WooCommerce stores
Keeping a WooCommerce store taking orders. What to check when checkout or payments fail, how to update without breaking the cart, and how to make a slow store faster.
- By
- WP Ministry
- Published
A store is a WordPress site where a fault has a price. A page that loads slowly loses a sale, and a checkout that fails loses it without telling you.
Orders are not going through. Start with checkout not working and payment gateway errors. If checkout is down right now, the checkout down runbook gives the order to work in. The failed orders calculator puts a figure on what a failure rate costs, from your own numbers.
Orders go through and nobody is told. See WooCommerce email notifications and WordPress not sending email.
The store is slow. Speeding up WooCommerce covers what is different about a store: the cart and checkout cannot be cached like other pages.
The dashboard is slow. That has causes of its own, covered in a slow WooCommerce admin.
Updating without breaking the cart. How to update WooCommerce safely is the order to work in, and the database update notice explains what WooCommerce does to the database after an update and what to do when it stalls.
A sale is coming. Work through the sale readiness checklist in the weeks before it.
Keeping it that way. WooCommerce maintenance is the routine, with a test order on a staging copy after every update. What WooCommerce maintenance costs explains why a store costs more to look after than a brochure site.
If you would rather hand it over, WooCommerce maintenance is a care plan for a store, with a checkout and payment test after each update.
Error fixes
- How to fix a WooCommerce checkout that is not workingWhen customers cannot place an order, the cause is usually on the site itself. The Checkout page is not set up, a cache is serving a stored copy of it, a plugin or the theme breaks its script, or PHP fails as the order is saved. Where the order stops tells you which.
- How to fix WooCommerce payment gateway errorsThe order is created but the payment is refused, or the money is taken and the order never shows as paid. The order's status and notes say which. Usual causes are mixed-up test and live credentials, payment confirmations that cannot reach your site, and a gateway not offered at checkout.
Guides
- How to maintain a WooCommerce store: before every update, every week, every month and before a saleA store needs the upkeep of any WordPress site, plus what only a store has. Orders arrive all day, the checkout can fail while every page looks right, and WooCommerce has its own database update, templates and background jobs. This page gives a routine for each.
- How to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerceYes, you can do it yourself. Shopify exports products, customers and orders as CSV files, and WooCommerce imports them. Customer passwords do not move, the design is rebuilt, and nearly every address changes, so each old one needs a redirect before the domain is switched.
- How to migrate from WooCommerce to ShopifyProducts and customers move from WooCommerce to Shopify as CSV files. Past orders need a migration app or Shopify's API. Passwords, your theme and what your plugins did do not move, and every old address needs a redirect because Shopify's address patterns are fixed.
- How to set up WooCommerce email notificationsWooCommerce sends each order email when an order reaches a certain status, to the store or to the customer. Set the recipients and the sender under WooCommerce, then Settings, then Emails, send through a mail service that vouches for your domain, and read WooCommerce's email log when one is missing.
- How to speed up a WooCommerce storeA store is harder to make fast than a blog because the cart, checkout and account pages are built fresh for every customer. Cache every page that can be cached, keep those three out, and make the rest cheap to build with suitable hosting, an object cache and a tidy database.
- How to update WooCommerce safely: before, on staging, on the live store, and if it breaksRead the release notes, check your extensions and template copies, and back up. Update a staging copy and place a test order there. On the live store, close the checkout, back up again, update, test, then reopen. With the checkout closed, going back costs no orders.
- Mismatched value (page crawl) for price in Merchant Center: finding the cause on a WooCommerce storeGoogle compares the price in your product data with the price in the HTML of the product's landing page and in its structured data, and can disapprove the item when they differ. On a WooCommerce store the usual causes are a variation's address, a sale that ended, tax, currency and a cached page.
- Missing field "brand" and "No global identifier provided" in WooCommerce: what they mean, how to fix themBoth notices name properties Google lists as recommended for a merchant listing, not required, so the product stays valid. WooCommerce prints gtin from its "GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN" field and brand from the brand assigned to the product. Fill both in. Where a product has no GTIN, leave it empty.
