Installing WordPress and WooCommerce

WooCommerce was designed as a WordPress plugin from its conception. Everything that WooCommerce has done is done on top of WordPress. So, while this is a book about mastering WooCommerce, we can’t start talking about WooCommerce until we make sure a few basic things are taken care of in your WordPress installation.

We’re going to make sure your WordPress site is set up correctly and then install WooCommerce. To do that, we’re going to look into the following:

• New features in WooCommerce
• Why and how you should use test sites
• Creating an ad-free admin experience
• How to install WooCommerce
• Configuring settings through the WooCommerce welcome wizard

Once you’ve done all of the preceding, you’ll have WooCommerce installed on a test site and you can start building your online store. Let’s first look at why and how we should use test sites with any WordPress installation.

Technical requirements

We’ll be installing a few different pieces of software in this chapter:

• WordPress: https://wordpress.org/
• WooCommerce: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/
• Jetpack Without Promotions: https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/
• Surbma | WooCommerce Without Marketplace Suggestions: https://wordpress.org/plugins/surbma-woocommerce-without-marketplace-suggestions/
• The code files for this chapter can be found in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-WooCommerce-/tree/main/Chapter01

New features in WooCommerce

The first version of this book came out back in the Spring of 2020. Since then, there have been 30+ major releases of WooCommerce. Let’s look at what they’ve been working on!

WooCommerce Admin

The WooCommerce Admin plugin started with WooComemrce 4.0 and was shipped with WooCommerce 6.5. WooCommerce Admin offers significantly enhanced reporting. It enables filtering and comparisons and provides an overview of your store’s performance in terms of sales and revenue.

Additionally, it offers insights into the most popular and highest-grossing products while also enhancing customer management and analytics capabilities.

WooCommerce Payments

WooCommerce also added WooCommerce Payments in 4.1. This feature brings a new dashboard to your site’s WordPress administration area for handling payments, refunds, disputes, and deposits.

WooCommerce blocks

With WordPress 5.0 they introduced the new block-based editing experience...

Importance of test sites

If you’ve been a WordPress developer for a while, you’re probably familiar with test sites. And while they’re important in developing non-e-commerce WordPress sites, they’re critical in WooCommerce development. The following screenshot shows what the website development process looks like:

Figure 1.1 – Website development process

In a typical WordPress development project, you’ll build custom functionality on your local machine. Then, you’ll upload it to a test site where the client usually approves it. Then, you’ll move the test site to the live site, replacing data and files.

And this works great for most WordPress projects. But when it comes to e-commerce, there are two problems:

• You can never replace the live database: Since an e-commerce site is always on and always accepting new orders and payments, and marking items as shipped, you can’t replace the...

Creating an ad-free experience

Both WooCommerce and Jetpack, a plugin we’ll install later in this chapter, include promotions. And these promotions make it less clear what’s going on. And if you’re developing this site for a client, you want to recommend plugins—you don’t want your plugin doing that for you.

As an example, in the following screenshot, there’s a promotion for premium functionality:

Figure 1.2 – An ad from Jetpack

Note

Throughout this book, I’ll include several screenshots. To make sure these are valuable to you, I’m going to make sure they’re showing you what I need you to see and I’ll try and get rid of the extra content.

To make this book clearer, I’m going to install two plugins that remove these ads, which lets me share more useful screenshots and will give you and your clients a much cleaner user experience.

Let’s first install something...

Installing WooCommerce

Let’s get started by actually installing WooCommerce on our site. Perform the following steps:

1. Search for WooCommerce under plugins in your admin menu:

Figure 1.4 – WooCommerce in the plugin installer

2. Click Install Now followed by Activate.
3. Click WooCommerce in the admin menu. Or if you’re familiar with WooCommerce and want to skip the welcome wizard you can click Start Selling on your Dashboard screen under WooCommerce Setup. See Figure 1.5.

Figure 1.5 – Clicking Start selling will skip the setup wizard

4. Clicking WooCommerce will take you to the welcome wizard, which will help you configure all of the settings you’ll need to get up and running. Here’s what the first step looks like:

Figure 1.6 – First step of the setup wizard

Now we can configure the store details in WooCommerce. Click Add...

Summary

In this chapter, we first went through the steps that we needed to take before installing WooCommerce. We had to ensure that our WordPress site was set up correctly and that we could build everything in a properly set-up test site.

Once we had that sorted, we installed a few plugins to keep our admin interface free of ads, which could distract us or our clients.

We then installed WooCommerce and Jetpack and configured a number of basic settings through the welcome wizard. With these steps, you can set up and test as many WooCommerce sites as you want.

Now that we’ve done all of that, we’re ready to create products in our store. In the next chapter, we will learn to build and configure new products.