Consider These 5 Things to Choose the Right WooCommerce Extensions

With more than four million installs, WooCommerce has long been the go-to solution for adding shopping functionality to WordPress websites. It offers a high level of support and numerous extensions to grow your ecommerce website. While the numerous options that it offers make WooCommerce a great tool, it may get challenging to understand if the extensions are right for your business needs or not. 

If you get your extensions from trustworthy sources and check for potential conflicts before implementing them fully on a live website, the selection process will become easier, and you will be able to mitigate the risks associated with installing new ones.

Consider the following things to ensure that you choose the right WooCommerce extension(s) –  

• Is the source legitimate? 

There are a lot of websites that offer free versions of premium extensions, usually referred to as “nulled”. They are usually out of date and often contain malicious code that may compromise your website.  

You may be tempted to use  these nulled versions for testing an extension’s features before spending money on a license. But saving this money in the short term won’t be worthwhile considering the mess a nulled extension could make. Therefore, it is recommended to go for the paid version, and if it doesn’t work for you , you can request a refund as most premium extension authors have limited-period return policies too. 

• Is the author reliable? 

Whether your extension comes from a larger team or an individual developer, it is essential to check the reliability of the source. Have they been building WooCommerce extensions for several years or is their experience limited? Especially, if it is a free extension by a new developer, they may not have the resources and time to update their code regularly – so you may face more compatibility issues than with the options from experience developers. 

Official WooCommerce extensions are developed either directly by the WooCommerce team or by vetted vendors with a track record of providing regular updates, high-quality extensions, and great support. 

• Is it compatible with your site? 

It does not matter how great the reviews are if the extension does not work with everything else on your website. This can be an indication of a low-quality extension, or it could mean that you need to do a little housekeeping on your current website. Ensure that WordPress, your theme, and all other extensions are updated, and your website is functioning correctly. Check your hosting server is using at least the minimum required version of MySQL and PHP.  

Bluehost takes special care of such things, so that its users don’t run into compatibility issues due to outdated hosting server. 

Some extensions may not play well with others, check the known conflicts page to see if the one you are considering has any known compatibility issues. 

• Is there good documentation and support? 

Before choosing a new extension, read through the documentation to ensure that you understand all its features and limitations properly. If there is no documentation or if it is not clear and thorough, you may want to avoid that extension. 

Even if the documentation seems understandable and detailed, check that your developer provides a reasonable level of support. This may be in the form of a ticket-based system, forum, or both. If there is a support forum, you can browse through it to see how many posts have been made, and how many of them have been marked ‘resolved’. If there are a lot of unresolved requests, you may want to reconsider using that extension. However, if the author is using a ticket-based system, you can read through their FAQs or get in touch with them to gauge their response time.  

If it is a premium extension, the developer should respond within 24-48 hours. If it is free, it may take a little longer to get a response. 

• Can it replace multiple extensions? 

If you have had your website for a long time, you may have activated many extensions on it by now. While considering another one, look for options that provide multiple features to replace multiple existing extensions at once. Limiting the number of extensions that you use improves website speed and reduces potential conflicts.  

Jetpack is a great example of this. With just one extension, your website can benefit from anti-spam features, security scanning, automated backups, marketing functionality and more. 

Once you check for these basic things in an extension(s), you can easily install them on your website to add additional features and functionalities to your WooCommerce store as and when you feel the need. This will help you enhance your customers’ experience continually, thus benefitting your business as well as customers.