WordPress has made it possible for anyone to create their own website without much effort. Since the arrival of WordPress, it has been considered as one of the most reliable and trustworthy website builder software for both big and small businesses. If we start counting the reasons why WordPress is important for your business or why you should use it, then the list is going to be endless.

The WordPress website builder is the most powerful and competitive content management system (CMS) and what makes WordPress best is its flexibility and ease of use. The popularity of WordPress can be estimated by the fact that more than 33.2 % of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress website builder.

Not to forget the fact that WordPress is free software that doesn’t charge you anything for creating a website enriched with thousands of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

WordPress Plugins are just like apps that help you to add more custom functionality to your WordPress website. With the help of WordPress plugins, you can simply add more value to your website via advanced features like analytics, membership areas, contact forms, etc. WordPress plugins are an integral part of the WordPress ecosystem.

On WordPress, you can simply find thousands of free premium plugins with the help of which you can easily create a great website.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

WordPress plugins are just like small software apps that are inserted on the top of WordPress software and let you add new features and enhancements to your WordPress website. Currently, there are more than 48 thousand WordPress plugins available on WordPress. WordPress plugins made it possible for WordPress to transform into a powerful content management system.

Not just this, you can improve the SEO of your website, boost your performance, add social media buttons, and create galleries with the help of WordPress plugins.

Now that you are well aware of WordPress plugins and their functions, let us have a look at the top 30 WordPress plugins that can help you make an outstanding and extraordinary WordPress website.

Top 30 WordPress Plugins

1 – HubSpot

If you have ever used in-bound marketing, you must be aware of a familiar with the name, HubSpot. If not, then keep scrolling. Hubspot is the one-stop destination for all the needs of your WordPress website’s Lead management. Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing plugin that can help you organize, track, nurture, and boost your leads and customers on the WordPress website.

HubSpot plugin connects your WordPress website with HubSpot CRM which helps you in attaining visitors’ information on your website.  HubSpot plugins also have the live chat and bot builder feature that can help you in engaging more customers.  Hubspot built-in analytics helps you to see the report of your email campaign and its success.

2 – Defender

Defender is one of a kind WordPress security plugin, which is enriched with features that can protect your website from hackers and not attacks. The defender WordPress plugin makes your website experience safe and secure. 

Defender comes with features like a one-step website hardening to save you from future hacking attacks and security tweaking, Google verification, IP Blacklist manager, WordPress core files scanning, and rehabilitation. With the help of the Defender WordPress plugin, you can also enable scheduled scans.

3 – Hummingbird

Hummingbird is an efficient and lightweight WordPress plugin. To win the Google ranking game, your website needs to be as fast and responsive as it can be. Hummingbird WordPress plugin is here to help your website fly faster!

Hummingbird provides you, world-class caching, that can help your website pages load faster and browse cache tools. It also comes with performance reports that can give you pro tips that you can implement on your website to make it speedy. With the help of this WordPress plugin, you can simply minify, combine, defer, and compress.

In a nutshell, Hummingbird turns your website into a lenient, efficient and high-speed machine!

4 – Jetpack

Jetpack WordPress plugin can be considered as a whole package of powerful features regarding the security performance and website management of your WordPress website. In fact, it also offers content management tools,  social sharing, related posting section, posts via Email, and spam-free comments. With the help of the Jetpack WordPress plugin, you can certainly increase visitor engagement and responsiveness to your WordPress website.

5 – Akismet

Comment spam is one major issue that most of the WordPress websites deal with. But the WordPress website builder and WordPress developers are always there to help you out. With the help of the Akismet WordPress Plugin, you can easily filter out that comment that looks like spam. In fact, Akismet itself checks out the comment section of your website.

6 – Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML sitemaps are one of those WordPress plugins that your website essentially needs so that search engines like Google can easily rank your blogs.

What Google XML sitemap does is to create an XML sitemap for your WordPress website. It makes the structure of your website clear and as a result, search engines are notified every time you publish a post.

7 – iThemes Security

Just like the name suggests, iThemes Security is a WordPress plugin that insures to pick the common holes in your WordPress website from security attacks.  there is a possibility that many times WordPress administrators are unaware of the fact that their website has vulnerabilities. iTheme security functions in order to help and protect your website from such vulnerabilities.

8 – Forminator

Forms, polls, and quizzes are an important part of a website because they are the ones who help in increasing engagement and customer interaction on your website. So, here WordPress presents you to a well-packaged WordPress plugin, Forminator.

