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Updating WooCommerce for WordPress 5.0.x

eCommerce

Are you an eCommerce merchant? Then you know that updates to your eCommerce platform, extensions, plugins, and payment gateways are a part of life.

With the updates released for WordPress 5.0 and resultant compliance patches for WooCommerce, the world has become a wee bit easier, at least for those of us who have wagered our lives on WooCommerce. The new updates have brought about a bouquet full of changes, new fixes, improved security, and better storefronts.

Ensure that you update your WooCommerce before you upgrade to WordPress 5.0 for a worry-free life.

Before you do anything else, take backups!

Backups

Backup

Backups are essential to safeguard your store’s online assets in any event of corruption. WordPress saves a part of its data in a database and another part in the files. The themes, plugins and any uploaded content like images and all are located in the wp-content folder.  Another is the database, which organizes the products, orders, posts, pages, user login data, and many more. In order to fully backup any store which uses WordPress and WooCommerce, we should take a backup of both the database and the files.

There are two types of backups, manual and automatic.

  • Automatic backups are the most reliable ones. Automated, regular backups of your entire site including your database, all content, plugins & themes, settings, and more.
  • While creating manual backups for your store, backup your database and your WP-content folder. This ensures that you have a backup of your theme and plugin files, especially when there are any customizations.

Getting and Testing Updates

Once the backups are created it is time to move on to installing the updates. Never test the updates on your live site before trying them on your dev (or local) site. If you are unfamiliar with this process, it may be a good idea to get help from a WooExpert.

Never start the new update installation in the live site.

  • Start with a Local install. The Local site is an isolated personal computer, generally not accessible from the web.  It’s highly recommended to use version control so that it will be easier to deploy the site to staging and production.

 

  • The Staging site is where you test updates. This should be a replica of the live site. To test a replica beyond the Local site, it’s better to create a second WP install and restore a backup of your live site to it. At FlexiCloud, we offer you with a staging site for testing your updates before deploying them live. This staging site can also be shared with others to help test it. Ensure that you test on multiple devices, different browsers, multiple locations and so on.

Message us to set up the staging site for your WooCommerce update.

 

  • The Production site or the Live site is where customers and purchases happen in real time. Once everything on the Staging site works smooth, the version is ready to go live. It’s safer to switch your site into ‘maintenance mode’ to prevent any transactions and orders during the update. [Always have a copy of your site’s backup handy in the unfortunate situation where something unexpected happens.]

Remember: Any lost functionality costs customers and money.

Testing is never a waste of time; it saves a lot of stress and saves money in the long run. Never delay testing all the functionalities of your site after deploying the updates. Test your live site to ensure that it works great!

testing

 

Updating Extensions and Payment Gateways

1. From WooCommerce.com extensions

Go to WooCommerce > Extensions > WooCommerce.com Subscriptions to get updates and plugins from WooCommerce. Read more about Managing WooCommerce.com subscriptions.

Always ensure to connect your store to your WooCommerce.com account as this lets you to,

  • View the status of WooCommerce, your extensions and also your payment gateways
  • Filter by Installed, Activated, Downloaded, and Update Available
  • Decide the compatibility of extensions and payment gateways with WooCommerce version/release.

2. From third-party developers’ extensions and plugins

Store/site owners must contact the third-party developers directly for support on any extensions, plugins, themes and payment gateways developed and maintained by third-party developers.

If you are interested in knowing more about the technical specifications of the new update, you can access the detailed document here. FlexiCloud supports WordPress 5.0.x and WooCommerce. Our high spec servers are fine-tuned to provide fast-loading, highly secure and versatile eCommerce hosting. If you enjoyed reading this article, you’ll also enjoy hosting with us at FlexiCloud.

 

 

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Magento 2.3 release – All you need to know

Magento features

Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms along with WooCommerce and OpenCart. eCommerce platforms help to create and integrate features that are essential for an online shop into the website. These eCommerce platforms enable designers as well as owners to easily update and enrich their shop’s product portfolio, manage inventory and track sales – all in one place.

