Isn’t it time to start your e-commerce? It’s possible both on new and existing websites. Today, we will review a very flexible solution in this area — WooCommerce for WordPress.
Building and managing online stores, as well as increasing customer engagement on them, is easy with WooCommerce. This spring, it has released a new version — 3.6. So let’s see the benefits of using WooCommerce 3.6 for your online store.
WooCommerce for WordPress: a wealth of features
WooCommerce is a free open-source e-commerce plugin used by 4+ million websites. WooCommerce’s slogan “Sell Anything, Anywhere” emphasizes its flexibility and a wealth of options for local and global commerce.
WooCommerce contains all the necessary features for stores and is further extensible with various free and paid plugins.
Among its useful built-in & add-on features are:
- e-commerce store essentials (product pages, shopping cart, checkout, etc.)
- flexible payment options like credit card, bank transfer, cash on delivery, 140+ specific payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay etc.
- dynamic pricing rules, recurring payments, booking and membership, selling goods from marketplaces, and so on
- integration with hundreds of shipping carriers, flexible shipping options with various rates, zones, and specific countries, delivery tracking, and more
- integration with Google Analytics, MailChimp, Google Product Feed, and other services useful for your marketing campaign
- easy integration with any other service thanks to a built-in REST API
- central dashboard that lets monitor important metrics and get handy reports
- hundreds of nice website themes that suit WooCommerce stores
and so much more.
What’s new in WooCommerce 3.6
In April of 2019, WooCommerce had an important update — version 3.6 released. It accumulates the work of 122 developers who made 2,279 commits. So let’s see what’s new in it.
Product blocks by Gutenberg
All websites that run WordPress 5 will have blocks for building rich WooCommerce pages. The WooCommerce team has introduced eight new product blocks that allow editors to show products on any post or page and customize their layout.
As Gary Murray, Senior Product Designer at WooCommerce, writes on his blog post, it is now possible to seamlessly integrate content and commerce offerings across the stores.
They can select from predefined product groupings or create custom groupings of hand-picked products. This feature comes from WordPress 5’s new Gutenberg editor, which is famous as a very intuitively understandable, user-friendly, and modern tool.
Website performance improvement
WooCommerce developer Timmy Crawford emphasizes great performance improvements in the 3.6 release. They are both for the customer and admin pages.
WooCommerce 3.6 is built upon a new Product Data Lookup Table. It caches pieces of data about the products like SKU, stock status, and so on, into one database table for more efficient queries.
Among the performance improvements are:
- 62% load time reduction during product ordering and filtering
- overall load time reduction due to bypassing inactive webhooks
- load time reduction for pages that list product categories or attributes
- load time reduction for product pages with attributes
New admin dashboard
You can also enjoy the new customizable admin dashboard in WooCommerce 3.6. It offers new handy reports (for revenues, stock, orders, tax, coupons, and so on). Advanced filters allow you to get more of your reports. It also has a new Activity Panel to help you quickly manage your store.
Miscellaneous updates
Among the benefits of using WooCommerce 3.6 are also various improvements. They include, but are not limited to these:
- Official suggestions for adding extensions are now shown.
- Account pages are now provided with successful registration notices.
- Search by country name is allowed for states in zones.
- Increasing and decreasing stock options is available through the bulk edit form.
- The order-by selector has accessibility enhancements.
Enjoy the benefits of using WooCommerce 3.6!
To leverage the features of WooCommerce 3.6, you will need:
- the up-to-date (5.x) version of WordPress core
- the fresh 3.6 version of the plugin
- all extensions and themes updated accordingly
- PHP version 7.2 or higher
And our WordPress team is ready to do it all for you. No matter if you already have or just plan to create an online store — our developers will help you with updating, installing, configuring, extending the plugin to fulfil all your e-commerce ideas.
Let us help you enjoy the obvious benefits of using WooCommerce 3.6!