Forminator is a free WordPress plugin through which you can easily create polls forms and quizzes. It is integrated with other apps like Google Sheets and Zappier. Other than this, Forminator has features like scoreless styling, conditional logic, and calculations. You can build your own custom extension with the best strong API of forminator.

9 – Snapshot

When we say WordPress website builder is incredible we don’t lie. WordPress plugins even cover the backup area of your website as well. Snapshot WordPress plugin allows you to restore your website data through backup. In case you lost your backup, it got corrupted or accidentally deleted, Snapshot Pro even keeps backup of your backup. A snapshot saves your backup to multiple locations like Dropbox, your computer, Amazon S3, Google Drive, etc.

10 – SmartCrawl

SEO is that one thing that can take your website from zero to top on Google SERP. Well, that’s true that every website administrator works hard to get visitors to their websites. You must be implementing all SEO practices but it is crucial for you to know about a SmartCrawl WordPress plugin and how it benefits to improve your website SEO.

Whenever your website publishes important content that needs to be notified early, this plugin does the job of informing web crawlers that your website has important content. Other than that SmartCrawl is flexible, easy to use, customizable, create a sitemap, and also adds automated keyword linking.

11 – W3 Total Cache

User experience is one very vital entity for the success of your website. With the help of the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin, you can enhance user experience and boost the performance of the server of your website.

This WordPress plugin is designed in a way so that it can expand your loading speed that will ultimately modify the user experience. W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin curtail download times and intensify the performance of your server.

12 – Beehive

Once your website gets popular success is not far away. But that popularity can only be gained through analyzing visitor engagement. Google Analytics is a great tool for such analysis. Beehive is a WordPress plugin that delivers the exact analysis from Google Analytics to your WordPress website dashboard. With the help of such influential data insights and reports by Google Analytics, you can efficiently track page visits, bounce rate, page views, and referred. You can even analyze the shopping behavior of your customers and the demographics of your website.

13 – Branda

Branding of your website is an integral step towards attaining more customer engagement on your website. Branding is as important as your services and products because it creates a sense of professionalism.

With the help of Branda WordPress plugin,  you can create your own logo customize your admin panel, footer, dashboard, and create your own company name for better reach. So, ultimately, Branda is the only branding plugin that you need for your WordPress website to twist it into your company’s website.

14 – Smush Pro

Imagine reducing the size of the image without compromising even if even the slightest with the quality of the image! Well, that means a fast loading website with high-quality images!

That is what the award-winning WordPress plugin Smush Pro does for your website. it saves the storage on your website and increases the loading speed of your website. Smush pro has been titled as the best Image Compression and Image Optimisation WordPress plugin.

15 – Contact Form 7

As the name suggests contact form 7 is a WordPress plugin that easily allows you to add contact forms with the help of shortcodes to your WordPress website.

With the help of contact form 7, you can easily add, manage, or create multiple contact forms and you don’t even need to do the extra coding.

16 – Broken Link Checker

Well, I think you already know what this plugin does. Just like its name is Broken Link Checker, this WordPress plugin does the scanning of your website and fix the broken links founding your posts, pages, comments, etc. Any kind of redirects missing images or broken links can’t hide from this incredible WordPress plugin.

17 – Duplicate

The main function of “Duplicate” is to duplicate, move, and transfer the website from one place to another. It often happens many times that you need backup or moves your entire WordPress website to another location. Well, duplicator WordPress plugin can get this done for you.

You can also consider duplicator as an easy utility WordPress tool that can keep the backup of your website.

18 – Disable Comments

Disable comments WordPress plugin helps you to disable comments on your posts, pages, blogs, or attachments. It allows WordPress administrators to easily get control over the comment section of the website. No matter if you want to disable comments on a particular post or on the entire website this plugin can help you with both.

19 – Relevanssi

Even the default search option of your WordPress website can be replaced or changed. Yes, you heard it right. Relevanssi, a WordPress plugin, can help you. You can easily customize to do fuzzy matching on partial words via this WordPress plugin. The free version of this WordPress plugin can help you control a single website but the premium version can help you control multiple websites.

20 – Easy Updates Manager

Easy Updates Manager helps you to handle updates on single-site and multi-site WordPress installations.

Quick Updates Manager helps you to handle all your WordPress updates for a single site or Multisite installation. There are tons of settings included in the plugin that make it highly customizable.

