WordPress webshop tutorial

A practical walkthrough of building a WordPress webshop, and the points where the tutorial approach stops being enough.

The build, in order

Product model first: what varies (size, colour, subscription) and what does not. Then tax and shipping zones. Then payment. Then templates. Then performance. Doing payment before you have modelled your products is the most common cause of a rebuild three months in.

1. Model the products

Simple, variable, grouped and virtual products behave differently in pricing, stock and shipping. Decide which you need and keep the number of variations per product under control; WooCommerce stores each variation as its own post.

2. Tax and shipping

Configure rates by the destination rules you actually operate under. Get this wrong and you will discover it at your first cross-border order, when it is expensive to fix.

3. Payment

Connect a provider, enable the methods your customers expect, and wire up webhooks so asynchronous payments update the order correctly.

4. Performance

Caching, image handling and a hosting stack that can serve a cart page without a full page cache hit. Cart, checkout and my-account must never be cached.

Launch checklist

• Test order, refund and failed payment
• Tax and shipping verified for every destination you ship to
• Analytics on the full checkout funnel
• Order confirmation emails rendering in major clients
• Backup and restore rehearsed