Introduction
WooCommerce is widely used and loved by many. There is one thing about it, though, that can cause nightmares for people; the WooCommerce update release.
If you have tools that automatically update your WordPress plugins for you and you aren’t prepared for a big update like WooCommerce releases at times then your checkout system could become non-functional. This is never a good thing, of course.
Best Practices
The first thing I will mention is that you should not immediately apply major WooCommerce updates. A major update would consist of any update where the version number is only 2 digits.
For example, The WooCommerce 2.3 update was a very large update that made a lot of changes. Very shortly after the 2.3 update was released we saw updates for 2.3.1, 2.3.2, etc. These are considered minor updates and would be more safe to apply than a major update.
Over the course of the first week or so after a major update is released you’ll find that these minor updates often follow pretty quickly. Once again with the 2.4 update we have 2.4.1, 2.4.2, and now 2.4.3 within the first couple of days of its release.
What I would recommend is to hold off on major updates until you see that the minor updates have slowed down tremendously. At that point you can rest assured that the majority of the issues caused by the update have been patched and you should be safe upgrading.
Still, though, you’ll want to make sure to consider these procedures a standard:
- Backup all current site files and the database.
- Make a copy of your live site on a staging / test server of some sort so that you can apply the update there and test everything prior to updating your live site.
- Do NOT update until you have thoroughly tested your site with your theme and all plugins that you are currently using.
Following these procedures will go a long way towards ensuring you do not have any checkout problems and will help avoid losing sales during these times.