For you to be successful with your online store, you need to use amazing WordPress themes and Plugins that will integrate well with your business. When it comes to blogging, running a website or building and ecommerce site, there is no doubt that WordPress is the leading platform and the best place to do all of that. WordPress has proven to be one of the most popular website builders for both blogger, companies and eCommerce entrepreneurs. One of its many benefits includes all the powerful themes and plugins at your disposal.
However, if you wan to run a smooth and seamless WordPress store and make money easily with your store without hazzles, the type of WordPress themes and plugins you use, can have a big impact on your goals.
In this article we will cover the best WordPress themes and plugins that will help you grow. Whether you are planning to make more money or find customers to your online store. Irrespective of where you are in the world; using the right WordPress themes and plugins can help you dominate your market and convert more. It can also give you edge over your competitors. Another great thing is that these WordPress themes and plugins can help you quickly and efficiently build your online business. Let’s dive in….
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WordPress Themes
Astra
Astra is one of the most popular themes for WordPress till date, it can be used not just for ecommerce stores but for other purposes like blogging, news or general website.
The core strength of Astra is that it’s incredibly built for ecommerce purpose and also customizable to suite your desire. It works perfectly well with the most commonly used page builders; such as (Elementor and Visual Composer), it’s fully packed with lots of features and comes with multiple theme options. Most importantly, it is capable of serving any market or niche, and it is a fully responsive WordPress theme with Retina ready output.
One major advantage of Astra theme is that, it doesn’t just provide you with just one design or homepage layout. It comes with several predesigned home pages that you can easily import into any of your site or store based on the purpose and aesthetics of your store and the niche it’s going to be in.
Among these pre designed sites/templates, there are designs optimized for an ecommerce website that are SEO optimized. But that’s not all. Astra also gives you a set of add-ons and custom widgets that bring even more features to your store.
Customization-wise, you can tune-up every little aspect of your online shop design via the WordPress Live Customizer UI.
OceanWP
This is another all-in-one WordPress theme that’s highly used and also recommended by its users. OceanWP is also a multipurpose WordPress theme and easy to install and use. The theme also comes with a set of pre-made designs that can you can easily choose from and install in a couple of clicks.
Apart from that, with OceanWP, everything is fully responsive, Retina ready and loads very fast. It supports RTL texts, and has built-in SEO and social media features in place.
One key factor that makes OceanWP stands out among other themes are its robust ecommerce features and the theme options panel, all this featured are geared at improving your sales and simply making you more money. Few of those robust features includes; a native shopping cart popup, a floating add to cart bar, quick view (allowing users to see details of another product without leaving the current one), and lots more.
Even if you are not satisfied with what OceanWP has offered with their theme, you can always choose from a range of cool extensions and add-ons from the WordPress Repository. (like adding social media share buttons, responsive side panels custom meta boxes and Compare functions).
Read Also:.The top and most affordable web hosting companies in Africa to host your WordPress blog
Flatsome
This is currently the bestselling WordPress ecommerce theme on ThemeForest as we speak. (You should know that ThemeForest is the biggest marketplace for WordPress themes and Plugins). Flatsome reaching well over 100,000 total sales on ThemeForest proofs that it is in no doubt one of the best WordPress Themes for Building your ecommerce site.
People who use this theme just seems to love the theme each passing day, and this might be due to the following reasons. Flatsome comes with lots of multiple features that make running an ecommerce store much easier. The most important of them is the Live Page Builder tool that comes in the box. With the page builder tool, you can build any type of online store you wish, you can also customize it using a library of over 30 content modules. You can use those to craft an awesome homepage and also any other sub-page of your ecommerce store. There’s also a full WPML and RTL compatibility, and a quick view features.
Apart from the Live Page Builder that comes with Flatsome, you also get access to the excellent Live Theme Options panel that lets you adjust every little detail about the theme’s appearance. This feature is greatly enjoyed by those using the theme for ecommerce purposes. The shortcodes are great too, particularly for items like testimonials and Google Maps.
The amazing part of Flatsome is that you can also choose from well over 300 pre-made layouts and page designs that comes with it.
Porto
Haven talked about Flatsome, we can’t afford not to mention Porto as this is the second most popular ecommerce WordPress theme also found on ThemeForest. One great unique thing about Porto is that it comes with 20 Great design variations that is specifically built for ecommerce stores.
