The Best WordPress WooCommerce Themes for eCommerce Sites

The post The Best WordPress WooCommerce Themes for eCommerce Sites appeared first on HostGator Blog . Selling products online has never been easier, even for the smallest of businesses, thanks to WordPress-compatible eCommerce tools like WooCommerce and free themes to customize your store’s appearance. Whether you’re still in the planning stages or want to update your online store, it can be a challenge to pick the right theme from so many options. Here’s a look at some popular eCommerce themes for WordPress, along with a quick overview of WooCommerce for WordPress, to help you find what you need. Setting Up an Online Store on Your WordPress Site A lot goes into building an online store : product categories, search tools, inventory tracking, color and size options, a way for customers to pay, and shipping options. And those are just the basics. WordPress doesn’t provide these functions automatically, so you’ll need to install an eCommerce plugin to get started. One of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress is a free, open-source program called WooCommerce . It’s used by small store owners and major brands around the world because it integrates so well with WordPress and because there are so many ways to customize it. For example, you can add support for different payment methods, email list management, and merchandising with extensions from the WooCommerce library. Want to sell memberships or subscriptions? There are WooCommerce extensions for that, too. (Many but not all WooCommerce extensions are free.)   Best WordPress WooCommerce Themes for eCommerce Themes give you another way to customize your WooCommerce store by changing its appearance and creating the user experience you want your customers to have. These are our picks for the best WordPress themes for eCommerce, and they’re all compatible with WooCommerce.   1. WooCommerce Storefront Storefront is a free theme built by and for WooCommerce. It includes schema markup for SEO, and it has a responsive design to so it looks good and works well on all kinds of devices. Storefront’s developers built it for fast loading and easy use. You don’t have to use WordPress shortcodes to customize Storefront, and it’s compatible with lots of payment, shipping, and SEO plugins. When you want to update your store’s look, you can use the WordPress customizer with Storefront. You can also switch to one of Storefront’s child themes. Each of the 14 child themes (free to $39 each) is tailored to a different type of business, like food, fashion, books, toys, and vacation lodgings. Storefront is a good choice for both: Non-tech people. Because it’s tightly integrated with WooCommerce, you’re unlikely to run into compatibility issues that would require coding skills to fix. And Storefront is compatible with the new block-based Gutenberg editor in WordPress . Tech people. If you’re happy to write your own code, Storefront and WooCommerce’s open-source foundation make it easy to build your own extensions to customize your store. Storefront’s not the only free WooCommerce theme out there. Let’s look at a few top choices from other publishers.   2. Astra Like Storefront, Astra is WooCommerce compatible and uses schema markup to help your store’s SEO. Astra’s developers recently released a free library of blocks you can use with WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor to customize your site without coding. Astra is very fast—it takes less than 0.5 seconds to load, using standard WordPress data—and it only uses about 50 KB of resources. That means your store pages will load fast and keep your shoppers from bouncing before they see your awesome merchandise. Astra also has a library of pre-made starter sites. You can use the Astra Starter Sites plugin to install one and save yourself a lot of time on store design. Upgrading to Astra’s pro or agency packages ($59 to $249) gives you access to more starter sites. Astra is a good choice for: Shop owners with lots of mobile customers. The store’s light weight and fast load times make it a good fit for m-commerce. People who want to a pre-designed site. Astra’s starter site library gives you instant site options.   3. eStore Another popular theme for WooCommerce, eStore is responsive, SEO-friendly, and designed to help your pages load quickly. If you’d like your customers to be able to make and share wishlists from your store—a feature that can earn you more conversions—eStore is compatible with the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin . This theme has a couple of cool design features in its free version: the ability to color-code your product categories, and a template that lets you feature all products in a collection on a single page, as well as in their categories. The pro version ($69) gives you more options for customizing eStore’s appearance, with the addition of Google Fonts, more header and color choices, and testimonial and product tab widgets. eStore is a good choice for: Store owners who want wishlists. YITH Wishlist and eStore work well together. Sellers who regularly feature new collections. The eStore product collection template makes those displays easy to update.   4. MetroStore Like eStore, MetroStore supports YITH Wishlist and provides product-collection page templates. It’s also compatible with YITH WooCommerce Compare , a plugin that lets customers select and compare different items in your store. Comparison charts can help increase your store’s conversion rate, especially if you sell appliances, tech products, or other items whose specifications and features are big factors in your customers’ purchasing decisions. MetroStore’s free version also lets you add video backgrounds to your full-width banners—a pretty cool feature if you have a brick-and-mortar store, fashion shows, or product demos to showcase. The pro version ($55) lets you import demo pages to your store in a single click so you can set up your shop faster. Upgrading also gives you offers and team members sections for your store. MetroStore is a good choice for: Stores that sell tech, appliances, or tools. Support for the YITH WC Compare plugin lets your customers create comparison charts. Store owners who want to use video in their store design. The video-background banner makes that possible.   Choosing a WordPress Theme for Your eCommerce Site Before you choose a theme, it’s a good idea to explore their online demos on your laptop, tablet and phone to see if they’ll give customers the experience you want them to have. Then you can download the free versions of the themes you like best to try them out with your own content before you go live. After you debut your new theme, track metrics like bounce rate and conversions to see if your new theme is helping customers find what they want or whether you need to make adjustments. Ready to get started? Start building your eCommerce store today with HostGator WordPress hosting . Find the post on the HostGator Blog