Most plugin lists for WordPress stores are written by people who have never had to launch one on a deadline. They recommend twenty plugins, half of which overlap, and none of which explain what happens when two of them fight over the checkout page. Here’s the stack we actually use, and the ones we’ve stopped installing.
Start with WooCommerce itself. It’s not the fastest or the prettiest, but it’s the one with the most documentation, the most payment integrations, and the least chance of a surprise when you update WordPress. If you’re a solo founder trying to be live by the weekend, familiarity beats elegance. Install it, run the setup wizard, then immediately turn off the onboarding emails in WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > WooCommerce.com so they stop cluttering your inbox.
The second plugin you need is a payment gateway. Stripe for WooCommerce is the default choice for most people because it handles cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay in one place. Install it, connect via the Stripe dashboard, then go to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments and confirm the webhook is registered. This is the step people skip. Without the webhook, test payments work fine and live payments fail silently. We’ve seen three launches die on this exact omission.
Third: a shipping plugin — wait, no. You’re selling digital goods? Then you don’t need one, and you should disable shipping zones entirely in WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping. If you sell physical products, use the built-in flat-rate shipping and skip the table-rate plugins until you have more than twenty SKUs. The table-rate plugins are powerful and they will eat your Saturday if you let them.
Fourth: an email plugin. Transactional emails from WordPress go out via PHP mail by default, which means order confirmations land in spam roughly half the time. Install WP Mail SMTP, connect it to a free transactional service, and send a test order to yourself. If the confirmation arrives, you’re done. If it doesn’t, you’ve found the problem before your first customer did.
Fifth: a backup plugin. UpdraftPlus is the boring answer and the correct one. Set it to back up weekly to a remote destination and do a manual backup before you install anything else. This is not the step to skip because you’re in a hurry. Every plugin install is a small risk, and the backup is your undo button.
Now the skips. Skip the page builder if you’re selling fewer than fifty products. Gutenberg plus WooCommerce blocks handles a product grid and a checkout page fine, and it won’t add 200KB of JavaScript to every page. Skip the SEO plugin until after launch — the default WordPress permalinks and a sitemap cover you for the first month, and you’ll make better SEO decisions once you have real traffic data. Skip the caching plugin until you’ve confirmed checkout works, because cache plugins are the number one cause of ‘my cart empties when I click pay.’ Add caching later, after you’ve read the plugin’s documentation on excluding cart and checkout pages.
Skip the abandoned-cart plugin until you have enough traffic to have abandoned carts. Skip the upsell plugins, the loyalty plugins, and the popup plugins. All of them solve problems you don’t have yet, and each one is another thing that can break on update day.
The rule underneath the list: every plugin you install is a maintenance commitment. When WordPress updates and something breaks, you need to know which plugin caused it, and that’s much easier with six plugins than with sixteen. The shortest path from domain to first sale is not the most feature-complete store. It’s the one that doesn’t break before the customer hits pay.