Top Craft Commerce Plugins
6 min read
There’s a huge community around Craft CMS; within that, it’s allowed for the development of Craft Commerce plugins, too.
As a CMS that’s growing in popularity by the day, more and more skilled developers are creating plugins to strengthen and boost the capabilities of what Craft and Craft Commerce can do for businesses, as well as empowering developers to build powerful and efficient websites and ecommerce.
We have our go-to plugins for Craft CMS, and to be fair, there are a lot of crossovers. We’ve compiled a list of our most recent favourites after building the Ella’s Kitchen ecommerce due to the performance we’ve seen from behind them.
1. Craft Plugins For Content And SEO
We’re big advocates of using plugins from nystudio107 and as we mentioned, Craft has a very active developer community, and you can rest assured plugins from nystudio107 are maintained and updated regularly.
We’ve been using SEOmatic and Retour on our Craft CMS websites for years and they make it easy for content and store managers to populate SEO data and create redirects themselves. With Ella’s, we were also able to utilise the Recipes plugin to help us grow the Recipe pages organically.
2. SEOmatic
The tagline for SEOmatic is “SEO done right” and we couldn’t agree more. The Craft CMS plugin allows for easy implementation of SEO metadata as well as following best practices. It’s powerful, flexible and simple for anyone to use when building a comprehensive SEO strategy for their business.
It impleÂments JSON-LD microÂdaÂta, TwitÂter Cards tags, FaceÂbook OpenÂGraph tags, Sitemaps of your conÂtent, Robots.txt bot direcÂtives, Humans.txt authorÂship accredÂiÂtaÂtion, and as well as HTML meta tag format for all of the above. What’s more, it’s used by Moz and the creators of Craft, Pixel & Tonic, so you know it’s got to be good, right?
This is a paid plugin.
3. Recipe Plugin
One of the biggest factors around the Ella’s Kitchen ecommerce was their desire to create and provide content for their audience and that includes a constantly evolving recipe section. We wanted to supercharge the SEO to make it easier for users to find Ella’s Kitchen recipes through Google Search and so we introduced the Recipe Plugin from nystudio107 too.
It also implements JSON-LD microÂdaÂta from recipe names, cook times, cooking instructions, etc. to create rich results but can pull in images and video data to provide Google with more information to create recipe gallery results too.
The results from introducing this plugin have been incredible and the success in improving impressions and clickthrough has made a big impact on traffic to the recipe section. We’d 100% recommend this to anyone using Craft CMS or Craft Commerce with a content area for recipes.
This is a free plugin.
4. Retour
Retour is another plugin that we use on all of our websites because it’s powerful, intuitive and easy to use. It’s a favourite amongst our content managers and it makes handling redirects easy (from 404s to 301s). Anyone migrating a website or ecommerce is going to need a strong redirect strategy and we’ve found Retour is our go-to for intelligent redirects.
It has easy imports from CSV files, data can be exported for easy auditing, multi-site capabilities and automatic slug updates too. It makes the transition so much easier when rebuilding websites.
This is a paid plugin.
5. Wishlist
We’ve become so used to the “save” or “pin” feature on sites like Instagram and Pinterest, that it’s been introduced to websites and ecommerce too. Whether it’s adding items to your wishlist or favourites or items you love, Wishlist empowers users to create lists that they can return to time and time again.
We used this recently to allow users to add entries and products to their favourites lists so they could return to them later. It’s a great way to engage users and give them the ability to create shopping lists if they don’t have the time to go through checkout until later.
This is a paid plugin by VERBB.
Craft Plugins For Payment
6. Web Payments
Made by Ether, Web Payments made our lives a lot easier in development and allows for a seamless and improved user checkout process. It easily adds support for both Google and Apple Pay to the checkout to make quick pay even smoother and less of a chore for users when adding payment details. It improves cart abandonment by making checkout a simple one-click process to improve sales.
This is a paid plugin.
7. Stripe for Craft Commerce
Developed by Pixel & Tonic themselves, this plugin provides a Stripe payment gateway for Craft Commerce for card payments and removes the need for user payment details from being kept on file.
This is a free plugin.
Craft Plugins For Performance And Reporting
8. Scout
Scout by Studio Espresso is a simple solution for adding full-text Algolia search to entries and automatically keeps searches in sync and allows you to create as many indices as needed whilst Scout handles keeping Algolia objects up to date.
Want to know more about Algolia? We talked about it here.
This is a free plugin but you can support the developers over at Beerpay.
9. Sprout Reports
Sprout Reports gives the ability to create custom reports and comes with two flexible Data Sources out of the box and can be extended to include additional Data Sources within Craft via third-party APIs too. We’ve used it to create custom MySQL queries to generate reports for marketing teams as well as logistics that can be viewed easily through dashboards in the Craft backend.
This is a paid plugin developed by Barrel Strength Design.
10. Webperf
Webperf helps to build and maintain high-quality websites through the Real User Measurement (RUM) of your website and ecommerce performance. Another plugin by nystudio107, it users RUM to anonymously capture Craft specific information such as Twig rendering time, memory used, database queries, and overall TTFB as well as recording issues with front JavaScript and Craft CMS errors.
This makes it super easy to discover errors in one place and keep websites well maintained as Webperf presents the performance information in insightful graphs, and provides recommendations on how issues can be fixed.
This is a paid plugin.
In conclusion...
The amount of plugins for both Craft CMS and Craft Commerce is an ever-growing list that continues to add to the flexibility and customisation Craft is known for. Whilst it’s not been heralded as one of the most popular CMS platforms to develop on (yet) it’s the only platform we’ll develop on due to its bespoke nature, security, community and ease of use when it’s passed on to the client.
We’d never go back to WordPress and here’s why.
If you’re looking for comparisons to other eCommerce platforms, check out our articles on Craft Commerce vs Shopify and Craft Commerce vs Magento and WooCommerce.
Craft Commerce vs Shopify
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