WooCommerce: 10 Most Popular Free Plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to launch your online business, build high-functionality online stores for your clients, or take your brick-and-mortar store online.  

Powering over 28.19% of all online stores, WooCommerce’s versatility and open-source nature allow businesses to build their dream store, add unlimited products and consumers, take orders, and increase sales.

The core WooCommerce plugin holds 68% of the usage distribution – the highest on the internet. However, despite its popularity, the official WooCommerce plugin lacks several features you might need for your eCommerce store. But to make up for that, it offers several plugins that allow you to enhance your store’s functionality and improve customer experience. 

But choosing from over 4228 WooCommerce plugins from WordPress.org can get overwhelming. So, to make your job easier, we’ve hand-picked the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use on your store to take it to the next level. Let’s dive in!

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist 

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist lets customers save the products they like or wish to buy later on their Wishlist page – making product discoverability easier.

You can select a specific page on your store for your wishlist, place the “Add to Wishlist” button on the shop page, and display the “Remove the Wishlist” button when the customer adds the products to the wishlist. 

It also provides several customization options – like where to add the shortcode “Add to Wishlist” and customizing the column displayed in the wishlist table. 

When you activate this plugin, it allows your customers to share their wishlist with friends, families, and even on social media – bringing more traffic to your store.

So, if you’re searching for a plugin to add the most powerful wishlist feature to your store and improve customers’ shopping experience – YITH WooCommerce Wishlist is an ideal choice. 

Top feature: Provides product variation support – saving every detail of the product, including size and color, to the customer’s wishlist and allowing them to purchase the specific product they added to the wishlist. 

No. of Active installations: 900,000+

WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway 

Accepting global payments via Stripe is no longer a hassle. With the WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway – you can accept payments via several services, like Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Alipay, JCB, and Discover, directly on your WooCommerce store. 

It provides a simple solution to accept payments online, comes with no monthly fees, setup costs, or hidden charges, and transfers all the payments you receive to your bank account on a 7-day rolling basis. 

It also supports Apple Pay, thus allowing customers to pay via the payment details associated with their Apple IDs. Moreover, it also offers Web Payments API support which lets customers pay through the payment details associated with their mobile devices and makes mobile checkout a breeze. 

Thus, WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway is a feature-packed plugin that boosts customer experience and reduces cart abandonments with flexible payment gateways. 

Top feature: Supports the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension and reusing payment cards – allowing repeat customers to check out using the same card they used previously and save time. 

No. of Active installations: 900,000+

WP WooCommerce Mailchimp

This plugin provides an easy and flexible Mailchimp integration with WooCommerceautomatically subscribing your customers to a mailing list once they take specific actions, like placing an order or order completion. 

While customer acquisition costs anywhere between 3 to 30 times more than retaining an existing customer, building a database of your existing customer’s emails is the perfect way to stay in touch with them and ensure high retention. 

Using this plugin, you can either automatically subscribe to your customer’s emails to Mailchimp or, based on their consent – by displaying the double opt-in checkbox on the checkout page. This gives your customers the option to subscribe to your email list. 

You also get the flexibility to control the label next to the opt-in checkbox, the location of the opt-in checkbox on your checkout page, and whether the opt-in checkbox is unchecked or checked by default. 

Additionally, it also provides translation support and WPML compatibility for your store. 

Top feature: Allows you to subscribe your customers to the Mailchimp email list after order creation, processing, or completion. 

No. of Active installations: 800,000+

Checkout Field Editor (Checkout Manager) for WooCommerce 

This plugin is the best option to improve your custom WooCommerce checkout page. It allows you to add 20 different custom checkout fields to your default checkout page with a user-friendly interface. 

Streamlining the customer checkout process is critical to eliminating purchasing frictions and cart abandonments. This plugin lets you add custom fields, including email, phone, radio, URL, and date, in three sections – Billing, Shipping, and Additional. 

You can delete the default checkout fields or edit them as needed with the new custom fields and rearrange, validate, or change the labels of the custom fields. 

It also lets you add a custom CSS class to improve customer engagement, reset the default checkout in a single click, and translate to other languages with WPML compatibility. 

Top feature: Makes it easy to display different checkout fields on the checkout page’s different locations using an intuitive drag-and-drop option. 

No. of Active installations: 400,000+

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce 

If you sell variable products, this plugin is the perfect choice to create beautiful yet professional visual representations of your variable products – thus enhancing product awareness.

It lets you turn the product variation select options into radio colors, images, or labels – providing a quick view of your product options to the customers and replacing the outdated dropdown product attribute field. 

For instance, if you sell a trouser in three different colors – this plugin allows you to display radio icons of the actual color instead of the dropdown with the color names, like red, blue, and green. 

Besides the color attribute – you can also enable image variation swatches and text, label, or button swatches for attributes like size and gender. It also offers multiple customization options – including options to select rounded or squared swatches and different tooltips per your store’s needs. 

