While there have been new Content Management Systems (CMS) popping up, and there are now more options than ever before, WordPress remains the best option for both businesses and marketers alike. WordPress offers so many unique advantages that make it an incredible platform. Not only is it highly customisable, which is a must-have for any business or marketer in today’s competitive climate but it’s completely free and easy to use.

Along with this, because of its open-sourced nature, there are a vast number of value-added plugins that you can install on your site to get advanced features that can help you scale your website when you need it. A good quality theme can also happen to be incredibly well optimised to rank high within the search engines, whilst being responsive, meaning it will scale properly to tablets and mobile devices. Perhaps most importantly, in today’s age of digital payments, it is both safe and secure with plenty of plugins/add-ons to securely accept payments.

How to Accept Payments on A WordPress Website?

1. PayPal

PayPal is perhaps the most recognized and trusted payment gateway that you will find on the Internet. As a business or marketer, establishing trust with your customer base is key. After all, having a secure gateway that customers can use can skyrocket your conversions. If a customer is able to easily make payments on your WordPress site, you will be able to convert a lot more than if you had a payment gateway that wasn’t as trusted or recognisable. By using PayPal, you can help reduce friction by giving them a payment gateway that they already regularly use. Therefore, they won’t need to create a new account, and you can even make it so they can easily checkout as a guest. There a handful of different PayPal plugins you can use to integrate it into your site.

2. Authorize.net

Authorize.net is another payment gateway that you can install and use along with your WordPress website. There are plugins that you can use to get this operational on your WordPress website. Authorize.net is a good option because it can help you retain the customer on your website instead of taking them to a third-party checkout solution like PayPal. This will give you the ability to allow them to complete the entire transaction on your site, which gives you full control over the entire checkout process, which can allow you to make tweaks and test things to improve your checkout conversion rate.

3. Stripe

Stripe is another good payment gateway that you can consider, which will allow you to integrate a very feature-rich payment solution into your website. With Stripe, you would need to utilize a plugin to integrate it fully into your WordPress site. The good thing about Stripe is the fact they have a Point-Of-Sale system (POS) that you can use to extend the flexibility of your payment solutions to offer in-person payments. Therefore, if you have a brick and mortar retail front, you can accept both types of payments. Stripe is also very good for those doing global business as they offer automatic foreign currency conversions.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to accept payments on your WordPress site. In fact, these are only a few of the top options available as there are ways to integrate other recognizable payment solutions like Square and even Amazon Payments into your WordPress site. It really comes down to figuring out which payment gateway is going to offer the best value for your business. While keeping a customer on your site with a solution like Authorize.net is a great option for many businesses with an established reputation, new businesses without a reputation within the marketplace might benefit from having a trusted and well-recognized name like PayPal to convert prospective customers at a higher rate.