For many businesses selling digital products like an ebook, music, or software, WordPress is a good choice. WordPress is one of the cheapest options for getting a website, and there are many WordPress ecommerce plugins. The tough thing is, it’s tough to know which plugins are the best free WordPress plugins for someone selling digital products.
10 Best Free WordPress Plugins for Digital Products
1. Best Free WordPress Plugins for SEO and Search Traffic
2. Avoid Spam with the Best Free WordPress Plugins
3. WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Social Commenting
4. Best WordPress Digital Downloads Plugin
5. Capturing Emails is Key to Digital Products Ecommerce Success
6. Best Free WordPress Plugins for Site Speed
7. Measure your Digital Products Business
8. Best Free WordPress Plugin for Site Indexing
9. WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Social Sharing
10. Visualize your data with Free WordPress Plugins
First here is some background info about WordPress for those of you who haven’t heard of it before.
WordPress is a popular free tool for both blogs and websites. It is very easy to install and to use, which is why there are over 70 million WordPress sites in the world.
You can have a free WordPress hosted site but most people selling digital products will want to upgrade to a premium site with their own domain. One of the good things about WordPress is that many hosting companies have WordPress installs available. It’s very easy to set one up, even for non-techies.
One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress is the huge number of free or paid themes available. You can make your site look however you want without any programming. The other major benefit of WordPress is that it has over 26,000 plugins available which cover every type of tool you can think of.
1. Best Free WordPress Plugins for SEO and Search Traffic
A website is like an isolated island in a big internet ocean. You need potential customers coming to your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is the process of making your site search engine friendly. This will help your site rank better in Google search results.
89% of users click on a link of the first page of their search results so good SEO is a cost-effective and efficient way of getting customers.
Do your own Google search and you will see how much information and discussion there is about SEO, so don’t expect miracles.
SEO it is not easy, it’s not quick, it’s complex and constantly changing. A good starting point for SEO is an article like this, where you can learn about fundamentals like title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords.
All in One SEO Pack is one of the most popular plugins for SEO with over 15 million downloads. Other popular SEO plugins include WordPress SEO by Yoast and Rank Math. These plugins have more settings and sitemap options to configure before you start, so they’re good for adventurous newbies. All are among the best free WordPress plugins for SEO.
2. Avoid Spam with the Best Free WordPress Plugins
Spam, spam, spam, spam is not only a chant from Monty Python, it’s also a pain to moderate. Anyone who runs a blog walks a fine line between trying to stop automated spam comments and making it a hassle for visitors to leave genuine comments. Antispam Bee is a great tool to tackle this problem, and is one of the best free WordPress plugins for spam.
Another widely used tool to help manage spam comments is Akismet. Askimet comes with WordPress and is free for personal blogs.
Paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites. It automatically moves suspected spam comments to the spam queue which reduces the time it takes to moderate your blog.
3. WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Social Commenting
Disqus is a popular plugin for social commenting. It makes commenting easier because users don’t have to register every time they want to comment on a new blog.
A person can use one Disqus profile across multiple sites. Disqus helps with comment authenticity. It also helps with social sharing as users can link the Disqus profile to social network profiles like Facebook or Twitter.
Disqus replaces the WordPress comment system.
4. Best WordPress Digital Downloads Plugins
One of the most important things to consider when selling digital products is accepting payments online securely. This can often be one of the biggest headaches. Obtaining a merchant account isn’t easy. Neither is experimenting with the programming and integration of your website.
You can’t have an online business if you can’t sell your digital products online.
Selz is an ecommerce platform for selling digital products like videos, indie games, software, music, or ebooks.
You can use Selz to sell physical or digital downloads from a site in minutes with no programming. The benefits of using Selz:
- Free to sign up
- Free online store page your own domain name
- Free Facebook Store
- Free file hosting for digital products like ebooks, games, files
- Options like PDF stamping and license keys to secure your digital products
- No merchant account necessary
- No monthly fees or costly extensions
- No programming needed
- Secure processing of credit card payments
- Integrated with Google Analytics
- Automated digital download delivery
- Selz is an easy to use WordPress ecommerce plugin for non-technical entrepreneurs. You can cut and paste a snippet of code to include a buy button or a widget showing your digital products on your site.
One of the best things about using Selz is that your customers will find it easy and quick to purchase without having to leave your site.
Once your customer clicks on the Buy Now button, they complete their name, email and credit card details. Customers buying digital products can automatically download the files of your ebook, plugin, or game.
Download the Selz free WordPress ecommerce plugin that makes selling from WordPress simple.
5. Capturing Emails is Key to Digital Products Ecommerce Success
A good way to build a passionate community for your digital products is to build a mailing list for regular newsletters and email updates. There are some effective plugins available that can help with building a mailing list.
