WooCommerce is the world’s most popular e-commerce platform, powering millions of online stores. It’s a free, open-source plugin for WordPress that allows anyone to build a flexible and scalable online store.
What is WooCommerce?
First launched on September 27, 2011, WooCommerce was developed by WooThemes. It gained popularity rapidly due to its deep integration with WordPress, the world’s leading content management system. In 2015, Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooThemes and WooCommerce, solidifying its position as the default e-commerce solution for the WordPress ecosystem.
While WooCommerce provides the core functionality to list products and accept payments, its true power lies in its extensibility. You can build a complete online store from scratch, choose from thousands of beautiful WooCommerce themes, and enhance its features with plugins.
But with over 50,000 plugins available, which ones are essential? We’ve curated a list of the 11 best WooCommerce plugins that will help you improve your site’s functionality, market your products, and increase sales.
11 Best WooCommerce Plugins for Your Store
1. WooCommerce Multilingual (WPML)
- Best for: Stores selling to an international audience.
- Plugin: WooCommerce Multilingual by OnTheGoSystems
- Expert Take: Making a customer’s shopping experience easy is critical for conversions. This plugin, from the creators of WPML, allows you to translate your products, categories, and attributes. More importantly, it lets customers view prices in their preferred currency and pay using local payment methods, all the way through checkout. This is a non-negotiable plugin for global e-commerce.
2. OptinMonster
- Best for: Lead generation and conversion rate optimization.
- Plugin: OptinMonster
- Expert Take: Email marketing is a trusted way to ensure users keep coming back. OptinMonster is the market leader in turning website visitors into email subscribers. It integrates with services like Constant Contact and Mailchimp. We use it for its powerful Exit-Intent® technology, which presents a targeted offer (like a coupon) just as a visitor is about to leave. You can create lightbox popups, floating bars, and gamified “spin-to-win” wheels to grow your email list and reduce cart abandonment. You can see how we use it to create coupon popups in our guide.
3. Rank Math SEO
- Best for: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Plugin: Rank Math SEO
- Expert Take: Rank Math is a user-friendly SEO plugin with powerful features. Its free version is more feature-rich than many premium competitors. For WooCommerce, it’s exceptional. It automatically adds Product Schema (structured data) to your items, helping you get rich snippets (like ratings and prices) in Google search results. Its “WooCommerce SEO PRO” module provides even more advanced tools to help you rank higher and attract more traffic. It’s a top contender in our list of the best WordPress SEO plugins.
4. LiveChat
- Best for: Real-time customer support and sales.
- Plugin: LiveChat for WooCommerce
- Expert Take: Live chat is the fastest way to resolve customer problems and answer pre-sale questions. This plugin deeply integrates with your store. When a customer starts a chat, your support agent can see their cart contents, order history, and shipping information directly in the chat window. This context is invaluable, allowing you to quickly solve problems or upsell related products, turning support interactions into sales.
5. TrustPulse
- Best for: Building social proof and trust.
- Plugin: TrustPulse
- Expert Take: TrustPulse is a social proof plugin that leverages FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). It shows small, non-intrusive notifications of recent customer activities on your website, such as “John S. from New York just purchased a product!”. This real-time activity builds trust and shows visitors that your store is active and trusted by others, which is proven to boost conversions. It’s built by the same expert team behind OptinMonster.
6. PDF Invoices & Packing Slips for WooCommerce
- Best for: Order fulfillment and invoicing.
- Plugin: PDF Invoices & Packing Slips for WooCommerce by WP Overnight
- Expert Take: This is an essential utility that saves hours of administrative work. The plugin automatically adds a PDF invoice to the order confirmation emails sent to your customers. You can also bulk-print invoices and packing slips from the WooCommerce orders page, which streamlines your shipping and fulfillment process significantly.
7. WP Rocket
- Best for: Website speed and performance.
- Plugin: WP Rocket
- Expert Take: We replaced an outdated plugin on this list with WP Rocket because site speed is critical for e-commerce. A slow store leads to high cart abandonment and lower search rankings. WP Rocket is, in our opinion, the best cache plugin for WordPress. It’s specifically optimized for WooCommerce, automatically excluding the “Cart” and “Checkout” pages from caching to prevent issues. It also automatically purges the cache when you update a product. You can read our full WP Rocket review to see its impact.
8. Variation Swatches for WooCommerce
- Best for: Improving product variation selection.
- Plugin: Variation Swatches for WooCommerce by GetWooPlugins
- Expert Take: By default, WooCommerce displays product options (like color or size) in ugly dropdown menus. This plugin replaces them with visually appealing swatches. You can use color swatches, image swatches (e.g., a fabric texture), or button/label swatches. This drastically improves the user experience, especially for fashion, home decor, or any store selling products with multiple visual options.
9. HubSpot for WooCommerce
- Best for: CRM and marketing automation.
- Plugin: HubSpot for WooCommerce
- Expert Take: This is the second plugin we’ve added to replace an outdated one. As your store grows, you need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. This plugin connects your store to HubSpot’s powerful (and free) CRM. It syncs all your customer and order data, allowing you to segment your audience, track the customer journey, and send highly-effective abandoned cart email campaigns. It’s one of the best CRM software options for small businesses.
10. Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce
- Best for: Organizing product page information.
- Plugin: Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce by YIKES, Inc.
- Expert Take: A cluttered product description can kill a sale. This plugin, with over 90,000 active installs, solves that. It allows you to add custom tabs to your product pages next to the default “Description” and “Reviews” tabs. You can create tabs for “Specifications,” “Size Charts,” “Shipping & Returns,” or “FAQs.” This organizes important information neatly, giving your visitors a hassle-free experience.
11. Advanced Coupons
- Best for: Creating powerful, flexible coupon deals.
- Plugin: Advanced Coupons for WooCommerce
- Expert Take: WooCommerce’s default coupon features are very basic. Advanced Coupons (which has a powerful free version) unlocks the deals you actually want to offer. You can easily create “Buy One, Get One” (BOGO) deals, apply coupons via a URL, add cart conditions (e.g., “Coupon only works if cart contains product X”), and even offer store credit. This is a must-have for running serious promotions and one of the best WooCommerce marketing plugins available.
Final Thoughts
While WooCommerce is 100% free and extremely user-friendly, its true potential is unlocked by its vast plugin ecosystem. The plugins mentioned above are some of the most beneficial tools available to enhance your store.
By carefully selecting plugins for SEO, speed, marketing, and fulfillment, you can create a professional and efficient online store, generate more leads, and increase your sales.
