Deciding to move your online business to WordPress comes with no shortage of plugin options.
As the number of WordPress eCommerce plugins continues to grow there are more 3rd party providers offering product integrations with WordPress. Choosing which plugins or provider to use on Shifter comes with a few considerations.
Shifter works by transforming each page of your site into static HTML and hosting those pages across our global CDN. During that process functions or plugins which rely on PHP may not work when deployed. Not all plugins will have this issue so if you’re not sure ask us.
One of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress is WooCommerce. It’s become the go-to plugins for selling online with WordPress for its features and extendability. We’re big fans WooCommerce and even offer fully-managed hosting plans through our sister company, Pilott. Unfortunately, WooCommerce will not work with Shifter. WooCommerce depends on PHP for many essential shop functions so we don’t recommend it. That doesn’t mean you can’t run your online store with WordPress on Shifter, you just need a Javascript-based solution that can provide similar features. These solutions are becoming more common as small businesses move to sell online. Some providers offer eCommerce SaaS products as an extension of their payment processing ones.
One alternative that we can recommend is Square Online Store. A product by Square, the company powering the register most of you have used in your local coffee shop or small business. They create products and hardware for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. Products from your Square Online Store can be added to any WordPress site via their shop embed script. Check their docs for the latest how-to guides.
We’ll continue to review and test other integrations for running an online shop with Shifter. If you have any recommendations and would like to share, give us a shout!