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Ecommerce

Excluding WooCommerce Pages from Caching

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If you run a WooCommerce shop and you’re using a caching plugin on your website – or your host is providing one as a service, like Varnish – make sure caching is disabled for key WooCommerce pages and cookies.

What is Caching?

Caching is ‘saving’ website information and content in the user’s browser on their first visit and displaying that saved page in the future rather than having to pull it from the server. It allows for faster page loading than if the page had to be ‘rebuilt’ from scratch each time the user views it.

But caching has its drawbacks, as you probably know from being told to ‘clear your cache’ to try to fix any website issue. Caching impacts on WooCommerce can include:

  • Users seeing old versions of the checkout page when they try to finish an order
  • Users seeing other users’ carts or finding strange items in their carts
  • Users seeing other users’ account info
  • Issues with WooCommerce checkout pages never loading

WooCommerce logoThese problems can cause your customers to trust your site less as well as privacy issues. But it can be fixed easily by excluding dynamic pages from the cache. Note: some caching plugins automatically exclude cart and checkout pages for certain ecommerce plugins. Check your plugin’s documentation.

How to Disable Caching for WooCommerce in WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a popular commercial caching plugin for WordPress. It does automatically exclude the Cart, Checkout and Account pages automatically, but there are a few more things you need to do.

1. Go to the WP Rocket settings, Advanced Rules.

2. In the Never Cache Cookies section, add the following lines:

woocommerce_cart_hash
woocommerce_items_in_cart
wp_woocommerce_session_
woocommerce_recently_viewed
store_notice[noticeid]

3. Save the changes.

Cookies help track products in carts and power the ‘recently viewed’ widget – they need to stay dynamic as they change a lot.

This process should be simliar for different caching plugins.

How to Disable Caching for WooCommerce in Varnish

Varnish is a server-side tool that speeds up website loading as well as providing security protection. Part of its job is to temporarily store the content of your web pages (a cache), which will be served up when a user requests them rather than making a call on your host server (just like the plugin-based caches).

If you have access to the server settings, you can add the following WooCommerce exclusions to Varnish.

Pages/URLs:

\?add-to-cart=
\^/(cart|my-account/*|checkout|wc-api/*|addons|logout|lost-password|product/*|wp-admin|wp-login)
\/checkout/
\/my-account/

Cookies:

woocommerce_cart_hash
woocommerce_items_in_cart
wp_woocommerce_session_
woocommerce_recently_viewed
store_notice[notice id]

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Payments, Uptime Monitors, Popup Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

For WooCommerce users, a new payments option was announced this past week: WooCommerce Payments. This new service uses Stripe’s payment processing but with a different user experience. However, there’s one big drawback – it requires Jetpack to function. If you’re already using Jetpack to calculate taxes in WooCommerce, then it may be worth a look. If not, I’d probably stick with Stripe. Learn more about WooCommerce Payments. And, why you may want to avoid Jetpack if you can.

Looking for a service to let you know if your website goes down? Here are 12 of the best uptime monitoring services reviewed. Note: if you’re a WP Minder client, we do this for you and always have an eye on your site. Learn about all the benefits of working with us.

Popups are everywhere – they can be useful and engaging, or just terribly invasive. This post about the 5 best WordPress popup plugins also has info on how to make sure your popups are not irritating.

And a few posts from our sister site Red Kite Creative that you might find helpful:

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blogging Misconceptions, Tweeting for Business, WooCommerce Images, Multisite

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, and are feeling a bit intimidated, here’s something for you. Learn about two misconceptions about blogging that are 180 degrees apart. Is blogging ‘just writing’ or does it really require ‘superhuman effort?’ Turns out that neither of those views is really very accurate, and somewhere in the middle is a more reasonable conclusion.

If you use Twitter to promote your business (or want to start), what should you tweet about? Here are 21 easy ideas for business tweets. Some of these can also be good to use on other social platforms you might frequent for your business, like Facebook or LinkedIn, though the article is focused on short tweetable content.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and had some issues with gallery thumbnail image sizing. Here’s a useful and recent post containing all you may need to know about WooCommerce images. If you need a little more focus on resizing those products try this second post on changing WooCommerce image sizes.

Finally… if you have a need to run several WordPress sites on one server and would like to manage them all from a single control panel, WordPress Multisite may be for you. Here is a great and comprehensive guide to Multisite just published last month. Is your company or organization a candidate for the networking tools that Multisite provides? Maybe, if you’re:

  • A company with different departments each with their own website
  • A university or school with various departments and also student/faculty who need their own sites
  • A global or chain business where each location has its own website
  • A gym where each trainer needs their own site
  • Basically any situation where you need a network of sites under the control of one administrator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Old Blog Posts, PDF Viewers, Landing Pages, Paypal Alternatives

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re a regular blogger and have been doing it for some time, you’ve likely built up a large collection of old blog posts. Some may be useful “evergreen” content, but many may not longer be accurate or that useful. Should you do something about that? The answer is yes – check out this article on what to do with old blog posts. Start with an objective inventory. This process may be rather painful, but in the end you’ll be left with a blog that’s much more useful to your customers. Think of it this way: if you chose to commit to blogging in the first place, also commit to keeping that content at its best. As an added benefit, this cleanup will likely improve organic traffic to your site.

If you offer PDF documents on your site, did you know that you’re not stuck using the browser (which you have no control over) to display them? There are a few PDF viewers for WordPress that give you lots more control over display and keep your viewers on your site when they click to open the document. Both of the plugins reviewed in this article are commercial, but I’ve used the free PDF Embedder plugin on a few sites to good effect.

Well-thought-out landing pages can make the difference in getting a conversion (like a sale or a signup) or not. They simplify things down to one key idea – what it is you’re selling or asking people to sign up for. Here are 10 examples of successful landing pages to inspire you. And… here are some WordPress landing page plugins to help you construct your ideal landing page for any given purpose.

Finally… do you use Paypal in your ecommerce site? It has over 60% market share, so it’s a good bet. Love it, or hate it? If you’re in the latter category, this post is for you! Learn about the top 18 Paypal alternatives for ecommerce sites. I’m not sure if all of these are WooCommerce-compatible, since it’s quite likely you’re using WooCommerce if on WordPress. Stripe is my go-to payment plugin for WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and Harvest. Compared to Paypal, their support is fantastic, and I find Stripe’s great dashboard makes it much easier for me to do my accounting tasks.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Ecommerce Sites, PDF Links, Gallery Plugins, WordPress 5.0, Email Signups

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Just in time for the holidays – learn 5 ways to take your ecommerce site to the next level. This is a very useful (and short) article. I totally agree with one of their points and can’t emphasize enough to clients that high-quality product photos are critical to ecommerce sites. Investing in great photography for your site will pay off by providing a strong first impression. And don’t forget – your photographer should remind you – that all product shots should be taken under the same conditions with the same background and angle.

Here’s a simple task: linking to a PDF in WordPress. It’s a help request I get fairly frequently from clients, so here’s a tutorial in how to do it yourself.

I’m a big fan of the FooGallery plugin, but always open to new things! Here’s a review of the 8 most beautiful WordPress gallery plugins.

WordPress 5.0 with the new Gutenberg editing experience came out last week. I’m holding off on updating WP Minder clients for reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, but if you’re considering going for it, take a look at 7 things to know before updating to WordPress 5.0. Just in case, remember that Classic Editor is your friend!

Finally… learn how to get more email signups on your WordPress site. It’s not easy, but this article covers what you need to build your list and strategies that will help you grow your list over time.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.