over product images, so they can see every detail and get a better sense of the quality of your offerings.
WooCommerce Extra Product Options
Do you ever wish you had more options in creating your product pages?
With this plugin, you can do build forms, decide to show or hide prices, use conditional logic, and much, much more.
Improve Page Speed
Generally, WordPress uses PHP scripts. But when you use WP Super Cache, 99% of your users will instead view static HTML files that require less processing power.
This will improve their experience by loading pages faster.
Easy to use. Customizable. BWP Minify allows you to combine and minify JS and CSS files while respecting the order of these files and their dependencies.
The result? Faster load times for your pages.
Images take up a lot of space, which means your pages will take longer to load. If you want your products to sell, however, you not only need pictures, but great ones.
"People look at a product before buying, so the quality of the photo becomes a selling point," says Zach Bulygo of Kissmetrics.
Smush.it lets you have your cake and eat it too by compressing, resizing, and optimizing all of your images. They’ll still look great, but take up far less space.
Smush has been tested as number one for both speed and quality.
Improve Product Data on Shopping Channels without Altering Site Content
This plugin isn’t bad… for very basic use. Unfortunately, it has a lot of shortcomings for businesses that want more control and customization to improve their sales.
Essentially, it’s a data dump. This makes it a fast way to reproduce your product feed – but also means that you will be recreating any mistakes that are already in that data.
Moreover, it doesn’t allow you to make bulk changes efficiently or optimize your feed, and your site may be missing attributes that are essential to building a good Google feed.
"Google has a long list of specifications that explains what data and in which format you need to supply everything. If you’re having problems with your product feed, this is probably where things go wrong," says Dennis of Store Growers.
GoDataFeed’s advanced data feed plugin.
At GoDataFeed, our product feed solution comes with:
- The ability to add your feed to over 200 shopping channels and sync your inventory across all of them.
- Preformatted templates and rule editors that allow you to optimize your feed for the specific channels you’re putting it on.
- Cost reporting that shows you how your campaigns are really doing and which ones are profitable – or not – so you can get the best ROI.
- Alerts that notify you when performance criteria are met – good and bad – so that you can quickly and easily make necessary adjustments.
- Additionally, you can make specific and global rules so that automatic action is taken when specific criteria are met.
If you want to take your WooCommerce store to the next level, make sure you are taking advantage of all the tools that are available to you.