To make it even easier for you as an ecommerce store owner, these premade designs are all divided into niches, making your setup very straightforward. For example, if you are looking to launch a clothing / fashion store, gadget online store, Wine Store Online, Health Store Online, bicycle store, auto parts store, shoe store, or whatever your niche maybe, be rest assured that Porto has you covered!
Aside the premade designs, there are also additional ecommerce features that comes with the theme, to extend what WordPress and WooCommerce plugin feature your store come with. With Porto WordPress theme, you get a whole lot of control over your store design and details as well. Your site headers are fully customizable (So you can either chose from the pre-made headers or you manually design yours following the guides that comes with the theme), you can select different layouts, set up mega menus, use product quick view with lightbox, customize both your archive and single product pages, use shortcodes to add elements to pages, translate with WPML, setup parallax scrolling, Add different languages and Currencies and lots more.
All this is delivered in a package that still loads fast and can work even on lower-tier servers.
Monstroid2
This incredible theme is in no doubt an amazing fit for any online store. haven been voted the best choice for WordPress in 2021. It’s Pretty great to want to try it out and see for yourself what makes it really powerful. However, let me tell you a few of its features. This multipurpose modular WordPress Elementor theme is packed with a whole lot that totally justify its award.
The theme is incredibly lightweight at 250kb and offers a smooth performance as a result. Monstroid2 comes with over 1000 pre-designed sections and ready-made pages, which makes it very easy to find a suitable design for you to go with your site/store. Not only that, you can also customize the entire thing as you wish.
Because this theme is Elementor-based, it comes with free, open-source code. However, you don’t have to use it, as Elementor is an intuitive drag-n-drop editor that brags of popular real-time editing functionality.
Monstroid2 also boasts more than 40 exclusive JetElements, including easy post-carousels, portfolios, subscription forms, and more. It’s very compatible with WooCommerce and suitable for complex sites, with the ability to create spectacular Mega menus and vertical menus.
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WordPress Plugins
WooCommerce
This is a free WordPress plugin that is built mainly for the purpose of ecommerce. This means, you are looking to run an ecommerce store online using WordPress, you must have WooCommerce ready before your store can come alive.
This so powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin that just so happens to be FREE is the driving force behind 30% of all online stores and offers incredible flexibility and customization.
WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, which is one of the most reliable and powerful companies in the WordPress ecosystem.
With WooCommerce, it is now very easy for anyone to create an eCommerce store in just a few minutes with few clicks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling digital goods or physical goods or running membership or subscription site.
Key Features:
It allows lots of extensions and themes with flexibility. This makes it very easy for you to add new features to your WooCommerce store, like including cart abandonment features, inventory management, distribution of discount codes, Payment options, Currency switchers and so much more
WooCommerce supports physical products as well as digital downloads and Membership sites.
Affiliate marketers can add affiliate or external products to your site, providing users a better experience. You can also easily manage your inventory or even assign it to a store manager.
Built-in support for popular payment gateways (plus, you can add many other payment options using extensions). Automatically calculate taxes, shipping costs, and other expenses. Excellent support including documentation, a knowledge base, help desk, and community forums.
One of the drawbacks of WooCommerce is in its scalability. As your store gets bigger and attracts more customers, you’ll need to move to a managed hosting provider so that you can scale your WooCommerce store.
All in One SEO
As the name implies, All in One SEO is a plugin that ensures that your website content is SEO-optimized. This will help your site to been seen on search engines thereby increasing traffic and which will definitely improve revenues and earnings on your eCommerce site.
For any site to be fully optimized and SEO ready, lots of time and effort need to be put in place so that your eCommerce website can rank on Google. However, with All in One SEO which is a WordPress plugin you can be rest assured that those effort will be reduced and channelled into more useful areas. ALL in One SEO in a nutshell makes your site SEO optimized and user-friendly.
Key Features:
Helps with Content and on page SEO analysis.
The Snippet preview is a great way of showing you how your post or page will look when it appears in the search engine results.
Helps with Site audit, SEO score, and optimization recommendations. Social media integrations
Helps analyse your headline/topic, slug, descriptions, keywords etc.
Read Also:.The top and most affordable web hosting companies in Africa to host your WordPress blog
Cart Recovery for WordPress
The Cart Recovery for WordPress is a powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin that works perfectly well with WooCommerce plugin, Easy Digital Downloads, WP eCommerce, and Restrict Content Pro.
