The Most Trusted Woocommerce Payment Gateways

If you want to take payments for your business online, a Woocommerce payment gateway is a way to go, It’s easier and more efficient than trying to process payments yourself!

A payment gateway is an electronic interface that authorizes credit cards or other payments through the internet. The most common use of a payment gateway is to enable customers to buy products, services or digital content online using their credit cards/debit cars or through online payment gateways/services like PayPal.

Payment gateway software provides security, ensures compliance with regulations such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards), and offers options like recurring billing or online invoices.

There are two types of payment gateways that can be used on your website:

One is integrated directly in the store, meaning customers never leave the site to complete their purchase. Amazon and Shopify operate this way.
The second way is that a customer will need to fill up a form/click a button on the website where they will be further taken to the payment processor gateway. PayPal is a prime example of this.

Payment fee/transaction charges – the prime criteria to decide which payment gateway is best suited for your business

A payment gateway typically has some kind of transaction fee, but they are generally competitive with each other. The specific type of fee will depend on the type of transaction you’re making, e.g. if it’s being paid via invoice or chip credit card and so on.

These fees usually have two components:

– A percentage per transaction: These transaction fees range between 2.5% and 3.5%
– Single transaction fee: This is usually around $0.30

PAYMENT GATEWAY	TRANSACTION FEE
Stripe	2.9% + 0.30 per transaction
PayPal Pro	2.9% + 0.30 per transaction
Square	2.65% + $0.30 per transaction
Authorize.net	2.9% + 0.30 per transaction
Amazon Pay	2.9% + 0.30 per transaction
Apple Pay	None

Unfortunately, payment gateways charge monthly fees for services. Some also have extra charges on certain types of transactions and others which you need to worry about when using their service.

If you want to save money, then it’ll be important for you to know about all of the fees that your payment gateway charges.

The top Woo Commerce payment gateways listed below for your business will allow you to facilitate seamless transactions between customers and the website.

The most widely used WooCommerce Payment Gateways

There are many different ways to accept payments on a WordPress/WooCommerce website using plugins; some use third party

services while others integrate directly into PayPal or Stripe accounts. The best way is going to depend on what exactly you want from your payment solution.

Here are the best rated and widely used payment gateways:

1. Stripe

With Stripe, online businesses can accept credit card payments and other local payment methods without complex merchant accounts or geographic restrictions.

Millions of users trust their money with Stripe because its secure servers protect against fraud while providing complete access to detailed transaction information for both clients and business owners.

With customizable forms, you can accept over a dozen different types of payment. These forms are embedded on your site. Their extensive reporting features include transaction history with monthly totals by category, managing refunds or disputes when necessary as well as monitoring integrations.

Stripe provides flexible integration options that simplify PCI compliance without compromising on the checkout experience.

Stripe makes it easy for businesses to accept payments online or on mobile. Stripe supports 135+ currencies and offers a unified API that lets you build payment features into your app quickly.

It enables your customers to complete transactions, view statements, update billing info easily, track refunds if needed with the ability to issue full refunds too!

So start accepting international payments today at the stripe by using their simple checkout forms & connect bank accounts directly in minutes here:
https://stripe.com/

2. PayPal Standard and PayPal Pro

PayPal is one of the most widely used payment gateways.

Their business solution, PayPal Pro, allows you to accept payments online and on a mobile device.

You can set up PayPal in seconds, and access it anywhere around the world. It is also very secure with features like automatic fraud screening and Seller Protection Policy.

With PayPal Pro, you can connect directly to your WooCommerce store and make checkout painless & seamless. Customers will never have to leave your site with the one-page checkout process. You’ll see fewer abandoned carts!

If your business is based in Australia, you can use the PayPal Pro Payflow account. It also comes in three more countries: the UK, the US and Canada, but to fully utilize it with this service one would need a merchant account on their end (PayPal).

You can create and send invoices in seconds, then track payments and get paid faster. Invoice from anywhere: on the road, at home or even on vacation.