You have two ways to ask visitors to subscribe to your list. First, you put a contact opt-in form on your website for people to enter their email details. This is a must.
A free plugin you can use to create an opt-in form is Sumo. Sumo integrates with MailChimp, AWeber and many other popular email campaign tools.
With tools like MailChimp, you can create auto-response emails, campaigns, and customized email templates. You can also create customized registration forms with it.
Sumo has a lot of great tools in addition to email. You can use Sumo for social sharing, site analysis with heat maps, pop-ups, and more.
Many people find pop-ups annoying. The thing is, they work. According to Crazy Egg, using opt-in pop-ups can result in a 1000% increase in conversions if you do it right. This one is a no brainer.
The best free WordPress plugins for pop-ups will include the ability to limit how frequently visitors to your site will see the popup. You can choose to only show your pop-up on certain pages or categories.
A great opt-in plugin will offer a range of templates to choose from or you can tweak the design to match your sites. You’ll also want to be able to do split testing of different popups to measure which has the best conversion rate.
Other great pop-up plugins include Optin Monster, WPForms, and Thrive Leads also get great reviews. So although not free they are a good tool to budget for if one of your primary objectives is building a mailing list.
6. Best Free WordPress Plugins for Site Speed
Speed is important, and not just for car enthusiasts! User experience and speeding up your website load time plays an important role in improving your site’s search rankings with Google.
W3 Total Cache allows you to cache your WordPress site and improve your page loading time, and is top of our list of the best free WordPress plugins for site speed.
7. Measure your Digital Products Business
Google Analytics from MonsterInsights is a fantastic free tool for measuring web traffic and visitor behavior on your site. Users have downloaded the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin over 2 million times.
The plugin easily connects to your Google Analytics and Google Adsense accounts. It uses the Google Analytics tracking code to automatically track your blog. It includes lots of metadata like views per author or category, or automatic tracking of outbound clicks.
Check out this article for more analytics recommendations.
8. Best Free WordPress Plugin for Site Indexing
This is a good easy to use sitemap generator for your blog. It helps your site get indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin automatically rebuilds a sitemap when you make a change to your blog and notifies Google and Bing that there has been an update.
9. WordPress Ecommerce Plugins for Social Sharing
Getting people to share your content is an important strategy for getting people to visit your site. We mentioned that Sumo is a great plugin for this, but if you spend a lot of time scheduling for social, you probably use Buffer or something similar. WordPress to Buffer is a helpful plugin that connects WordPress and Buffer, saving you precious time.
10. Visualize your data with Free WordPress Plugins
You may think TablePress is an unusual choice. However, comparison tables are a fantastic way to list your features against a competitor or to show feature bundles.
And if you don’t know HTML, it is very difficult to create tables for your WordPress pages or posts. Without this tool, you would resort to using images of tables created using other tools. This plugin solves that by allowing you to easily add tables.
Want more options? Check out this list.
What Do You Think?
These 10 best free WordPress plugins are just a handful of the thousands of plugins available. Between helpful plugins and platforms like Selz, WordPress ecommerce doesn’t have to be a hassle.
Let us know if you’re already selling digital products online and have a favorite WordPress plugin not listed here.
This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Elliott
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Bryce Patterson
Great to hear you’re finding our content helpful- thanks for checking us out!
Marvin
Hi, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam feedback? If so how do you reduce it, any plugin or anything you can suggest? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any support is very much appreciated.
Bryce Patterson
Hey, Marvin- thanks for stopping by FounderU! We’re glad you liked the blog. I would recommend contacting the hosting site your blog is on in regards to your spam feedback. Thanks!
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Bryce Patterson
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Such an informative and helpful post. Thanks for sharing.
Kristen DeCosta
Thanks for your kind words, Rajesh. I am glad this was helpful to you!
Kashif Khan
Very helpful post. Thanks for sharing this list.
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Glad you found this helpful!
Sam Rajput
Really good recommendation these are all effective for small and large scale of business. Thanks for adding them in one particular list.
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This is a good this list off plugins, nice tutorial i like it.
Liana Ho
Great list of resource here Geoff,
I’ve already seen a number of useful plugins to add on my clients’ websites.
Geoff
Hi Liana, good to hear that you found the list useful. Let me know how you go if trying some of them out
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Recently I found following wordpress plugin “Business Plugin” which is good for any business website which comes with FAQ,Testimonials,Team Members. Easy to manage.
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Hey, thanks Shane. It sounds like an interesting plugin. I’ll make sure to check it out.
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Thank you for the article. Some of them are new for me I will have to check them if you think there are the best wordpress plugins for business
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Hey there, no we seem to have it pretty much under control now – we use Akismet to keep it at bay.
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I am going to try the TablePress and Selz plugins. I am trying to revamp my website so I believe these will help me do the job. Thanks for the post.
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