Most plugin lists are written by people who’ve never stared down a checkout page at 11pm on a Sunday. They give you seventeen plugins, half of which overlap, and none of which mention the settings that quietly break your tax calculation. This is the short list. Six plugins, one rule: if it doesn’t get you closer to a paid order, it doesn’t go in.
Start with WooCommerce. It’s the default and it’s fine. The thing nobody tells you is that the setup wizard will try to sell you on Jetpack and a theme before you’ve added a single product. Skip every upsell. When it asks about shipping and taxes, choose ‘I’ll configure later’ — you’ll do both by hand in ten minutes and avoid the wizard’s confusing defaults.
Second, a payment gateway. Stripe for most people, PayPal as a backup for the customers who still trust it. Install WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, paste your publishable and secret keys from the Stripe dashboard, and turn on test mode. Place one test order with a 4242 card before you do anything else. If checkout doesn’t work in test mode, nothing else on this list matters.
Third, an email plugin for order receipts. WooCommerce sends plain-text order emails that get eaten by spam filters. Install WP Mail SMTP, connect it to a transactional provider like Postmark or Brevo, and send yourself a test. This is the setting people forget, and it’s why their first customer emails ‘did I actually pay?’ at 9pm.
Fourth, a caching plugin. LiteSpeed Cache if your host runs LiteSpeed, WP Super Cache if you’re not sure. The setting you’ll miss: exclude cart, checkout, and my-account pages from caching. If you cache checkout, customers see a stale cart and bail. Every caching plugin has an exclusion box; paste those three URLs in it.
The three you delete: a page builder you don’t need (the block editor is fine for a store), a ‘free’ security plugin that nags you to upgrade every login, and any plugin that promises ‘one-click affiliate empire.’ None of them get you to a sale.
Now the settings that actually matter. In WooCommerce > Settings > General, set your base location correctly — it drives tax and shipping zones. In Products > Inventory, turn on stock management and set a low-stock threshold, or you’ll sell something you don’t have. In Settings > Accounts, decide whether customers can check out as guests; for a weekend launch, allow it, because account creation is a friction point you don’t need yet.
Finally, put a test product in the store and buy it yourself with a real card for a dollar. You’ll learn more in that five minutes than in an hour of reading docs. Refund yourself afterward. If the order confirmation lands in your inbox and the product downloads or ships correctly, you’re live.
The whole stack takes about three hours if you don’t get distracted. The distractions are the enemy here. Every plugin you add ‘just in case’ is another thing to debug when checkout fails at the worst possible moment. Six plugins, one test order, done.