- Missing field "hasMerchantReturnPolicy" and "shippingDetails" in WooCommerce: what they mean and three fixesBoth are recommended properties of a merchant listing, not required ones, so the product stays valid. WooCommerce prints neither. Settle them with shipping and return settings in Search Console or Merchant Center, with markup added through a WooCommerce filter, or with an extension.
- Why the WooCommerce dashboard is slow, and how to find the causeThe WooCommerce dashboard is built by the server on every click, with no page cache to help. Measure one slow screen with Query Monitor, then check order storage, the Scheduled Actions queue, the options table, Analytics, the object cache, plugins and the server, in that order.
- WooCommerce category page SEO: what a product category tells Google, its pagination and its addressWith no SEO plugin, a WooCommerce category page prints its name as title and heading, your description and a breadcrumb trail, and no canonical link or meta description. Its pagination is set out as Google asks. What it lacks is words for the shopper and links from the rest of the store.
- WooCommerce coming soon mode: how to check it, launch your store, and what Google is sent meanwhileComing soon mode shows a placeholder in place of a WooCommerce store, or the whole site, to everyone except a signed-in administrator or shop manager. A new store starts in it. To launch, choose Live under WooCommerce, Settings, Site visibility, or run wp option update woocommerce_coming_soon no.
- WooCommerce database update required: what the notice means and how to finish it safelyWooCommerce's files were updated and its tables and stored settings have to be brought to the same version. Back up the database, start the update once and let it finish in the background. Since WooCommerce 9.9 it starts by itself, so the backup belongs before the plugin update.
- WooCommerce filter URLs indexed in Google: ?orderby, ?filter_ and add-to-cart addresses, and what to doA WooCommerce store answers at extra addresses for one list of products, such as ?orderby=, ?filter_, ?min_price=, /page/2/ and ?add-to-cart=. Each returns the page with no canonical link and no noindex. A small store can leave them. To stop the crawling, add robots.txt rules for the parameters.
- WooCommerce out of stock and discontinued products and SEO: leave, hide, delete or redirectAn out-of-stock WooCommerce product keeps its page. The address still answers 200 and its structured data changes to OutOfStock, so a product that is coming back needs nothing done. One that is gone for good is redirected to a true replacement or left to answer 404, never sent to the home page.
- WooCommerce products not showing on Google: what to check, in orderFirst settle where the products are missing. Ordinary results need a product page Google can index, rich product results need product data on that page, and the Shopping tab needs the product in a Merchant Center account. Then check the store in that order.
- WooCommerce schema markup: what your store outputs and how to fill the gapsWooCommerce prints product structured data on its own, with the name, price, stock status and rating. Test a product page with Google's Rich Results Test, fix any error, then add what is missing, such as a GTIN, a brand, and shipping and return details. Markup does not guarantee a rich result.
- WooCommerce variations and SEO: variation URLs, canonical links and the price in structured dataA WooCommerce variable product has one address. Each variation is that address with attribute parameters added, and it carries a canonical link back to the product, so it is not a duplicate to fix. The product's markup gives a price range. A variation's address gives that variation's price.
- WooCommerce vs Shopify: when to switch, and when to staySwitch when you need something the other platform does by design and yours does not. Shopify runs the hosting for you and fixes parts of the store. WooCommerce leaves both the upkeep and the control with you. Slow pages, plugin conflicts and update work can be fixed without moving.
What it costs
Runbooks and checklists
- WooCommerce checkout is down: a runbookWhat to do, in order, when customers cannot pay on a WooCommerce store. Go through the checkout yourself and read the latest orders, work out which of three faults you have, keep orders coming in with a second way to pay, then account for every payment made while it was broken.
- WooCommerce sale readiness checklist: Black Friday or any big saleA WooCommerce store fails on its busiest day for a short list of reasons, and each can be checked beforehand. This checklist runs from four weeks before a sale, such as Black Friday, to the day after, with the screen and the setting to check for each item.
Tools
- What is my product page telling Google? A product data checkGive a product page's address and see the product data it carries for search engines, set beside what Google requires for a merchant listing and what it only recommends: name, image, price, stock, brand and identifiers.
- WooCommerce failed orders calculatorWhat your store did not collect from orders that were started and never paid, worked out from your own order counts and average order value.