You are searching for a method to use your WordPress website to sell digital goods. You understand how challenging it is to sell digital goods online if you’re a content developer.
Although you can sell your goods on several online marketplaces and platforms, you’ll wind up submitting a sizable portion of your profit to platform commissions.
With more sophisticated capabilities like a download counter, access controls, and file management, WordPress digital download manager plugins are a fantastic option. The 5 best WordPress plugins for digital downloads in 2023 are included in this post, along with some advice on choosing the right one for your website.
Table of Contents
Considering Things Before Choosing Digital Downloads Plugin
When selecting a digital download plugin for your WordPress site, there are a few things to think about.
- Features: What qualities matter to you? Do you require a plugin that can manage many goods or only a select few? Do you need the ability to monitor download trends or password-protect your files?
- File management: Think about the file management skills of the plugin. It ought to make it simple for you to manage, upload, and update your digital materials. Check for features like file classification, mass upload, and the capacity to change file information or metadata.
- Price: How much money are you prepared to spend on a plugin for digital downloads? While some plugins are cost-effective, some might be highly pricey.
- Ease of use: How simple is it to utilize the plugin? Do you want a plugin with several bells and whistles or something basic and uncomplicated?
- Customization and extensions: Check to see whether the plugin offers extra extensions or add-ons or allows for customization. Because of its adaptability, the plugin may be customized to meet your unique needs or integrated with other products or services you already use.
- Payment gateways: Make sure the plugin supports the payment channels you wish to use if you intend to sell digital goods. To handle transactions safely, it should interact easily with well-known payment processors like PayPal or Stripe.
- Support: What type of support is provided by the plugin? Is there a chat room or forum where you may ask for assistance from other users? Is there a specialized support group you can get in touch with if you run into issues?
Let’s begin with our selection of the best plugins for digital downloads in light of the capabilities mentioned above.
5 Best WordPress Plugins for Digital Downloads
- Easy Digital Downloads
- WooCommerce
- WordPress Download Manager
- Download Monitor
- WPForms
Let’s begin the review of these 5 best WordPress plugins for digital downloads.
Easy Digital Downloads
A well-known digital download plugin for selling online goods including ebooks, PDF files, photos, movies, and other types of digital content is called Easy Digital Downloads. With this free plugin, you can even market WordPress themes and plugins from your dashboard.
You can quickly secure your files with a password, stop spam using reCaptcha, and monitor statistics like IP address, purchase date, and time. For tracking client purchase history, there is a specific dashboard for customer management.
The plugin has unequaled functionality for selling digital items and is fairly simple to use. It is linked with well-known payment processors like PayPal and Stripe to guarantee a simple purchasing process for your consumers. Simple Digital Downloads integrates with common themes and works well with well-known mailing programs.
Easy Digital Downloads Features:
- Shopping cart
- Detailed reporting
- Order management
- Customer management
- Advanced file protection features.
- You will find integrations with almost every payment gateway.
Pricing:
- Starting free from WordPress.org
- The premium plan starts at $99 per year
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin, that allows you to utilize your WordPress store to sell nearly anything. Although it is well known for selling physical goods, you may set up its settings to offer digital goods that can be downloaded, such as ebooks, photo albums, plugin zip files, and other things.
There are several add-ons that may be used to add functions like discount coupons, spam protection, and members-only downloading material.
While it’s a free plugin, new users are sometimes sidetracked by all of the available settings, which may initially appear intimidating. Before implementing any new features or improvements, we advise reading this WooCommerce beginner’s guide
WooCommerce Features:
- There are several extensions available.
- Adaptable to your preferred WordPress theme.
- Payment gateway integration is simple.
- Geared at both online and offline goods sales.
- There are lovely WooCommerce templates available.
Pricing:
- Starting free from WordPress.org
- The premium extension starts at $49 per year
WordPress Download Manager
The popular plugin WordPress Download Manager offers more than just adding download links to your website.
With a drag-and-drop uploader that supports the majority of popular file formats, this plugin adds downloadable files using the standard WordPress editing interface.
Users may define details like the film version, package size, and link label using the download package options. The three lock choices of password lock, terms agreement, and CAPTCHA are also available, allowing you to customize the access permissions.
WordPress Download Manager features:
- An uploader of files using drag and drop.
- For each downloading package, download the reports.
- Terms agreement, password, and CAPTCHA are the three choices for content locking.
- Unauthorized downloads are avoided via the IP block function and download URL masking.
- A tool for managing uploaded files is an asset manager.
- Up to 15GB Google Drive storage space.
Pricing:
- Starting free WordPress.org
- The premium plan starts at $99 per year
Download Monitor
Using the same WordPress file uploader and user interface, Download Monitor is simple to use and doesn’t require any training.
This plugin is excellent for software downloads since it allows you to upload multiple files and define file versions. Users have the option of selecting a file from the media library or uploading a new one from their PC. There are also options to make the download a featured one and limit access to members only.
You may quickly insert the downloaded files into any post or page using the download button block. It has a specific block settings tool that enables users to choose the download and file versions. The look of the link may also be altered using a variety of template settings.
Download Monitor features:
- Downloads may be added, edited, and removed using the standard WordPress interface.
- Use your WordPress website to sell downloads.
- Backing for Gutenberg Block
- Numerous file versions are supported
- Other download links are available (mirrors). You may utilize the file-sharing URLs for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and other services.
- For your downloads, use categories, tags, and other metadata.
Pricing:
- Starting free from WordPress.org
- The premium plan starts at $39 per year
WPForms
You undoubtedly already know that WPForms is the greatest form builder plugin, enabling users to quickly and effortlessly construct stunning forms. Did you know that it works well for digital product sales as well, especially if you simply have a few items to sell?
All you have to do to start selling is set up your form, an email notification to deliver the download link, and a payment gateway to receive money. After that, you can embed the forms wherever you like on your WordPress website to advertise your downloads.
Give WPForms a try if you just offer a few digital items on your site and don’t want to deal with a bulky digital download plugin. You may also gather contact details and offer the customer a downloaded file by using the content download form template.
WPForms Features:
- 600+ form templates that are editable
- Gateways for accepting payments like PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Authorize.net
- Form style helps match your forms with the theme of your website
- Constrained reasoning
- Entry control
- Protection against spam with Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCAPTCHA, and Custom Captcha
Pricing:
- Starting free from WordPress.org
- The premium plan starts at $49.50 per year
Everything depends on your particular preferences and the goods you wish to market. This list should assist you in selecting the top WordPress download management plugins. Note that before choosing the best plugin for your website, you may assess them in a test staging environment first.
We hope you have enjoyed this article on the best WordPress plugins for digital downloads. If you liked this post, then please subscribe to the WPinLearn YouTube channel for WordPress video tutorials. Join the WPinLearn community and follow us on Twitter.
FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions
What are digital products?
A digital product is a non-tangible item that only exists digitally. It only lives in digital form on your laptop or smartphone; you cannot physically touch it.
What digital products can you sell with WordPress?
WordPress allows you to sell any type of digital product, including services and downloads. Installing a plugin that manages digital goods and payments is required to do this.
What are the best-selling digital products?
Although there are many various things you may offer online, these are the ones that do the best business eBooks,
Online Courses selling, Software as a service (SaaS), Photography selling, Video, Music, and Audio,
Documents, Professional Services, WordPress products.
