Do you plan to sell products online internationally? If so, you should probably consider providing your web visitors with a currency conversion feature.
Currency conversion lets your prospective customers translate international currency pricing into their local currency at the purchase or checkout stage. It also lets customers view the exact amount their card or PayPal account will be charged, displayed in their local currency.
One advantage of adding currency conversion to your site is that it lets your customers see and understand pricing in foreign countries in their own home currency, and makes it easier for customers to work out their costs and expenses.
Fortunately, if you are a WordPress user, it’s easy and simple to add a currency converter to your WordPress site, allowing your customers to easily calculate the cost of your goods.
Currencyr – Free Currency Converter For WordPress
Currencyr is a simple yet advanced, intuitive, easy-to-use and complete currency converter WordPress plugin with a unique and attractive converter tooltip. Best of all, it’s free!
This currency conversion WordPress plugin includes great features like the following:
- Inline conversion tool
- Supports a number of exchange rates providers, such as Yahoo!, Open Exchange Rates & FoxRates
- WP-Cron task scheduler enabled
- Currency table and converter widget
- Supports integration with various e-store plugins like WooCommerce, WP-eCommerce, Shopp, and Easy Digital Downloads.
- Automatically determines local currency
- Full language translation support
Important: This plugin requires your server to be running PHP 5.3.0 or later. Do not install this plugin if you are running an older version of PHP. Alternatively, ask your web hosting support team to upgrade your PHP.
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You can install the plugin from your WP dashboard by typing in “currencyr” into the Plugins search field and clicking “Install Now” …
After installing and activating the plugin, you can configure the plugin’s settings by selecting Currencyr from your admin user menu …
This takes you to the plugin settings page …
For example, you can select a base currency from the ‘Base Currency’ drop-down menu if you prefer to use something other than the default option ’United States Dollar’ …
You can select a data provider from a dropdown menu. The default provider is ‘Yahoo! Finance’, but you can also choose one of the other options, such as European Central Bank, FoxRate, Google Finance or Open Exchange Rates …
Note: If you select ‘Open Exchange Rates’, an API (Application Programming Interface) is required …
You can select how often you would like the currency exchange rates to be updated by specifying an option from the ‘Update Rates’ drop-down menu …
The plugin uses jQuery, which allows web developers to add things like animation effects to web applications (e.g. WordPress plugins).
Unless you have a reason to edit the jQuery settings, simply ignore this section …
Configure the rest of the settings according to your own preferences and don’t forget to click ‘Save Changes’ when done …
When you have configured your settings, you can easily add currency conversion to your WordPress blog’s posts using shortcodes.
Refer to the ‘Additional Plugin Notes’ section further below to learn more about using currency codes (e.g. USD, NZD, CAD, etc …) in the Currencyr plugin.
Shortcodes
You can easily add currency conversion to posts, pages and widgets with no technical knowledge or skills using shortcodes.
Let’s take a look at some examples of currency shortcodes that you can add to posts and pages:
Let’s say that you retail your product online for a set price (e.g. $175) in US Dollars (USD), and you would like to display the conversion amount in British pounds (GBP) on your product information page.
To display this information, just add the following shortcode into your page content …
Note: You can also insert amounts in dollars and cents (e.g. 165.49, 189.00, 399.99, etc …)
The screenshot below shows how the above shortcode should look after you have inserted it into the post or page …
After publishing your information, the currency conversion will appear as you can see in the example below …
Using the above example, let’s now display the same amount into different currency formats.
To do this, use following shortcode (add as many currency symbols as you want separated by vertical pipes) …
You can see how the above shortcode appears when added to a post …
After publishing your post, the converted currency amounts will then appear as seen in the screenshot below …
refer to the ‘Additional Plugin Notes’ section below to learn how to change the currency separator symbol in this plugin.
Now, let’s suppose that you want to select a different base currency than the one selected as the default.
For example, say you have specified your default base currency as EUR and you have a section on your e-commerce pages targeted to non-European customers (for example, Australia or Canada), you can change the base currency using the following shortcode …
You can see how the above shortcode looks when you add it to a page …
After publishing the content, the converted currency will then appear like this …
Currencyr Widget
You can also insert a currency converter into your site’s sidebar using the Currencyr widget.
To add currency conversion to your sidebar area, select Appearance > Widgets from your WP dashboard menu …
In the Widgets > Available Widgets section find the ‘Currencyr’ widget and drag it to an Active Widgets location …
Configure the widget options as shown below (add the currency codes you want to display on your widget separated by commas), and click ‘Save’ to update your settings …
Your currency converter will now display on your website’s sidebar with the settings you have specified when configuring the widget …
Additional Plugin Notes
This section contains additional information about using the plugin.
Currency Separator
The Currencyr plugin allows you to specify a symbol of your choice to display as the currency separator when using multiple currencies.
You can change the symbol in the ‘Multiple Separator’ settings section.
So, for example, entering the default symbol “/” (forward slash) …
Displays your currency values separated by a forward slash as you can see in the screenshot below …
If you select another symbol and resave your plugin settings …
Your web visitors will see the new symbol being used as the currency separator …
E-Commerce Software Integration
As mentioned earlier, the Currencyr plugin can be integrated with various WordPress-compatible e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce, WP-eCommerce and Shopp …
(above image sourced from Currencyr plugin site)
And there you have it! Now you know how to easily add a currency converter to your WordPress site.
To learn more about WordPress e-commerce plugins, see the tutorial below:
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