Magento 2.3 was eagerly awaited by all of us in the eCommerce community. Armed with a plethora of new features and updates, the new release is all set to make your eCommerce journey a much more exciting one in 2019.

We are glad to confirm that FlexiCloud supports all the requirements for Magento 2.3.x, so rest assured, if you plan on upgrading, you’ll have a smooth, hassle-free transition.

Magento Releases Roadmap

John.does [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Magento 2.3.0 features

  1. Multi-source inventory

One of the main features of 2.3 is multi-source inventory. Anyone involved in procuring products knows that it is practically impossible to source everything you need from one place. As shops grow, so does their inventory. A Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) system helps eCommerce owners to manage their inventory across multiple physical locations from within the Magento admin. This should considerably improve operational efficiency.

Magento 2.3.x release
More options, happy customers!

In Magento 2.3, merchants can also assign products as well as quantities to each fulfillment source, such as warehouses, stores, distribution centers or third-party drop shippers. Tracking inventory at each source for easier management of inventory as well as integrating them with third-party inventory systems can also be handled within Magento admin. We can also set up rules to prioritize and automatically control the inventory sources that are used to fulfill orders for each website in real- time. This helps to streamline operations and help inventory management a breeze.

The inventory reservation system in the MSI is beneficial even for merchants with a single source of inventory. The system tracks deductions from the salable product stock when customers add products to carts resulting in better accuracy in inventory counts and high performing checkouts. These measures ought to improve the conversion rates as well.

  1. PWA studio

online shopping
mCommerce is on the rise. Are you prepared?

With over 2 billion smartphone users, mobile commerce is seeing unprecedented growth. eCommerce merchants can’t afford to miss this opportunity to provide a superior mobile shopping experience to their customers which account for nearly three-quarters of consumers engaging in mobile shopping. Progressive Web Apps (PWA) from Magento facilitates eCommerce merchants to provide awesome mobile shopping experiences to their customers. PWA Studio makes it easier to build Magento-powered PWA experiences that will boost conversion rates and increase mobile shopping engagement. PWA studio is designer focused on guided development, reference themes, open web standards, and lower costs.

For information on how to work with PWA Studio visit pwastudio.io.

  1. Page builder

eCommerce page builder
Rich pages lead to better conversions.

Page Builder for Magento Commerce is an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. It’s quite user-friendly and has lots of content types to create awesome web pages and shop pages. Be it images, videos, and banners, or instant preview capabilities that enable non-technical users to take control of their content, the new Page builder has it all so that we can enrich pages, update content and a lot more, without the help of a front-end web developer. The new grid is highly customizable and in-context editing makes the whole process quite simple. It can be used to create dynamic content blocks as well. The existing Magento functionalities are fully integrated into the Page builder for better ease of use while creating pages.

Page Builder will only be available for all Magento Commerce customers only by the 2.3.1 release, as it is currently limited to the Early Adopter Program.

  1. Additional features

Magento 2.3.0 delivers updates and enhancements across the entire platform, in addition to the following features:

  • Magento Shipping
  • GraphQL
  • Asynchronous & Bulk Web APIs
  • Declarative schema
  • Improved indexing performance
  • New security tools

Magento 2.3.x technology stack requirements

  • Operating systems (Linux x86-64): Linux distributions, such as CentOs, RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, Debian etc.
  • Memory requirement: up to 2GB of RAM.
  • Composer (latest stable version): to develop Magento extensions.
  • Web servers: It easily works in all major web servers like Apache, nginx or LiteSpeed.
  • Database: MySQL 5.6 or later.
  • PHP: Magento 2.3.0 is compatible with PHP 7.2 compatibility for the 2.3.0 release. Please visit the release notes for more information on required PHP extensions and patches.
  • PHP OPcache: verify that PHP OPcache is enabled for performance reasons.
  • SSL: A valid SSL for HTTPS and TLS 1.1 or later.
  • Mail server: Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or an SMTP server.

It’s always beneficial to review the full copy of the release notes for detailed information on the new release. You can also read more information about Magento here.

FlexiCloud supports all the requirements for Magento 2.3.x. If you liked this article, you’d also like our hosting services.