Upgrading WooCommerce: Comprehensive instruction
By Litextension
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WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It’s by far the best designed and most popular eCommerce solution across all websites. WooCommerce users can sell anything on their site they can imagine and, with an innovative inventory system, they can keep track of their stock in real time in order to deliver their quality products to their customers. To avoid any problem when using and to make sales online smoothly, WooCommerce users should upgrade their current WooCommerce version. It is the reason why LitExtension generates this article below. Let’s jump into “How to upgrade WooCommerce Store?”
Table of contents
1. Backup your Database
Most people don’t know that any store powered by WordPress and WooCommerce has two places where data and content are stored: One is your wp-content folder. It stores your themes, plugins, and any uploaded content. Another is the database where your products, orders, posts, pages, etc. located. So, if your precious database stored in two places, how do you safeguard it all and keep it backed up? I will guide you manually. There are two parts to backing up your store manually:
- Backup your database! There are multiple ways to do this, see the Codex for your options to back up your content. Both manual and plugin options exist.
- Using SFTP head to your WordPress content folder to backup your theme and plugin files. We strongly recommend making a backup of your theme files if you’ve made any customizations.
If you have any problem in manually backup, LitExtension — WooCommerce Migration Service is automatical solution for you. It is the most efficient and reliable automated site migration service, of course, including backup database.
2. Performing WooCommerce upgrades
After making a full backup of your website, to ensure that the update process runs as smooth as possible, follow these steps:
- Step 1: Go to WordPress Dashboard > Plugins, and update any third-party plugin that is out of date. Do not update WooCommerce yet. If your website is running WooCommerce 2.0 or earlier, do not update your live site. This is a significant update over multiple versions and could cause trouble. Only update on a test/staging site to ensure that the process runs smoothly.
- Step 2: Update any WooCommerce extension you purchased from WooCommerce.com. You can also download your extension(s) from your Woo Account and overwrite the plugin(s) manually by FTP in /wp-content/plugins/
- Step 3: Go to WordPress Dashboard > Plugins and upgrade WooCommerce to the latest stable version.
- Step 4: Update WordPress core file: There will be a notification on your WordPress Dashboard if an update is available.
- Step 5: Update your theme to the current version. In case you are running the later version of WooCommerce, you may be in needed to with your theme author to see whether it is compatible with or not. You can update the WooFramework here: WordPress Dashboard > Theme > Update Framework if your site is running based on WooThemes.
3. Two common issues after upgrading
Plugins and themes conflicts
Absolutely WooCommerce is a great foundation for most eCommerce store. But as your business grows and changes, you may be faced with the problem: all these plugins and add-ons you installed in the past are not working as they should with WooCommerce later. To resolve it, you have to read all sentences below:
- First, switch to a default WordPress theme, to see if the problem still exists. If the problem goes away, contact your theme developer about the issue. If the problem persists in a default theme, go to the next step.
- Next,disable all your plugins, except for WooCommerce and the WooCommerce extensions giving trouble. If it can fix, then there’s likely a conflict with one of the disabled plugins. In order to confirm that, you need to reactive your plugins and see if the problem appears again. If the issue is still repeating, go to the final step. It is …
- Contact a Ninja to investigate further. In the support ticket, you create, provide us with as much information as possible.
Issues caused directly by WooCommerce
When you upgrade WooCommerce store, not all of the issues are caused by plugins or themes you already have. Some issues were in fact, such as:
- Shortcodes are not executed in variation descriptions
- Variation attributes are missing from some orders
- Billing and shipping fields are not in the right place during checkout
- Emails are being sent more than once
- You get a redirect loop when trying to reach your site
- Your customer data may be lost
In this case, the best solution is to contact with some WooCommerce Migration services. A migration tool allows you to switch all your customer data, billing & shipping fields, orders, … as well as upgrade WooCommerce in a few hour. I suggest you can use LitExtension tool to avoid all common problems when upgrading. For further information, please feel free to contact us as soon as possible!
