Are you looking for the best credit card processing plugins?
Credit card processing plugins are the best way to accept online payments on your WordPress site. They support many payment options, providing flexibility for customers with different preferences and reducing cart abandonment.
In this article, we’ll compare the best credit card processing plugins and tell you how to pick the right one for your business.
There is no getting around the need for a credit card processing plugin if you plan to sell products, services, or subscriptions through your website.
Redirecting customers to external payment gateways can be a hassle and may lead to cart abandonment. Rather than directing customers to leave your site and go to a payment gateway’s website, such as PayPal or Square, a credit card processing plugin integrates with WordPress.
This allows you to accept and authenticate digital payment information from your customers without exiting the page. That way, you provide a seamless and convenient payment experience.
For membership websites, credit card processing plugins often support recurring payments, allowing customers to set up automatic payments for ongoing services.
But before you begin, make sure you enable HTTP/SSL on your WordPress site so you can securely accept online payments.
If you’re unsure how to do that, follow our beginner’s guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your WordPress Website.
Now that you know why they’re important, let’s compare the best credit card processing plugins in the market.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is a powerful plugin for selling digital products, including software, PDFs, eBooks, documents, and other downloadable content.
With EDD, you can process unlimited transactions, sell unlimited products, and, best of all, there are no monthly fees.
The plugin comes with several built-in payment gateways: Paypal and Stripe. Besides the popular and standard payment gateways available out of the box, EDD offers additional payment addons to appeal to more customers. This includes Authorize.net, Braintree, ClickBank, and more.
Aside from collecting one-time payments, you can charge recurring subscription fees on any digital products. The plugin will automatically charge customers based on any time period you set, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly.
On top of that, it’s super simple to set up. The EDD plugin automatically creates product pages, cart pages, and checkout pages for you. And you can customize those payments with a buy button, log-in, cart widget, and order history, just to name a few.
You’ll even have a Reports dashboard in WordPress to show all earnings, refunds, and the average order value. That can even be broken down based on the different payment gateways you use.
Learn more about EDD with our beginner’s guide on how to sell digital downloads on WordPress.
Pricing: A free version of Easy Digital Downloads is available, which supports PayPal, Stripe, and Amazon Pay. But if you choose their All Access Plan at $499.50 per year, you get access to their entire addon catalog. That means you don’t need to install and purchase payment gateway addons individually.
WP Simple Pay is the best Stripe payments plugin for WordPress. It lets you easily collect both one-time and recurring payments directly from your site.
If you don’t own an e-commerce site and just want a simple way to accept transactions for your services, WP Simple Pay is for you. Using the drag and drop form builder, you can quickly create any type of payment form. Since Stripe is a highly reputable payment gateway, you’ll build trust with visitors and increase conversions.
WP Simple Pay supports multiple currencies and allows you to add intuitive, clean payment forms on your site. They also support over 10 payment methods, including ACH Direct Debit, Alipay, Afterpay, Klarna, and more.
One of the best parts about WP Simple Pay is that you can offer a free trial period to users before an invoice is billed. This is a great way to increase signups for a subscription service.
And they support ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ options, allowing your customers to make impulse purchases since they pay in smaller, more manageable amounts.
WP Simple Pay is one of the best plugins for customization, too. It comes with 70+ ready-made payment form templates to fit your use case.
Whether you need a donation form, subscription payment form, ACH direct debit payment form, or anything else, there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for.
To learn more, read our in-depth guide on how to allow users to choose a payment method on WordPress forms.
Pricing: WP Simple Pay offers a free version that automatically connects with Stripe Checkout and most major credit and debit cards. The paid plans give you advanced functionality, such as the ability to accept recurring payments, set up automatic billing, offer ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ options, and more.
WPForms is the best form builder plugin for WordPress. You can quickly create many types of forms, including booking forms, contact forms, and more. With over 5 million website owners using WPForms on their WordPress site, it’s one of the most trusted plugins out there.
