Every week someone asks me for my plugin list, and every week I see the same mistake: people install fifteen plugins because fifteen blog posts each recommended a different one. Then the cart breaks and they can’t tell which plugin did it.
So here’s my actual stack. Six plugins for a store that sells physical or digital products, one of which you can skip. I’ll explain what each does and why it earned the slot.
WooCommerce first, obviously. It’s free, it’s the default, and the ecosystem around it is enormous. The tradeoff is that WooCommerce gives you a lot of settings you don’t need yet, and the default product page is ugly. That’s fine. Ugly and working beats pretty and broken.
Second, a payment gateway. Stripe is the right answer for most people starting out. It takes about ten minutes to connect, the fees are transparent, and you don’t need a business bank account in most countries to start accepting cards. If you’re outside Stripe’s supported countries, look at Paddle or your local provider before you look at PayPal — PayPal checkout converts worse in my experience and the dispute process is miserable.
Third, a caching plugin. This is the one people skip and then wonder why their product pages take four seconds to load. I’ve been using WP Super Cache on smaller stores because there’s less to misconfigure than the bigger options. The critical thing is that your caching plugin must be configured to exclude cart, checkout, and my-account pages. If it isn’t, customers will see each other’s carts. I’ve seen this happen. It is as bad as it sounds.
Fourth, an SEO plugin. Rank Math or Yoast, pick one and stop thinking about it. You want it for three things: the sitemap, the ability to edit title tags per product, and schema markup so Google shows your price and stock status in search results. That last one is worth more than most paid marketing you’ll do this year.
Fifth, a backup plugin. UpdraftPlus, free tier, scheduled daily backups to cloud storage. This is insurance, not a feature. You will not notice it until the day a plugin update white-screens your site, and on that day it’s the most valuable thing you installed.
Sixth, and this is the optional one: a checkout field editor. If you’re selling digital products, you don’t need shipping fields, and asking for a phone number on a digital download checkout costs you conversions for no reason. There are free plugins that let you strip those fields out. If you sell physical goods, skip this entirely.
Now the ones I’ve stopped recommending. Page builders that take over the entire site, because they lock your content into their format and migrating away is a nightmare. ‘All-in-one’ security suites on small stores, because your host probably handles the basics and the suites slow everything down. And abandoned cart plugins that email people who added something to a cart while testing — yes, that happens.
A word on plugin count. There’s a myth that you should never exceed some magic number. The real rule is that every plugin is a maintenance obligation. Each one needs updating, and each one can conflict with the others. Six good ones beat twenty mediocre ones, not because of performance but because when something breaks you can actually find it.
One practical tip for tracking this down: when something breaks after an update, deactivate plugins one at a time and reload the broken page after each deactivation. Don’t do them all at once. The whole point is to identify the culprit, and you can’t identify anything if you’ve turned everything off.
If you want the exact settings for all six, including the caching exclusions that people get wrong, that’s what the setup pack covers. It’s the boring part of the job, so I wrote it down once so nobody has to figure it out twice.