Apps provide options to automatically update major and minor releases of WordPress. Site administrators may also choose to upgrade plugins, themes, and more automatically.

21 – Redirection

In order to improve the ranking of your WordPress website and reduce the rate of visitors landing on error. Make use of the Redirection WordPress plugin.

In case you are moving pages are changing the directory instructions of your WordPress website then this WordPress plug-in can be very useful to you as it keeps in an account of 401 error and manages 301 redirects.

22 – Regenerate Thumbnails

Well, I think now it’s easy to guess what’s the role of this WordPress plugin. So, Regenerate Thumbnails is a WordPress Plugin that regenerates the thumbnails of the images on your WordPress website. Be it individual images, upload images, or separate images, you can regenerate the thumbnails of any of them with the help of regenerate thumbnail WordPress plugin.

23 – TablePress

With TablePress, which uses a shortcode, you can easily create tables that can be embedded into posts, pages, or text widgets. Since table data can be inserted directly into a spreadsheet interface, no special coding is required.

Tables can contain any data type, including formulae. Sorting, pagination, and filtering provide extra TablePress features. Tables can also be imported and/or exported from/to the formats Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON.

24 – Photo Gallery

Gallery gives tools that help you add and edit images that are 100 percent responsive to different views on your site. Within WordPress, you can easily add photo galleries and albums to posts and pages as well as multiple widgets.

The plugin can also make renaming, downloading, deleting, and copying images simple in just a few steps. This tool can also add Photo details and tags.

25 – Yoast SEO

SEO lets you get more visits to your website from the search engines. Although WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, there’s so much more you can do to increase traffic on your website using the best SEO practices.

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plug-ins in WordPress ever. Yoast provides the most comprehensive solution out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, with all the functionality and resources you need to boost your on-page SEO.

It helps you to add meta tags, create sitemaps, connect your website to the Google Search Console, optimize it for social media, and more.

26 – MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress plugin in Google Analytics. It helps you to link your website to Google Analytics “correctly,” so you can see precisely how people find your website and use it.

The best part is that the WordPress dashboard shows you all the relevant stats that matter right inside.

Then you can customize your website to increase your traffic, subscribers, and revenues accordingly. We have comprehensive guides on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, how to use Google Analytics to enable tracking eCommerce, and how to track user engagement.

27 – Constant Contact

Constant Contact is among the second most prevalent providers of email marketing services.

Their platform helps you to create a mailing list and give your subscribers beautiful email newsletters.

It gives non-techy users a fast and easy setup. This also works well with common WordPress plugins like OptinMonster and WPForms for lead generation.

28 – Shared Counts

Shared counts are the best social media plugin in WordPress which helps you to easily add beautiful social sharing buttons to your website.

It also shows share counts, which lets you add social proof to your website.

While there are several paid solutions available, this free plugin beats all of them in terms of consistency and performance of code.

29 – Insert Headers And Footers

You may need to attach code snippets to your WordPress header or footer often when running your WordPress site for verification, adding scripts for re-targeting ads, etc.

Insert Headers and Footer help you to quickly add snippets of code to your WordPress site without changing files on your theme. Take a look at our WordPress tutorial on how to add header and footer code.

30 – SEMrush

SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit intended for digital marketers and business owners. Helping you boost your SEO, paid traffic plan, social media, and marketing & PR plan comes with powerful tools.

This also lets you collect your rivals’ strategic intelligence so you can circumvent them and conquer the business.

This lets you do keyword analysis, backlink audit, monitor brand mentions, spy on rivals, discover best performing social media posts and accounts, evaluate ad strategy, and more.

Conclusion

We hope that now that you are well versed with the list of the topmost WordPress Plugins that your WordPress website must.

If you have any more outstanding WordPress plugins in your mind then let us know below in the comment section.

Magento and WordPress both provide the e-Commerce platform for your website. There are many similarities between them such as they both provide a very good structure for SEO, they both have strong online community where you can get help to your problem. Large range of themes to choose from, and on the top, they both follow an open source php, mysql based systems which can be customized as per your requirements. 

Magento is purely an E-Commerce system (it was first built on top a PHP framework called “Zend Framework”). It has all required features and functionalities to run a full-fledged complex e-commerce store.

You can setup multiple local stores on Magento, you can charge customers in multiple currencies, you can customize it further as per your requirements.

However the codebase and backend system of Magento is not very intuitive and it needs special skills to to maintain and customize Magento.