The plugin offers several payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square, Authorize.net. All you have to do is install the addons and connect to your payment gateway account so you can begin accepting payments.
The best part is that the free version of WPForms lets you use Stripe payments for free.
WPForms is great for subscription services or small businesses that do not need a product or checkout page.
For example, let’s say you sold a monthly beauty box subscription. You can create a form so users can pick out the type of beauty box they want and enter their shipping information.
For more details, check out our guide on how to create a WordPress form with payment options.
Pricing: WPForms is free to use, and you can accept Stripe payments with the Lite version. You’ll need the Pro version to choose other payment gateway add-ons. Plans for WPForms Pro start at $49.50 per year, which is more affordable than most form builder plugins.
MemberPress is a popular membership plugin that offers advanced features to manage your membership site.
For instance, this plugin lets you accept credit card payments, create gated content, add membership levels, make members-only forums, restrict access based on different membership levels, and more.
It’s hands down the best plugin for course creators looking to sell online courses, premium content behind a paywall, or group membership plans.
MemberPress supports the most popular payment solutions, such as Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net.
With MemberPress, you have everything you need to build a membership site from scratch. You can do everything from create pricing pages, add signup forms, add members-only content, customize membership email templates, build group forums, etc.
If you plan on using MemberPress, check out our ultimate guide to creating a WordPress membership site.
Pricing: MemberPress is a premium plugin that begins at $179.50 per year for one site.
WooCommerce is the most popular and well-known e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
You can accept payments from all of the major credit card providers, including Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and more.
By default, your store will only accept direct bank transfers, check payments, and cash on delivery.
If you want all of the popular payment gateways like WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal, Square, Klarna, and Amazon Pay, you’ll need to download them as an addon from the extensions store. The good news is many are free to download.
WooCommerce is best suited for selling physical products since it allows you to quickly set up your online store, create product pages, customize the checkout process, manage inventory, and process payments, all in one place.
WooCommerce has plenty of apps in its marketplace to help improve the checkout experience. For example, adding related items or a countdown timer in the shopping cart can boost your sales.
To learn how to set up a WooCommerce store, read our comprehensive tutorial on WooCommerce made simple.
Pricing: WooCommerce is free to get started, and so are all of the payment gateways within the WooCommerce marketplace. However, most people end up paying for other apps or themes to enhance their online store.
Accept Stripe Payments is a free WordPress plugin that allows users to process payments via Stripe.
It uses a simple shortcode that allows you to add the Stripe ‘Buy Now’ button anywhere on your website for a product or service. Also, you can accept donations via Stripe.
When users click on the buy button, a Stripe pop-up will appear, asking users to enter their credit card information to complete the purchase.
Your customers are redirected to the Checkout Result page once they’ve entered their credit card payment.
The page will display the transaction and the item they just paid for.
Within WordPress, the transaction will be captured in the orders menu of the plugin. You can easily view all orders you’ve received in your WordPress dashboard.
Also, the plugin offers very basic features to create and customize a product page. Since it’s a free plugin, it doesn’t offer nearly the features that other e-commerce platforms do, such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or even Shopify.
For full details about adding Stripe as a payment method, check out our tutorial on how to accept payments with Stripe in WordPress.
Pricing: The Accepts Stripe Payments plugin is free to use. However, they do offer addons that you can purchase individually or in a bundle. For example, you can purchase addons like Subscription payments, Apple and Google Pay, Alipay, and others. It costs $39.95 per addon, or you can get access to all premium addons for $79 per year.
LearnDash is the most advanced WordPress learning management software (LMS) plugin. This plugin is designed to help build a paid community around digital courses.
As a user, you have complete control over who can access your courses and for how long.
You can also provide exclusive perks and curate courses to build membership plans and packaged deals.
As soon as a person signs up, they’ll instantly receive access to all the content in the membership plan.