This plugin can be easily used to track abandoned carts, view stats in your WordPress dashboard, and configure automatic recovery emails that you will be sending to your customers when their carts are abandoned. Also, it integrates well with WordPress’ GDPR compliance tools for data access and data removal requests.
Key Features:
This plugin captures customers name, email address phone number as soon as they’re entered at checkout.
Capture and engage new customers who never reach checkout with “Save to Cart”.
Trigger abandoned cart email campaigns automatically when a customer does not final make the purchase.
Track in-progress carts, abandoned carts, and recovered carts easily within your WordPress dashboard.
Cart Recovery for WordPress is one of the best options for reducing shopping cart abandonment with your online store.
WP Product Review
For the success of your online store, you need a way for you customers to give you a great feedback or leave a product review. WP Product Review is one of the best WordPress plugins for eCommerce for product reviews. With WP Product Review, adding a product review becomes easy. More so, you get to choose how you want to manage and display reviews on your website.
To do this, you simply select the product review option when writing a blog post or a product description, and the plugin shows you all the settings you need to write your review. You can even break down your review into features, add images, pros and cons, and more.
Key Features:
Save time by importing features from reviews you’ve already built (and Amazon info!)
You can choose from 3 review layouts that’s available to you to match with your store design and also sooth or appeals to your visitors.
When posting a review or comments, users can rate the different product specifications.
Automatically generate comparison tables from existing reviews.
WP Product Review comes with sidebar widgets that let you showcase your reviews as well. And, you can use it to collect user-submitted reviews or let your users add their own rating and reviews in the comments for your products.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the best email marketing service for eCommerce businesses and is also very user-friendly. It is very beginner friendly, allowing you to easily add it to your store and start building your email list in no time. With Constant Contact marketing tools, you will be rest assured that all your marketing needs are covered.
This plugin comes with dozens of professionally designed email templates for various niches. However, you can create yours from scratch. You can also create multiple lists and create custom funnels to send personalized emails to selected audiences.
Constant Contact can be used as an email service provider to send targeted email campaigns to your audience. It also comes with an easy-to-use campaign builder, tons of analytics to get the highest open rates possible, and loads of other features to help you grow your email list.
Key Features:
Pre-designed templates to help you send branded emails List segmentation.
Marketing automation and A/B testing. Etc.
This is an excellent plugin for business owners who want to use email marketing to increase their profits.
Bonus Plugins
We’ve covered some WordPress themes and plugins that you can use to launch an online store in Nigeria easily. However, here are some bonus plugins for you.
CartFlows
With CartFlow, you can easily replace the WooCommerce checkout process with your own custom checkout, built with your WordPress page builder of choice.
One of the most helpful things about CartFlows is that it enables you to build checkout funnels, creating complete order bumps and upsells. For example, if someone is buying a pair of sunglasses, you could display a special-order bump offer for a carrying case. By employing these smart offers, you can boost your revenue per order.
You can also create a custom checkout processes for individual products, which is great if you have a smaller store or are using WooCommerce for non-product applications, such as powering your online course or membership site.
WooCommerce Mailchimp
The easiest way to build a database of both new and existing customers is by collecting email addresses in an email list. WooCommerce Mailchimp plugin has proven to be the best free plugin for this job. To use this seamlessly, you should also be using Mailchimp Email Marketing tool
Mailchimp plugin automatically subscribes your customers to a mailing list when they take a specific action. This action could be placing an order or when an order’s status moves to completed, or even subscribing to your mailing list.
Note: Your existing customers are your best friends. You need to treat them well so that they can remain customers and be loyal to your site for years to come.
Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce
This is a great plugin that helps your customers know the status of the order. Once a customer places an order on your site, they want to know exactly when they can expect to receive their order. If possible, track its every move and know exactly where their product is at the moment.
With Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce you can keep your customers in the loop and also updated by providing them with the tracking details both in an email and in their ‘My Account’ area.
This plugin integrates with more than a hundred shipping providers, including the big names such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.
In conclusion, there a tons of WordPress themes and plugins out there in the market that you can use to enhance the functions of your online store. Some are paid and some are free, however, most of the free ones may also have a pro version that you need to upgrade to. But with the list of WordPress themes and plugins I have given you in this article, you can easily create and launch your store to start selling. Hope you find them helpful and useful.
