WooCommerce
The highly configurable, low cost, self-hosted storefront designed to extend and integrate seamlessly with your WordPress site.
WooCommerce is by far the most popular plugin users choose to turn their WordPress sites into a money-making machines. While it doesn’t get as much fanfare as certain other ecommerce platforms, it is a great choice for customers who:
- want deep and seamless integrations into their WordPress site,
- want a lot of control over the UX of the shopping experience (think highly customized checkouts) or
- want a low-cost ecommerce solution.
Similar to other top-tier ecommerce platforms, WooCommerce accepts all major payment providers and has a plethora of plugins that provide specialized functionality (and we should mention, the ability for developers to write their own).
As WordPress experts, we love using WooCommerce as a way to bridge the gap between highly customized CMS-driven sites and online stores with special functionality. This is particularly useful when the checkout process is highly configurable and integrated with CMS-driven content. WooCommerce can also be used effectively in “catalog-only” mode which disables the purchasing features while utilizing all of the other great functionality in the storefront setup such as product filtering, product variants, etc.
Gymnast-level flexibility
It’s hard to beat WooCommerce’s level of flexibility. You can edit the checkout experience much more easily than on a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce. You can fully edit the look and feel of pages and content modules, unlike a platform like Square Online. You can make these edits much more easily than you could on a more complex platform like Magento. Additionally, you can create your own plugins that affect both the store and CMS-driven parts of your site.
And of course WooCommerce allows developers to easily build sites that use responsive design, check all the boxes for accessibility and integrate fully with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
The anti-SASS ecommerce platform
With WooCommerce, all of your content is hosted locally on your own servers. You can complete control over your codebase and database. You can also extend the functionality on your site by choosing to use a combination of free, paid and self-built plugins.
All of the product types
On WooCommerce you can easily sell all sorts of different products and many products types are provided out-of-the-box without additional plugins. You can sell physical goods, digital products, memberships, subscriptions and more.
Fine tune your SEO
With many other online store platforms you can hit a wall with SEO due to not being able to edit important things like script loading, image optimization, custom URLs, etc. On WooCommerce, you can continually iterate on your SEO and edit everything you need to edit to bring your site to the top of the search results. WordPress’ popular Yoast SEO plugin works great for managing metadata and other SEO properties while cacheing plugins like Autoptimize, WP Super Cache and WP Total Cache help on the performance side.