wordpress plugins for e-commerce

5 WordPress Plugins for E-commerce to Make the Holidays a Breeze

E-commerce companies around the web are gearing up for a special, magical time of year: the holiday shopping season. It’s a season filled with joy…. But also with stress as you try to manage site your website, marketing, shipping, and all the other little details that pop up this time of year.

A little prep work right now can help make your holiday season run more smoothly. We’ve gathered up five of our favorite WordPress plugins for e-commerce sites to help you optimize your site, advertise your products, convert sales, and connect with your customers.

You know you’ll already have too much on your plate once the holidays roll around — take some of the pressure off by installing these five WordPress plugins for e-commerce site optimization ahead of time.

Your future self will thank you.

Our 5 Favorite WordPress Plugins for E-commerce

W3 Total Cache

wordpress plugins for e-commerce

At IvyCat, we talk a lot about how important your site speed is to making sales. Consumers have begun to expect near-instant results, particularly during the busy holiday shopping season.

Caching improves user experience on your WordPress site by improving site speed and reducing download times. W3 Total Cache offers features like optimized progressive render (so pages can be interacted with more quickly), reduced page load times, and minification of post, pages, JavaScript, and more.

Autoptimize

wordpress plugins for e-commerce

Another great way to speed up your site is to use Autoptimize to aggregate and minimizing JS, CSS and HTML.

Autoptimize makes your page super speedy by concatenating all scripts and styles, minifying and compressing them, then organizing the code on the page to run at its most optimal. Advanced users can even take advantage of the plugin’s API to customize it.

Perfect Audience Retargeting

wordpress plugins for e-commerce

Shoppers have a lot on their minds this time of year, and it just because they see the perfect gift on your site doesn’t mean they’ll buy it immediately – or remember to write it down. Studies have shown that it takes multiple impressions of your brand or product before a consumer decides to buy, which is why retargeting ads can be so powerful.

When a visitor comes to your site, a plug-in like Perfect Audience places a cookie in their browser that serves up ads on Facebook and other places around the web. With this plug-in, setting up retargeting campaigns is simple. You can even track impressions, clicks, and results on your personalized dashboard.

WordPress Landing Pages

wordpress plugins for e-commerce

If you’re ramping up your advertising and email marketing, you need to have stellar landing pages when people click back to your site. WordPress Landing Pages lets you create eye-catching landing pages based on your current WordPress theme, or chosen from their library of templates.

Getting your landing page perfectly dialed in can take a bit of experimentation. WordPress Landing Pages tracks conversions and lets you clone pages to do A/B testing on your layout, CTAs, images, and more. It even has the ability to pre-populate forms with your visitor’s information, removing yet another step to conversion.

Editorial Calendar

wordpress plugins for e-commerce

The holidays provide tons of opportunities for unique content marketing — but it can be tough to keep track of all the sales, shipping cutoffs, and dates. Editorial Calendar is a great free app that helps you plan your editorial schedule. It helps you check for gaps in your content, and makes sure you don’t miss any important dates.

Schedule gift guides, sale reminders and other announcements ahead of time, then just drag and drop within the calendar to change post dates. Editorial Calendar has the ability to manage posts from multiple authors, as well.

Are you ready for the holidays? You can get a great head start by installing these five WordPress plugins for e-commerce site optimization. If you want recommendations specific to your site, get in touch with IvyCat today.