Juice up WordPress with Lemon Squeezy

It’s hard to deny the power and reach of WordPress. As of today, WordPress powers 40% of all the websites on the Internet, and it’s still growing at a healthy pace every year.

It is by far the most popular content management system (CMS) out there and has grown well beyond the simple blogging platform it once was. Some of the biggest news organizations in the world like New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and FiveThirtyEight use it to power their news cycles.

Aside from blogging, WordPress is also prolific in the eCommerce space. WooCommerce, an open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress, is a wildly-popular plugin that lets you run your own eCommerce store from within your WordPress website.

While you can sell digital products with WooCommerce, it really wasn’t built with that in mind. It was built for physical goods, and many of the features are tailored towards that. For digital creators, the plugin as a whole can be overkill just to sell one or two digital products. It’s kind of like using a chainsaw when all you really need is a pocket knife. (Too much?)

Easy Digital Downloads, or EDD, is another popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Unlike WooCommerce, EDD was built to manage digital products specifically. In the past, I ran my own WordPress product shop on EDD and processed hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales through it. While it was a better solution than WooCommerce, I often suffered growing pains and maintenance fatigue as my customer base grew.

They’re not bad, but creators deserve better

These plugins are used and loved by many, and they certainly have their place in the ecosystem. But WordPress has evolved, creator’s needs have evolved, and neither WooCommerce nor Easy Digital Downloads has really evolved to meet the needs of digital creators. Both plugins are still heavily intertwined in the complex and often frustrating WordPress interface. Neither plugin really feels like the perfect solution, but many choose them because they’re already using WordPress.

But when you decide to run everything on WordPress, you accept a lot of responsibility in doing so. You’re responsible for setting up and maintaining nearly every aspect of your operation such as plugin updates, security, payments, taxes, customer accounts, extensions, and GDPR laws. Woof! That’s a lot even for me, and I’ve been using WordPress for over a decade now.

I don’t know any creators who want to spend their time managing these kinds of headaches when they could instead be creating new products to sell. Let the creators create!

Lemon Squeezy can solve this problem

Lemon Squeezy was built from the ground up to be a platform for digital creators to make money selling digital products. As creators ourselves, we essentially built the platform we wished we had over the years to sell our digital products, courses, subscriptions, memberships, and more.

Lemon Squeezy helps you create your first products, add them to a customizable storefront, gives you multiple ways to share and market your products, and gives you all the actionable metrics you could ask for. And we do all of this within our beautifully-designed and intuitive dashboard that customers are already raving about.

We’re also the merchant of record, which means we take responsibility and liability for payment methods, complicated tax laws, subscription billing, invoicing, secure file delivery, and virtually every other complicated aspect of running an online store. We make it easy-peasy so you don’t have to think about any of it.  

We know WordPress deeply

Although our current focus is on making Lemon Squeezy the best platform for digital creators, we know the potential of the WordPress ecosystem. In fact, all of the Lemon Squeezy founders have deep WordPress roots, having created and sold dozens of WordPress businesses in the past.

We know WordPress inside and out, we know the struggles users have with it, and we know the opportunities that we have to help make it better for creators with a Lemon Squeezy integration.

Imagine being able to connect your store to your WordPress site and easily add your Lemon Squeezy products to any post or page. Imagine being able to use the power of WordPress as a CMS, but offloading the complicated eCommerce stuff to Lemon Squeezy where it’s best handled. That’s the future we’re working towards.

Use Lemon Squeezy to sell on your WordPress site

Although we’re not quite to that future vision, you can still sell your Lemon Squeezy products on WordPress today! In fact, it’s super simple and we’ve got a few unique and customizable ways for you to get started.

Once you’ve created a product in Lemon Squeezy, you’ll have access to the Share Product panel, where you can customize the way customers purchase your products.

Link to your products using the Checkout Link

The Checkout Link is a direct link to your product checkout page. This page displays images of your product, a product description, and the checkout form to complete a purchase. Using the toggles in the Share Panel, you can customize the look of your checkout to suit your tastes.

The Checkout Link is great for sharing your product on social media, emails, and newsletters because you can direct customers right to a purchase page with a simple link.

Adding your Checkout Link to WordPress is a breeze. First, copy your link from the Share Product panel. Once you have that, you can head over to your WordPress site and use the link on buttons, text, pricing tables, call-to-actions, or anywhere else you might add a link.

As a quick demo, I’ll add my Checkout Link to download our free Creator’s Guide to Digital Products. Right from within this blog post, I was able to send you directly to a secure, blazing-fast, optimized checkout page for a purchase (or free download). 😍

Link to your products using the Checkout Overlay

The Checkout Overlay takes selling on your WordPress site to the next level. With this feature, customers can buy your Lemon Squeezy products within a beautifully-designed overlay, without leaving your website.

Similarly to the Checkout Link, you can customize your Checkout Overlay and tweak how you want it to appear on your website. The difference is, the Checkout Overlay comes with a code snippet as well as a link. This code snippet powers the Checkout Overlay on your website.

To add to your WordPress site, you’ll want to add the HTML block to any post or page, and paste the Checkout Overlay snippet right into the HTML block. When you save it and preview it on the front-end of your website, you’ll have a seamless, secure checkout experience without installing any eCommerce plugins on your site.

Check out how awesome the Checkout Overlay feature is by clicking the button below to toggle the overlay and download the Creator’s Guide.

Download the Creator’s Guide to Digital Products

This is just the start

The Checkout Link and Checkout Overlay are both powerful features for generating sales, and both work flawlessly in WordPress. But we know we can take this even further and find new and innovative ways for creators to sell their Lemon Squeezy products on WordPress, so stay tuned for that.

We’ve only just launched Lemon Squeezy, and creators are already telling us that we’re making a positive impact on how they sell their digital products on the web. That’s a pretty great start, and encouragement enough for us to continue working on our vision.

If you haven’t signed up for Lemon Squeezy yet, there’s no better time to do it! Sign up for free today and start earning money with your digital products.

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