WooCommerce is hosted inside the WordPress system, which is a content management system and open-source blogging platform. It allows you to add functionality to your websites by adding plugins.

If you want an e-Commerce website using WordPress, then you may install any e-Commerce plugin such as WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, Easy Digital Download, etc. Out of them, WooCommerce is the most popular and flexible.

One good thing about WooCommerce is that it is easy to maintain and customize and there are tons of free plugins to take care of various needs. If you are looking for a lightweight simple e-commerce site then WooCommerce could be a good solution.

If you are running on Magento site and feel it is too heavy to maintain and customize while you just want to run a simple e-commerce store then you can migrate to WooCommerce.

Following are the steps to migrate to WooCommerce.

Pre Migration Steps

You decided to move your site from Magento to WordPress, but before the migration process, you need to follow these steps to run this process smoothly:

1. Install WordPress: We are supposing that you already purchased the hosting if not then first step is to purchase the hosting. WordPress hosting is widely available with a great range of options from inexpensive to specialized managed hosting. To know more about managed hosting, check out this post.
2. Install WooCommerce: Now the next step is to install the WooCommerce plugin on your site. There are many other plugins available for e-Commerce such as WP eCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, etc, but we will talk about WooCommerce.
3. Install Plugin to Migrate Site: There are many plugins available for migration of the site from Magento to WordPress(WooCommerce) such as Cart2Cart, FG Magento to WooCommerce, etc

Manual Migration

This is the simple method of migrating the site from Magento to WordPress is to use the .csv file for the migration purpose. To apply this method, you need to make a .csv file of the products, customers, orders available on your Magento store and then import the .csv file to WordPress(WooCommerce).

The steps for semi-automated migration are as follows:

Step 1: Purchase the WooCommerce Import Suite

After installing the WooCommerce on your WordPress website, you need to purchase the import suite of the WooCommerce in order to import the .csv files. To purchase it you can follow the steps below :

• Go to WooCommerce > Extension
• Then choose Import/Export
• Choose the suite which you want
• You will be redirected to WooCommerce official site, here you can proceed with the payment

Step 2: Create .CSV file from Magento

Now you have to create the .csv file of the data which you want to migrate, for eg. products, orders, customers, etc. In order to make a .csv file of the data which you want to migrate follow these simple steps :

1. Login to Magento administrator area

1. Go to System > Import/Export > Export
2. In the Export, section choose the entity you want to export and Export File Format as “CSV”
3. Include or exclude the data to be exported in the Entity Attributes section
4. Finally, click the continue button

Step 3: Import the CSV file to WordPress

Importing product to WooCommerce is very easy and very less time taking. All you need to do is, follow the simple steps below :

1. Go to WooCommerce > CSV Import Suite
2. Click the Import Products button
3. Select Choose File and then upload the .csv which you need to import
4. Finally, click upload file and import
5. Check the map fields before completing the import

Semi-Automated Migration

Use one of these plugins

FG Magento to WooCommerce

Cart2Cart: Magento to WooCommerce Migration

In order to migrate e-Commerce site from one platform to another platform, you need to migrate products, images, categories, customers, orders, etc.

Step 1: Install and Configure the Plugin

Step 2: Test the Database Connection

Step 3: Import the Data

Fill all the details required. The settings are set to default, you may change them as per your needs. You can check the details about the options by clicking the help button on the plugin page and then choosing ‘options’.

Once you fill all the required settings, you may click on the button “Start/Resume the import” and start the process of migration.

It may take time depending upon the size of your Magento site i.e. the number of products, number of images, etc.

Step 4: Check the New Site

Before migration:

• Back up information from your store;
• Inform the customers and suppliers about your plans;
• Choose the best time for migration — analyze when the visitor’s traffic is the lowest.

And after the transfer you need to:

• Don’t forget to set up 301 redirect, create a custom 404 page and generate a sitemap.
• Then ask the customer to recover their passwords;
• Make sure all the data migrated and test your brand new store.

Magento and WooCommerce are both professional e-commerce solutions and both have their pros and cons.  There was a time when Magento was the best e-commerce solution on the market, but WooCommerce came on the scene in 2011 and has since proved to be a better option for many businesses.

In general, Magento is still best for large enterprises or groups of online stores. If you currently have an outdated Magento site, this is the perfect time to see which e-commerce solution is best for you. It may be more cost-effective to migrate your data from Magento into a new WooCommerce site as it’s remarkably easy to use.

