Debugging WooCommerce - The WooCommerce way

1. Debugging
WooCommerce
Andrew Wikel
WooCommerce Ninja
@slash1andy

2. - Robert Burns
“…The best-laid schemes o' mice
an ‘men…”

3. Debugging

4. WooCommerce is awesome
Customizing WooCommerce using actions and filters, or
just adding plugins or themes, is a great way to provide
a tailored solution for your exact needs, but sometimes
things can go haywire.

5. - Lord Melbourne
“…the possession of great power
necessarily implies great
responsibility.”

6. Your face when your site white screens
It’s going to be OK. Breathe.

7. Calm
Your first instinct will be to panic, but
you’re not doing anyone favors with that.

8. Find the problem
It’s often buried *just* under the surface

9. Questions to ask
• When exactly did you first notice the problem?
• Have any updates been applied to your website
recently?
• Have you changed themes or made any design changes?
• Have you installed any new plugins?
• Is your problem happening in one browser, or all of
them?
• Do you see any specific error messages?

10. Sometimes the problem
is right here.

11. Cheating, the WooCommerce way
We’ve built a fancy tool for you (really for us, but you can
use it). It’s called the System Status Report, and you’ve
likely seen it in the WooCommerce menu.

12. Things to look for
• Anything in red, which means a problem.
• If you’re using an old version of a plugin from
us, it will tell you.
• It will tell you the template overrides you are
using in your theme.

13. Still not seeing anything?
• Go to the page and use Firebug/Chrome Dev
tools to look for anything out of the ordinary.
• Use the built in logging for WooCommerce
extensions that have it. This can help you
narrow down certain issues with payments or
shipping.
• WP_DEBUG

14. Fix the problem
Get to it!

15. Don’t do any of this live
• Make sure you have a backup of your site
• Perform all debugging (and updates and
everything else) on a staging site.

16. Undo how you broke it
• If you did something to break it, undo it
• This is why you should have a backup to roll
back to (if an update went awry, or your theme
has outdated templates, etc.)

17. Start in a vacuum
• Deactivate everything (all plugins except the
one that you have the issue with)
• Change the theme to Storefront
• Try to break it again

18. If it works
• Start reactivating plugins/theme until you find
the culprit, and leave that deactivated while
you contact the dev, etc.

19. If it doesn’t
• Try the exact setup on a completely different
site to narrow it down to server configurations

20. Google
• It’s not cheating. It’s how I know 95% of what I
do.

21. Still no?
• Call in the big guns: Your developer/Woo
Expert/ WooCommerce Support

23. Resources to remember
• WooCommerce Documentation
• Woo Experts
• Advanced WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Troubleshooting 101

24. Thanks
@slash1andy
automattic.com