Top feature: It allows you to disable the default plugin stylesheet and instead write your own CSS – maximizing and personalizing your development process. 

No. of Active installations: 300,000+

WooCommerce Admin

WooCommerce Admin is an excellent free plugin if you want to monitor your store’s key metrics and reports and test new features before WooCommerce even releases them. 

Contrary to other plugins – this is a feature plugin that provides a JavaScript-driven interface to manage your WooCommerce store and allows you to test the latest features like analytics for the future WooCommerce versions. 

Moreover, it provides many new and improved reports, which are speed-optimized – including Revenue Report, Orders Report, Variations Report, Customers Report, Products Report, and Categories Report. 

You can either install this plugin manually or via automatic installation. 

Top feature: It provides a customizable dashboard that you can design with performance indicators and key metrics corresponding to your store’s needs and importance. 

No. of Active installations: 300,000+

WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration

WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration provides seamless integration between Google Analytics and your WooCommerce store – allowing you to gain valuable data insights and improve your store’s functionality and performance. 

It lets you link a referral link to the customer’s purchase and add the transaction information to your Google Analytics data. Thus, you can track and analyze customers’ shopping behavior, checkout behavior, number of page views, eCommerce event conversions, sales performance, and even product performance through Google Analytics. 

Overall, it’s an easy-to-use plugin that enables you to study your store’s performance and identify improvement areas to bag more sales and provide a stunning shopping experience to your customers.  

Top feature: Also supports Universal Analytics, Global Site Tag, eCommerce, and enhanced eCommerce event tracking. 

No. of Active installations: 200,000+ 

WooCommerce Menu Cart 

WooCommerce Menu Cart is a great plugin to refine your store’s checkout process. This plugin adds a shopping cart button to your store’s menu in the navigation bar – making it super-accessible for your customers to go to their cart from any page on your WooCommerce store. 

It seamlessly fits in the menu and allows you to configure the cart button as required. For instance, you can always choose to display the cart in the menu, or only when there are items in it, display only items, price, and both, display only the cart icon, or only items or price. 

It also lets you configure the menu alignment – float right, float left, or use the default menu settings, and even customize your own CSS to personalize the cart per your specific requirements. 

So, if your WooCommerce theme doesn’t include this functionality – this highly compatible and translation-ready plugin can be a lifesaver for your store. 

Top feature: Besides WooCommerce – it’s also compatible with WP-Ecommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Jigoshop, and Eshop. 

No. of Active installations: 100,000+

Booster for WooCommerce

Booster for WooCommerce is a feature-packed plugin that doesn’t just do one thing – but provides you with a set of 110 features to customize your site’s functionality with easy-to-setup options and zero coding requirements. 

It provides 100+WooCommerce add-ons in a single plugin with all the features you need to create a seamless customer experience and leverage robust back-end reporting and admin tools. 

Its key features include professional PDF invoicing and packing slips, streamlining cart and checkout, customizing products through product add-ons, and setting up custom payment gateways.

Thus, if you need an all-in-one WooCommerce solution to boost your site’s functionality – Booster for WooCommerce is an ideal choice.

Top feature: Provides a modular architecture – allowing you only to enable the features you need and ensuring zero bloating of your WooCommerce store. 

No. of Active installations: 80,000+ 

YITH WooCommerce Product Gallery & Image Zoom

When purchasing online, most customers check the product images before reading the product details- making images the key elements of your customer’s purchase decisions. 

This plugin allows your customers to zoom through the product images when they hover the mouse on them – allowing them to see every detail and inspect the product’s quality. 

You can choose the image’s zoom position, configure the size of the zoom window, determine whether to blur the background image while zooming and display the lightbox on your product images. 

Other customization options include changing the size, color, and position of the lightbox icon, the colors, size, and shape of the arrows, and setting the number of thumbnails to display in the slider. 

Top feature: It also lets you enable the product gallery slider below the featured product image, display the slider arrows on hover, and enable this slider as infinite (choose the style between circular and back to first). 

No. of Active installations: 60,000+

Conclusion 

WooCommerce is an excellent eCommerce solution to run your online store; however, it only offers basic functionalities. If you truly want to enhance your store’s functionality, change its overall look and feel, and improve customer experience, your best bet is to add some high-functioning free WooCommerce plugins to your arsenal. 

While choosing from thousands of options can get overwhelming, check out the plugins listed above and choose a suitable set that best matches your store’s needs. 

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Rodolfo Melogli

Business Bloomer Founder

Author, WooCommerce expert and WordCamp speaker, Rodolfo has worked as an independent WooCommerce freelancer since 2011. His goal is to help entrepreneurs and developers overcome their WooCommerce nightmares. Rodolfo loves travelling, chasing tennis & soccer balls and, of course, wood fired oven pizza. Follow @rmelogli

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