This post first appeared on our E-Commerce Business site at https://commercecodes.com/how-to-migrate-magento-to-woocommerce

Shopify is an out of the box SaaS tool that allows you to quickly and easily create an online store. It provides you with several templates that can be customized to meet your requirements. One of the key factors behind using Shopify is that users without much knowledge of technical or design skills can create a store without hiring a designing agency or a web developer.

Shopify is highly customizable so for advanced customization, you can hire Shopify developer and get an appealing custom made E-store. Moreover, Shopify has auxiliary apps available for you to assist in the complete eCommerce process from inventory management to customer management. It allows entrepreneurs to concentrate on their business and not on the technical side of the website and shopping management.

Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify is a fairly complex process and has a lot of work included in it. Here we will acquaint you with the step by step process of conducting successful online store transportation from WooCommerce SaaS platform to Shopify.

When you migrate your store from WooCommerce to Shopify, you can import your existing product and customer data to Shopify. Before you import your data to Shopify, you need to export your data from WooCommerce.

Export your store data from WooCommerce

Before you import your existing store data, you need to export your data from your WooCommerce store. When your export is completed, you will have an XML file saved on your computer that you can use to import your data to Shopify.

Steps:

1. From your WooCommerce admin, click Tools > Export.
2. Select All content.
3. Click Download Export File.

Import your store data to Shopify

After you export your store data from WooCommerce, you need to import your data to Shopify.

Note

To complete your import, you need to have Shopify’s importer tool installed.

Steps:

1. From the Import store app in Shopify, go to Select your platform > Import from WooCommerce.
2. Click Add file.
3. Select your WooCommerce XML file that you downloaded.
4. Click Import.
5. Review your import.

Delete a store data import

If you’re unsatisfied with a data import, then you can delete it. For example, if your data import contains many failed items, then it might be helpful to remove that import and try again. You can delete only your latest import, and need to wait for the data to delete completely before you start another import.

Steps

On the Import complete page, click Delete import.

1. On the Delete import dialog, click Delete import.

After all your imported files are deleted, click Start new import to start another import.

Review and update your imported data

If your data import was successful, then you should see your product and customer data in your Shopify admin. If some of your products or customers did not import, then you can add them manually. You can add a product or add a customer manually after your data import.

Note

You might encounter errors with your CSV import. Learn more about solutions to common product CSV import problems.

Import was successful with changes

When your import is finished, the import summary page shows you the details of your import. If some of your products or customers were imported with changes, then you see specific error messages in the Products to review section of the import summary. You can edit your products and customers manually by clicking View items next to these messages.

Products imported successfully but are not published

If your product visibility was set to hidden in WooCommerce, then your product is not available for purchase on your store. You can make your products available by making them available to a sales channel.

Imported products no longer have their dimensions

If your customers need the dimensions of your product, then add the dimensions directly to the product description.

Some products or customers failed to import

If some of your products or customers did not import, then you can add a product or add a customer manually.

Any customers with the same email address or phone number is skipped during an import. Only the most recent customer entry with the duplicated data is imported.

Bundled products failed to import

If any of your products are bundled on WooCommerce, then you need to add these products to Shopify manually. You need to use an app to bundle products. You can install a product bundle app from the Shopify App Store.

Digital products imported successfully but are not published

If your product is a digital download, then your product is not published on your store. You need to use an app to sell digital products. You can install the Digital Downloads app to make your products available on your store.

Product variants failed to import

If your product has variants, and one of the variants is missing an option, then the product is not imported. You need to add this product to Shopify manually. For example, if you are selling T-shirts with the options of size and color and one of your variants includes an option for size but not color, then your product is not imported.

URL Redirects

It is important to properly set the URL Redirects so all the URLs from old website map to new website otherwise if a user is coming from an old referrall lin or through Google then they will see a broken link.

Setup your URL redirects at

Create a URL redirect

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Navigation.
2. Click URL Redirects:

• Click Add URL redirect.
• In Redirect from, enter the old URL you want to redirect visitors from. Only broken URLs should be redirected. If the old URL still loads a webpage, the URL redirect won’t work.

In Redirect to, enter the new URL that you want to redirect visitors to. If you want to redirect to your store’s home page, then enter /.

Click Add.

This post first appeared on our E-Commerce Business site at https://commercecodes.com/how-to-migrate-woocommerce-to-shopify