Takeaways from WooCommerce: Maintenance & Best Practices
Posted: November 7, 2019
On Nov. 5, 2019, the Bend WordPress Meetup hosted presenter Timmy C., who works for Automattic on the WooCommerce team. Timmy covered best practices and maintenance tips for WooCommerce sites. He also introduced the future WooCommerce dashboard that his team of Automatticians is working on.
We’ve built several sites with WooCommerce and we’re big fans of this great customizable, open-source eCommerce platform. These are some of our biggest takeaways from the meetup:
- Automatticians are everywhere. An Automattician is an employee of Automattic, the inventive company that owns WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr and many other great products. The entire company works remotely all over the world, even here in Bend, Oregon. It was fascinating to hear Timmy’s experiences, as it sounds like a great place to work. Complete with sabbaticals!
- The new stats reporting suite is impressive. An reporting and stats dashboard is available now as a separate plugin, and will be fully integrated with new installs soon. The UI looks great, and there is a sorely needed feature added to find customers by name, email, etc. No more weeding through the ‘Users’ tab to find a customer’s details and order!
- Evaluate WooCommerce plugins carefully. While most plugins in the Woo marketplace are vetted, any plugin developed by a third party may pose security risks. It’s important to research and weigh the risks/benefits before using 3rd party plugins. Some may simply feature poor, inexperienced code and may cause conflicts on a WordPress website.
- Always maintain a staging or development site for updates. This sounds like a no-brainer, and something we always practice at Alpenglow. But sometimes it’s tempting to take a shortcut and make a “quick” update or plugin upgrade. Working with a production site directly can be dangerous, especially when your customer’s livelihood is at stake. Most quality WordPress hosts include some sort of staging/dev workflow, but a local dev environment can work just as well.
It was exciting to look behind the scenes at what the future has in store for this evolving project. Thank you to the Bend WordPress Meetup group for hosting this informative event.