PayPal charges a wide variety of fees for various types of transactions, and their monthly fee itself is $30. For online transactions throughout the US, each one will cost 2.9% plus an additional 1.5%; international payments come with a 3.4% charge on top of that as well as higher transaction costs at around 5%.

PayPal’s fees vary widely depending on your location and the type you are conducting

3. Authorize.Net

Authorize.net is a payment gateway that has thousands of users worldwide, including over 70% of leading merchants in the US and Canada. It’s owned by Visa.

If you’re looking for an easy way to accept credit cards online with low fees per transaction, this may be your best bet!

It is available for merchants located in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe or Australia.

The entire checkout process can be done on your own website, and WooCommerce integration is also strong.

The plugin has full support for both WooCommerce Subscriptions and
Pre-Orders, along with the standard features of WordPress integrations like MailChimp or AWeber.

This extension allows users to save their payment method and reuse it. It is user friendly, making the process easy for all involved parties.

Fees

Monthly fee of $25
2.9% + 30¢ per transaction

4. WooCommerce Payments

Use WooCommerce Payments to collect payments on your website without setup costs or monthly fees. Available in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and now: Spain France Germany and Italy.

Accept major credit and debit cards, along with local payment methods on your site. You won’t have to pay any setup costs or monthly fees for this capability!

Customers can easily check out from your store, saving time and having a seamless experience.
Customers pay in their preferred currency which saves them conversion rates or manual calculations to make sure they are paying the right price for an item.

Customers who have credit card information saved will be able to use this instead of taking extra steps like typing their name and contact number again during checkout!

WooCommerce Payments provides you with the tools to monitor charges, handle disputes, track deposits and keep tabs on recurring revenue. All of this helps free up your time so that it can be spent growing your business.

You can download and install WooCommerce Payments at no cost to you. Pay as you go with no setup costs or monthly fees.

To conclude, there are many more WooCommerce payment gateways and plugins but these 4 are the most widely used payment systems. They are secure, easy to set up and test and that is why they are being favoured by the majority of e-commerce websites and online store owners.

WordPress maintenance: 7 important tasks to perform regularly

WordPress Maintenance: The majority of the customers get a new website done, make it live and then simply forget about upkeep and maintenance. A website is just like a car (especially a database website or an E-commerce store).

Like your car, it needs regular updating so that it gives the best speed and performance, remains secure from hackers and confirm to the Google Web Vitals.

There are hosted platforms like Shopify that take care of all these aspects but they will bill you monthly for this service (It is included in the monthly payments you make to them).

In the case of a WordPress/Woo Commerce website, many clients can do the basic upkeep like updating the core plugins or updating a new WordPress version. It is perfectly fine and provided you take regular backups you can do such small tasks to update your website.

But there are certain tasks that can harm your website, can crash the database and distorts the working of the website if not done properly. Even a single plugin mismatch can hamper the working of your website.

The majority of the clients had never worked with WordPress, had no time to carry on such activities on their own and there are certain tasks that are beyond the capability of o regular WordPress user.

For these, you need a trained developer who knows what he is doing and who can upkeep your website so that there is hardly any downtime.

Here are a few important tasks that come under the expertise of a trained WordPress/WooCommerce developer. Without knowing what you are doing, you can do more harm to your website than the good. WordPress maintenance is not for the weak-hearted.

1. Update PHP versions

WordPress site work uses PHP themes/framework. The PHP team is constantly releasing updates to the language. In order for your website’s scripts and templates to work correctly, you need these new versions installed on your server.

This is an important task and if there mismatch between PHP version, theme or plugin files, the website can go down/crash thus needing many hours to make it live again either by re-install from a backup OR by finding the bug. So, this is a very crucial update and it often goes bad if not done by a trained developer.

2. WordPress core updates

WordPress is a popular content management system for blogs around the world, is continually updated by its core team to provide more security and stability in their software as well as adding exciting new features that you can use on your blog or website.

