10 Best Free WooCommerce Plugins
So you’ve got your online store up and running thanks to WooCommerce, but what about the free plugins? You’re making a couple of sales, shipping a few items here and there, and sometimes you even get a positive review or comment for your business.
You know you’re close, but you also know that you can be sailing a lot smoother and probably be hitting a higher benchmark. Well, the oils that’ll make your business run like a fine machine lie in the free plugins and extensions for WooCommerce.
Think of them as having an extra pair of hands around the (online) store, keeping things in place, taking care of stock and shipping, and getting down details from customers and prospects that want to know more.
Essentially, adding some of these plugins for to your WooCommerce WordPress website automates almost everything, while you’re free to take care of higher-level issues. Like working lunches at your favourite café to discuss strictly business issues with a close friend [read colleague].
Before you get your proverbial ‘woohoo’s in a bunch, however, let’s take a look at some of the best free WooCommerce plugins and how they can benefit your online store. Don’t forget to view our WordPress Hosting offers.
1. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
Jetpack is a WordPress security, performance, and marketing tool created especially for WooCommerce stores. It’s also one of the most popular plugins for WooCommerce stores.
Besides providing around the clock security and real-time backups in case anything happens to your store, it also optimizes your website. Some of the other features include:
- Backing up your site regularly. You can restore your website to any point with ease. It also allows you to see every site change and who made the change in the activity log. This makes coordinating repairs, debugs, maintenance, or general troubleshooting can easily be seen so you and your team don’t repeat tasks or stumble over each other’s work.
- You can manage migrating to a new host, migrating themes, and plugins. However, if you’re looking for a seamless experience, check out our WordPress Hosting options at HOSTAFRICA, so you don’t need to worry about migrating hosts.
- Lazy load images that automatically delay loading media in your posts until visitors scroll down to where they actually appear on the page. This is by no means an excuse to not compress and optimize your images in general. Nobody enjoys waiting decades for pages to load.
- Having a custom site search that is customizable and helps your visitors find what they’re looking for in your store by taking them to the relevant pages. We all know how annoying it can be when searching a website for something you saw some time back, but the search function is next to useless. Thankfully that won’t be the case with your online store
These are just some of the features Jetpack offers that’ll help your WooCommerce store thrive the way you know it should.
2. Mailchimp – for WooCommerce
No more monkeying around with your newsletters, abandoned carts, and marketing campaigns. Mailchimp has over 17 million customers using it for their e-commerce websites.
The WooCommerce integration allows for your customers purchase data to be synced with your Mailchimp account, so targeted campaigns are much simpler.
Basically, that’s less frustrating ‘woo woo ha ha’ and more celebratory “woohoo! Haha, we got more sales this month”. Check out these Mailchimp features:
- Syncing to your Mailchimp account so customers’ purchase data and new subscribers’ data are stored
- Automating your marketing by reminding customers about items they left in their cart, as well as reaching out to lapsed customers
- Tracking and grouping customers based on what they purchased and how often they bought from your online store.
- Create discount codes and landing pages that highlight your products or promote sales and/or giveaways.
3. Woof – Products Filter for WooCommerce
This WooCommerce plugin allows visitors on your website to filter and sort products by categories, attributes, product tags, price, and more. It makes finding that one item customers don’t know the name for but always ask about much more accessible.
We can take for granted how convenient organisation of product are, but have you tried searching for an item on an online store like Takealot without using filters?
4. YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
A simple plugin with the potential for massive returns. How many times have you found an item and decided to wait until the time was right to purchase it?
Another basic concept that we accept as part of our everyday shopping experience but adds incredible value to the online shopping and browsing experience. You’ll likely be familiar with these features:
- Saving your favourite products so you can find them easier at a later stage
- Sharing your wish list with friends or family so they know exactly what to get you
- Sharing the wish list on socials, which bags you some indirect marketing. When someone shares their wish list from your website, other people will take a look at the products on your site which makes you more likely to bag a sale
5. YITH WooCommerce Compare
Another utilitarian plugin that improves quality of life for your customers. This extension, as the name infers, allows your visitors and prospects to compare products side by side. You can also customize the table through which the products are viewed.
Just a straightforward plugin that makes window shopping easier to do.
6. WooCommerce Multilingual
If you’re making international sales or looking to expand to a location where you’d like to accommodate some other languages, WooCommerce Multilingual is just the plugin you need.
Some of the translation features are:
- Translating all of your WooCommerce products with easy management for those products, categories, and attributes
- Maintaining the translation throughout the checkout process
- Sending emails to customers and admins in the language of their choice
- Being able to run a single WooCommerce store with multiple currencies based on the visitors’ language or location.
If you’re going to take your business to the next level, this is the plugin to do it.
7. Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce
Automating your WooCommerce fulfilment workflow is managed much easier with this plugin.
You’ll keep customers happy by providing them with an eye to keep on their shipment, and also saves you time on post-shipping inquiries.
The key features are:
- Renaming the WooCommerce “Completed” order status to “Shipped” or “Partially Shipped” if you’re shipping separate packages.
- Sending customers their shipping information and a way to track their order, which will give them peace of mind
- Easily adding tracking information to orders when editing an order
8. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Reviews are an essential part of marketing, and the best part: they’re free. If your customers are happy with the product or service you’ve sold them, having them market for you can have invaluable outcomes for you.
This plugin allows you to send an automated, personalized email reminder to customers after they make a purchase, making it easier for them to spread the gospel of how great your products and services are.
You can enhance the reviewing process by adding Q&A sections on product pages, so they know their particular concerns are being heard and addressed.
Overall a fine addition to your product pages.
9. WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
“Keep a paper trail”. We’ve heard it time and again (sometimes felt the ramifications of not heeding to it, as well). This plugin ensures that you and your customers have the proof for your puddings.
With this extension you can automatically attach an invoice PDF to WooCommerce emails of your choice. You also get to generate PDF invoices in bulk and download the packaging slip from the order admin page.
10 . Google Analytics and Google Shopping plugin for WooCommerce
When Google speaks, we listen. This Google Analytics integration allows for tracking, measuring, and understanding users’ data so you can market your website and business in the best way possible.
With this plugin you’ll be able to:
- Know what your users’ like and preferences are
- Offer them better experiences and simply their shopping process
- Take care of any hurdles that come between them and a conversion
Allowing room for decisions based on the available data can help you retarget customers that you thought were lost. Once you know where people fall off from your website, or where your website is lacking, creating systems and plans to fix and address those issues are streamlined.
Conclusion
Running an online store is hard, no doubt, but with the additions of some of these plugins you can automate much of what needs to be done and improve the quality of life for your visitors.
People want to be comfortable and safe when doing shopping online. If you can provide a good experience for that, your conversion rate will definitely increase.