And if you plan to sell memberships, LearnDash works with MemberPress.
When it’s time to collect your funds, LearnDash accepts payments using several payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and 2Checkout.
Pricing: LearnDash starts at $199 per year for access to one site, which includes updates and support.
WP Charitable is a top-rated WordPress donation and fundraising plugin, with over 10,000 + non-profit organizations and website owners who use this plugin to raise more money online.
The beauty of this plugin is that it does not charge processing fees, so more money goes towards supporting your cause.
It comes with all the features you’ll need, such as the ability to accept both one-time and recurring donations, customizable donation forms, GDPR compliance, and more.
Best of all, Charitable has built-in payment integrations for PayPal, Stripe, Paystack, GoCardless, Braintree, Mollie, Windcave, and more.
If you’re a non-profit looking to raise money, make sure to read our guide on how to add a PayPal Donate button in WordPress.
Pricing: Charitable is free to use, and you’ll get access to PayPal and Stripe integrations. You can also create unlimited fundraising campaigns. However, the paid plans allow for premium payment gateways, recurring donations, crowdfunding, and more.
YITH WooCommerce Stripe is an addon plugin that allows you to accept credit card payments through Stripe on your WooCommerce store.
YITH is a trusted and well-known plugin developer that has some of the best apps for WooCommerce stores, including the:
This plugin lets you automatically process payments, so you can reduce the rate of abandoned carts and offer a positive buying experience.
It has other features, such as the ability to:
Show the customer’s credit card list on the checkout process, making it easier to complete the purchase.
Create a blacklist of users to reject payments from potential fraudulent visitors.
Process refunds with a single click.
Manage recurring payments for subscription products with YITH Subscription.
Ask for additional info like their billing address and zip code for verification of the credit card owner and to prevent chargebacks.
Pricing: The YITH WooCommerce Stripe plugin costs $79.99 per year, which includes one year of updates and support, along with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
When picking a WordPress plugin for accepting credit cards for your site or online store, it’s important to consider various factors to ensure you choose the one that best fits your needs. Here are a few aspects to look for:
Security features: Security and compliance should be at the top of the list. Look for payment plugins that offer PCI compliance, robust encryptions, and other security measures to protect your customer’s payment data. Also, look for fraud detection and prevention features, such as address verification and CVV checks.
Payment gateway options: Check which credit card types and payment methods (e.g., debit cards, digital wallets, cryptocurrencies) the plugin supports to accommodate a wide range of customers. For example, Stripe makes up over 68% of the market share for e-commerce payment processing in the U.S., so it’s important to have Stripe as a payment option.
Support and updates: Confirm the plugin releases consistent updates and offers reliable customer support. That way, should an error arise, the support team can help you quickly accept payments again so you don’t lose customers.
Customization options: Plugins that let you customize payment forms and checkout pages can boost conversion rates. You can align your payment process with your brand identity and deliver a consistent user experience. This may include customizing button colors or adding Buy Now buttons.
Ease of use: The plugin should have a user-friendly interface so it’s easy to set up, even for beginners. Users should be able to adjust payment settings and manage features without encountering confusion.
Advanced features: If you offer subscription-based services or products, ensure the plugin supports recurring payments. On top of that, it should have built-in reporting and analytics tools to gain insights into your sales data. Some plugins integrate with analytics tools like MonsterInsights so that you can track your traffic sources, sales metrics, and conversions. That way, you know where your sales are coming from and which products or services are selling the most.
By carefully considering these factors, you can pick a WordPress payment plugin that aligns with your business needs.
Of the options above, we recommend WPForms Lite so you can begin accepting Stripe payments immediately, and if you’re selling entirely digital products, you can’t go wrong with Easy Digital Downloads.
We hope this article has helped you pick the best credit card processing plugin for your site. You may want to check out our post on the best WooCommerce plugins for your store or the best WordPress coupon code plugins for your online store.
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