Today it seems every website is a kind of online shop, where it offers some kind of merchandise or specific products. This is in most part because online shops can be seamlessly integrated into a WordPress website.
A number of plugins can help you further develop your webshop and here is the curated list of the ones we would recommend.
Yoast SEO
When talking about SEO, it is one of the best plugins available for WordPress. Using it you can generate sitemaps for your website, and it can suggest what improvements your website needs to achieve a higher search rank.
Contact Form 7
Anyone can make a good contact form with this plugin. More so, it can be used to make a poll or a quiz pop-up for new or returning visitors.
CloudFlare
High page loading time is a serious issue with Google penalizing websites who take more than 4 seconds to load a page. This plugin is the best solution to optimize your page loading time. Additionally, it offers DDoS and CDN protection services.
WooCommerce or Magento
Depending on your preference for an e-commerce solution, you may opt for the free WooCommerce or paid Magneto. Both have many features that will help you make and configure your webshop to your own liking.
Shopify
The cloud-hosted Shopify platform enables you to start your webshop very fast. Because it is cloud-hosted you do not have to worry about updating the plugin, plugin or security. They do it for you.
Lemon Stand
Alternative cloud-based eCommerce platform that you may want to use is Lemon Stand. The main focus of this eCommerce platform is to enable you to make amazing webshop with little effort while offering a customized experience for your website visitors. While some other platforms work with the backend, Lemon Stand enables you to make changes to your webshop with the front-end development tool.
Zendesk Chat
With chatbot and artificial intelligence on the rise, still, there are plugins that let YOU communicate with your customers. With this plugin, you can have multiple conversations managed with the online Dashboard.
WP Rocket
A webshop can have hundreds of products on offer, with a few photos for every single one. This can amass a substantial number of images that lead to slow page loading issue. The negative impact that a high number of images will have on your WordPress website can be resolved with Wp Rocket caching plugin. It will provide page caching, cache preloading based on a crawler simulation, static files compression to reduce HTML weight, and it will speed up your website further by loading images only as the user scrolls further. The positive effects are substantial both from a visitor experience and SEO point-of-view.
The WP Rocket plugin is essentially free, so there is no reason not to have it, while the paid version includes additional features aimed at developers.
On a side note, be aware that eCommerce websites are resource intensive, as they sell your products in most part by the images and media you provide. Do consider getting a high-quality website hosting, SSD hosting preferably, that will provide your customers with the best possible browsing experience.