WordPress Plugins for Ecommerce Website Owners with Tight Budgets

1. BigCommerce

Because you’re on a tight budget, you can’t afford to spend your time on menial, time-consuming tasks, even if the tasks are important. You need to find ways to automate and set up workflow systems to every extent possible so that you can spend your time strategically building your business, as opposed to bogged down in the nitty-gritty.

Integrating new products into your various storefronts, for example, can turn into a huge time suck. If you’re only selling on your own website, then you need to make sure that the backend is set up to accept orders of the product, and you also need to make sure that your site’s various content areas are listing and promoting content about the product.

But today’s e-commerce merchants know that your brand’s storefront website is only one of the most important direct sales touchpoints. To find your audience, you need to maintain presences on a variety of platforms, marketplaces, and social networks. Which multiplies the chances of work redundancy pitfalls.

And depending on the number of products that you need to add, it could take you hours to complete the integration process. There are other tasks like inventory management, product research, fulfillment logistics that are just as time-consuming, as well. That’s why BigCommerce’s WordPress ecommerce plugin is such a game changer for your website.

With the BigCommerce plugin, you can integrate products into your store in just a few clicks. The plugin has a chock full of e-commerce functionalities that can truly transform your WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce brand. Manage your e-commerce business via BigCommerce’s commerce platform, and all of the content will be automatically updated across your shopper-facing channels, including your WordPress site.

Some of the plugin’s additional features/functionalities are multichannel selling, abandoned cart recovery, complex product catalogs, a variety of payment gateway options, and it can even help you streamline your global shipping. If you think that’s all there is to it, you’ll be pleased to know that using BigCommerce with its WordPress plugin only costs $29.95 per month (for their standard package), and $79.95 per month (for their Plus package).

With that much value, the amount you’ll spend for the plugin is well worth it.

2. Elementor

Using page editors can be challenging and time-consuming.

Although WordPress has basic page editor features, unless you have coding know-how, you will need an easy-to-use page builder to make your e-commerce website look professional and credible — two elements that can increase your website’s ability to close sales.

There are two kinds of page builders: Front-end and back-end builders. It’s challenging to edit your website from the back-end because it doesn’t show you in real time how your website looks. You’d have to save and click preview to view what’s happening to your website.

With front-end editors like Elementor, however, you can edit your pages live so you can see immediately the changes every time you make them. Page editors like Elementor can save you time with its easy-to-use drag and drop tools, allowing you to customize your pages with ease.

Elementor coats only $49 per website per year (perfect for site owners on a limited budget), and it offers you control over the details and elements of your website, ready-to-use templates, or even save custom-made layouts that you can use on your other pages.

The Elementor page builder plugin can be a great option for you if you’re managing an e-commerce website that you want to optimize to be user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. 

3. Contact Form by WPForms

A contact form might be the most convenient way for your site visitors to contact you. People want to do away with opening another window and copying and pasting email addresses to contact you — especially when they’re using their mobile devices.

Considering how important forms are, you need to have an efficient and powerful tool that can help you create high-performing forms for your WordPress e-commerce website.

That’s where WPForms com in. This plugin has truckloads of other features to it. You can use it to create feedback forms, payment forms, subscription forms, and several other forms that you might need to generate sales out of your WordPress e-commerce website.

It’s also worth pointing out that the Contact Form by WPForms is a drag-and-drop builder, making it easy even for total newbies to create stunning forms. They also have pre-built form templates, and other crucial functionalities such as mobile readiness, SEO friendly, and you can even create surveys or polls.

For just $32 per year, you can access the Basic premium version of the WPForms plugin to get features such as customizable email notifications, multi-page forms, smart conditional logic, and more. Using plugins like WPForms is one way of ensuring that your visitors can communicate with you directly through your website in a user-friendly and efficient way. 

4. Yoast SEO

With the amount of traffic that the search engines can bring to your e-commerce website, you’ll definitely want your pages to rank on the search engine results pages.

Even having said that, however, effective SEO can take some time and elbow grease to learn and execute, if you’re manually coding all of your page metadata. And given that your growing business gives you a constant flow of truckloads of things to do, you simply won’t have the time to handle that, especially if you’re adding dozens of product pages every month.

The good news is, WordPress plugins like Yoast can help you with your e-commerce site’s SEO without your having to type in a single line of code.

The plugin lets you optimize your SEO titles, meta keywords and meta descriptions on each of your website posts and pages. The plugin will also give you an analysis of your page’s SEO and some recommendations on how to optimize your page further for the search engines.

You can also create custom titles for your archives, tag pages, the main site, and category pages. Additionally, the plugin can add Twitter cards, Sitemaps, Open Graph metadata, and ping search engines whenever you update your website.

Here are some other Yoast SEO features that you need to know of:

• It checks your focus keywords’ density throughout the whole page and analyzes the number of words in each paragraph of the article.

• It analyzes the text readability of your website and calculates its readability score, which helps you understand how readers are most likely to consume your content.

• It checks the presence of images and links in the post.

• It checks if you are using the keywords in five important locations in your articles.

Did I also mention that Yoast SEO is also free? Whew! That takes a huge weight off your shoulders to be able to use a plugin with this level of functionality and usability with no cost. And if you want to plunk down $89 per year, you’ll get a lot more powerful features in their premium version.

With plugins like Yoast SEO, you can improve your e-commerce website’s ranking and boost your chances of driving more traffic to your website. 

What’s Next?

With the number of available WordPress plugins for e-commerce websites, choosing the right one can be challenging and time-consuming — especially if you’re on a tight budget.

Give these four plugins a try and see how they can improve the overall usability, functionality, or help you achieve the results you want for your e-commerce WordPress website.

What other WordPress plugins do you plan on using for your e-commerce website?

Let us know in the comments section below. Cheers!