WooCommerce have announced that they plan to release version 4.0 of their ecommerce plugin in March 2020.
This is going to be a major release, which means that there will be some breaking changes. The good news for anyone running WooCommerce, is that the amount of breaking changes is much smaller than for WooCommerce 3.0.
Before we start highlighting any potential negative points of updating WooCommerce, let’s discuss the positives.
The main feature coming in WooCommerce 4.0 is the inclusion of the new WooCommerce Admin interface.
For those who don’t know, WooCommerce Admin is a new design of the interface for managing your store. It includes new and improved reports and a dashboard to track key metrics of your site.
WooCommerce Admin has new reports with filters that allow you to dive into data about your store.
These range from things such as revenue reports, orders reports, products reports and more.
This change means that WooCommerce 4.0 can leverage the latest technology to build attractive and useful reports. Hopefully this will improve the everyday workflows for store owners.
If you’re reading this and think you cannot wait to try out this new experience, then you’re in luck! WooCommerce have released the admin interface as a plugin, so you can test it out on your site before the 4.0 release.
Please note that for WooCommerce Admin to work, your website needs to be running at least WordPress 5.3 along with WooCommerce.
What’s going to break?
As brought up earlier, the release of WooCommerce 4.0 will contain a limited number of breaking changes, so we don’t expect the update to cause too many issues.
The big one is going to be the upgrade of Action Scheduler library to Action Scheduler 3.0. This might sound technical which is because it is! In simple terms, it will have a new database structure compared to the old version.
This should make the speed of the store much faster, but when making changes to databases, there is always reason for caution.
We recommend having a recent backup of your website before updating. If you don’t already have one, we offer a backup and update service on all WordPress websites.
Please feel free to get in touch with us via our contact page if you’d like more information about this, or anything else related to WooCommerce.