After working with dozens upon dozens of WooCommerce sites, here’s some of my best tips:
- Use a theme that is Woo compatible, such as the free Storefront theme. Page builder themes (Divi, Beaver, Elementor) and framework themes (Genesis) are popular choices. Make sure your theme is well maintained and updated regularly. I do not advise custom coding a theme or forking a canvas (ex: Underscores) because when you do that you are responsible for all forward compatibility.
- Never override Woo or Theme templates unless you are committed to ongoing monthly maintenance of those customizations. Software updates break any forked templates over time.
- Page builders are great for pages, but aren’t as well suited for blog posts and Woo products. Reason is Woo pages are highly dynamic (categories, sorting, filtering, login state, cart, checkout, etc.) Also, blog posts tend to be distributed via RSS and email systems that don’t adapt well to block style content.
- Learn the Customizer settings for your theme well. Also learn Woo settings and your Plugin settings well, as these make big differences in behaviors and they do change over time.
- Be careful using unofficial plugins for WooCommerce. They may not stand the test of time and may have wonky licensing matters.
- Use CSS to customize your design, but keep global CSS in the Customizer or your plugin of choice, then make local CSS on specific pages to keep things organized and your global CSS down to sub 500 lines of code.
- Use Code Snippets plugin to manage your PHP code overrides. This is easier and faster than utilizing a child theme, though larger development teams favor the child theme approach. Woo documentation has a resource of snippets for your reference.