WordPress updates come every few weeks with new features and bug fixes. It is really important to keep your core files updated with the latest releases. Moreover, each release adds more functionality to the system and only a trained developer knows what can be done by the latest functionalities associated with each release.

3. Regular Backups, Theme and Plugins update

Did you know that WordPress Theme and Plugins updates are important? Keeping your site up to date will help avoid hackers, which in turn can save lots of time on repairs.

With more than 19 million users around the world- so it’s inevitable that someone has considered how best to break into these sites. Hackers take

advantage of vulnerabilities in code such as outdated themes and plugins. Updating them regularly gives everyone peace of mind.

Your WordPress developer will also take regular backup of your site. No doubt, there are free plugins that can do the task but a typical maintenance guy will make sure that the backup he just took is fit to be used in order to restore the site.

Many times, the backup is taken by the plugins that fail to restore back the website when needed.

4. Keeping the database in shape

Your WordPress website has two parts. The website that you see and the database that runs behind the website. It is the database that stores all the entries in the tables and it is very important to keep it in shape.

Keeping your SQL database in good shape requires a healthy balance between maintenance and patience.

There are many factors that can affect the performance but any immature or poorly written queries will be sure to make it even more challenging for things to work smoothly.

One way to deal with problematic databases is by performing regular backups (and making them available offline), tuning, monitoring resource utilization and upgrading packages.

Looks awful and hard to understand? It is not for everyone to mess with databases. So, makes sense to take the help of a trained developer.

5. Run performance tests to keep up a great speed

Run performance tests to maintain your WordPress website. A

well-performing site can attract more traffic and enhance the user experience.

Based on how much time your site takes to load is one of the important factors that Google considers in order to rank websites. A good score is that your website home page should load between 3-5 seconds.

Moreover, recently Google implemented Core Web Vitals which takes into consideration three important factors for an overall user experience.

These are the Largest Contentful paint (how much time it a page takes to load after clicking on a link), First Input Delay (how much time it takes once the user interacts with a button or JavaScript event) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how fast the page becomes stable with all elements).

A performance test will optimize your website. They will load fast, good for user experience and it adds a lot of value where a user is able to finish his shopping in no time and do a quick checkout if the page is super responsive.

6. Find 404 errors and fix broken links

404 simply means when a page is not found ( being deleted, taken off or URL changed). At the same time, we often change URLs or links and forget to update links within the website.

It often leads to a bad user experience when suddenly your visitor sees a “Sorry, 404 page not found….” warning.

At the same time, too many 404 errors and broken links mean your SEO efforts are doomed. It is very important that your sitemap (file submitted to Google for indexing) and the actual URLs of your site are perfectly in tune.

Many times clients change permalinks without knowing the repercussions. They simply alter the whole URL structure of the website.

So, regular maintenance will take care of all these issues.

7. Study server log files

So many times, clients have no knowledge that their website is under attack or had been hacked. They realize it when speed goes down, third party content starts displaying on their site and suddenly website links start taking people to spammy sites.

You will be penalized by Google for this, your ranking will be dropped and people will see a warning message to beware of your site as it may contain malware.

A trained maintenance guy will study the security and error log files in the server to keep an eye if there had been any attacks on the website, what are the backdoor loopholes that a hacker is trying to exploit and plug in to keep the website safe.

Hackers often add entries to the .htaccess file and it is very hard for a layman to understand what it means.

So, a WordPress maintenance guy will take care of these vulnerabilities.

To sum up, there are certain maintenance tasks that are a bit easy and anyone having a basic understanding of WordPress can do it. If not done in the right way, even a plugin update can crash your WordPress site.

Majority of the time and in order to keep your site updated you need to hire a maintenance professional so that tasks that run behind the site on your server can be taken care of.

Spending a few dollars on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis means your website is running on the latest files, it is optimized to perform better and your site is also safe from malware and hacking attempts. Read more about WordPress maintenance on WordPress.org