Every WooCommerce plugin roundup online lists forty options, and if you install even a third of them your store will be slow, your checkout will conflict with itself, and you’ll spend the weekend debugging instead of selling. Here’s the list I actually run on a one-person store, in install order, with the reason each one survives.
Start with WooCommerce itself and nothing else. Do a test order with the default setup before you touch a single add-on. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. When something breaks three plugins later, you need to know the baseline worked. Place one order in test mode, refund it, and move on.
Plugin one: a Stripe or WooCommerce Payments gateway. Pick one, not both. Two gateways means two sets of webhooks, two test modes, and a support surface you don’t need. Stripe’s official plugin is the least surprising choice for a solo founder because the dashboard tells you exactly why a payment failed.
Plugin two: an SMTP plugin. WooCommerce’s order emails go out through your host’s PHP mail by default, which means they land in spam about half the time. WP Mail SMTP plus a free Brevo or Postmark account fixes this in fifteen minutes. If you skip this step, your first customer will pay and never receive a receipt, and you’ll find out from an angry email.
Plugin three: a tax and shipping helper only if you need it. For digital goods, you often don’t. If you sell physical items, use the built-in shipping zones and paste in your rates rather than installing a rate-calculation plugin that pulls live carrier quotes. Live quotes are great at scale and a configuration nightmare for ten orders a week. Set flat rates, revisit in six months.
Plugin four: a backup plugin. UpdraftPlus free is fine. Schedule a daily database backup to remote storage. This isn’t about plugins breaking your site — it’s about you breaking your site while configuring plugins, which is far more common.
Plugin five: a caching or speed plugin, but only after launch. WP Super Cache or LiteSpeed Cache if your host supports it. Do not install this first. Caching hides configuration errors during setup and then surfaces them at the worst possible moment. Turn it on once your test orders pass.
Plugin six: an analytics option. You don’t need a heavy plugin. WooCommerce’s built-in reports plus a privacy-friendly analytics snippet cover a solo store fine. Installing a full marketing suite on day one gives you dashboards you won’t read.
Now the skips. Skip any plugin that adds a page builder on top of WooCommerce for your product pages. Skip abandoned-cart recovery until you have enough traffic to have carts worth recovering — at twenty orders a week it’s noise. Skip multi-currency until someone actually asks. Each of these adds settings that interact with checkout, and checkout is the one place you cannot afford mystery behavior.
The install order matters because of conflict diagnosis. Gateway, email, backup, then everything optional. If you install in that order and test after each step, a broken checkout tells you immediately which plugin to suspect. If you install everything at once and it breaks, you’re bisecting plugins at midnight.
One more thing: write down the version number of each plugin you install and the date. When a plugin update breaks your checkout three months from now, that list is the difference between a ten-minute fix and an evening of guessing. Put it in a note somewhere you’ll actually look. The full annotated list, with the exact settings for each, is in the setup kit.