What are WordPress and WooCommerce?
If you have never built a website before, this is the right place to start. By the end of this page you will understand the three pieces that every online shop built with our plugins is made of — hosting, WordPress, and WooCommerce — and how they fit together. You do not need to write any code.
The simplest way to think about it
Imagine opening a physical shop:
- Hosting is the building — the physical space your shop lives in. On the internet, this is a computer (a "server") that is always switched on so visitors can reach your shop at any hour.
- WordPress is the shop fittings and management system — the walls, shelves, lighting and the back office where you manage everything.
- WooCommerce is the checkout counter and stockroom — it turns a plain WordPress website into a real store that can list products, take orders and accept payments.
- Plugins (like ours) are specialist tools and staff you bring in — one improves your product search, another manages wholesale customers, another speeds up your images.
You need all of these working together. The good news: each one is free to start, and you install them in order, one step at a time.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the world's most popular system for building websites — it powers more than 40% of all websites on the internet. It is free and open-source, which means anyone can use it and there are no licence fees to the WordPress project itself.
WordPress gives you:
- A public website that your visitors see.
- A private admin area (called the dashboard or wp-admin) where you log in to add pages, write content, change the design, and manage your store. You reach it by adding
/wp-adminto the end of your website address, for exampleyourstore.com/wp-admin. - Themes, which control how your site looks, and plugins, which add new features.
Important: there are two things called "WordPress". WordPress.org is the free software you install on your own hosting — this is what you want for a real store, because it gives you full control and lets you install any plugin. WordPress.com is a hosted service run by a company; its cheaper plans do not allow custom plugins like ours. This wiki always means the self-hosted WordPress.org version.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that adds everything you need to sell online. On its own, WordPress builds blogs and brochure websites; add WooCommerce and it becomes a full e-commerce store.
WooCommerce gives you:
- Products — physical goods, digital downloads, or variable products (for example a t-shirt in several sizes and colours).
- A shopping cart and a checkout page.
- Payments — connect card processors like Stripe or PayPal so customers can pay you.
- Shipping — set delivery zones, methods and prices.
- Tax settings, coupons, and an order management screen where you see and fulfil every sale.
WooCommerce is also free and open-source. Like WordPress, it can be extended with plugins — and that is exactly what the Rotozoom suite does.
Where the Rotozoom plugins fit
Once you have WordPress and WooCommerce running, our plugins each solve one specific job better than WooCommerce does on its own:
| Plugin | What it adds to your shop |
|---|---|
| Product Filter | Lets shoppers narrow your catalogue instantly by price, attributes, stock and more. |
| B2B Manager | Adds wholesale pricing, hidden prices for guests, and trade-account approval. |
| Image Optimizer | Compresses and converts product photos to modern formats so pages load faster. |
| Warranty | Issues warranty certificates and handles return requests. |
| Woo Conditions | Shows or hides payment and shipping methods based on the cart. |
| Sales Assistant | An AI chat that helps shoppers find the right product. |
Every plugin has a free version you can use forever, and a Pro version that unlocks the advanced features. You install them the same way you install any other plugin — covered in Installing and updating plugins.
What you will do next
The rest of the Getting Started section walks you through building a working shop from nothing, in order:
- Install WordPress — get hosting, a domain, and WordPress itself.
- Install and set up WooCommerce — turn WordPress into a store.
- Add products and launch your shop — list what you sell and go live.
- Installing and updating plugins — add Rotozoom plugins and connect your licence.
Take them one at a time. None of them require coding, and you can always come back to this page if a term is unfamiliar.