How To Start A WooCommerce Store, Step By Step

WooCommerce runs a large share of the online stores on the web, and the reason is simple: it is free, it turns WordPress into a shop, and you own the result rather than renting it. What the free part hides is that a store has requirements a blog does not. Orders arrive continuously, payment data passes through, and a checkout that breaks at 9pm on a Friday costs real money.

This guide covers the whole setup in order, from choosing hosting through to testing a real transaction before launch. It also flags the two things most guides still get wrong, because WooCommerce changed and the guides did not.

What You Need Before You Start

Four things, and only two of them cost anything:

• A domain name. Roughly £10 to £15 a year.
• Hosting. The one decision on this list that is hard to undo later.
• WordPress. Free, from wordpress.org.
• WooCommerce. Also free, from woocommerce.com or straight from the plugin directory.

You do not need a business bank account, a company, or a finished product catalogue to start building. You will need the bank account before you can take money, because payment providers verify you.

Step 1: Hosting That Can Take Orders

Start here rather than with the design, because it is the decision you are most likely to regret and the most disruptive to change later. A shop is not a brochure site. Every page a logged-in customer sees is uncacheable, the cart and checkout hit the database on every request, and an order has to be written correctly the first time.

What that means in practice:

• Uncacheable traffic is the load that matters. A blog serves most visitors a cached page. A store cannot cache the cart, the account area or checkout, so the server does real work for every shopper.
• Database speed decides checkout speed. WooCommerce is query-heavy. NVMe storage and object caching matter more here than on any other kind of WordPress site.
• Watch how the plan is metered. Hosts that price on monthly visits can charge you more precisely when a campaign works. Plans sized on bandwidth and storage do not.
• Backups need to be frequent. A nightly backup on a store means potentially losing a day of orders. The database should be captured more often than the files.

Our WooCommerce hosting is built for exactly this shape of traffic, with no visitor ceiling, NVMe throughout and daily off-site backups on every plan from $25 a month. If you are weighing options generally, managed versus shared hosting covers what the difference actually buys you.

Step 2: Install WordPress And WooCommerce

Install WordPress through your host, which on most managed hosts is a one-click job. Then from the WordPress dashboard go to Plugins, Add New, search for WooCommerce, install and activate. That is the whole installation.

Two things worth doing before you go further. Set your permalinks under Settings, Permalinks to Post name, because product URLs read better and changing this after launch means redirects. And make sure your SSL certificate is active and the site redirects HTTP to HTTPS, since no payment provider will work properly without it and no shopper should be asked to trust a site without a padlock.

Step 3: The Setup Wizard

Activating WooCommerce launches an onboarding wizard. It walks through, in order: a welcome screen, a question about where you are in your commerce journey (starting out, already selling, or building for a client), your store details, a review of free features covering payments, shipping, tax, marketing and security, an optional Jetpack connection, and then the Home screen with a setup checklist.

Here is the first thing most guides get wrong. The wizard does not ask you to choose a theme. Plenty of tutorials describe a theme step because there used to be one. Design now lives in a later checklist task called “Customize your store”, which offers to design your own or pick a theme. If you are following an older guide and looking for a theme step that is not there, that is why.

Store details are worth getting right first time. Your store address drives tax calculation and shipping zones, and the currency is awkward to change once you have orders in the system.

Step 4: Add Your First Product

Products, Add New. The important choice is the product type, in the Product data dropdown:

• Simple — one thing at one price. Most products.
• Variable — sizes, colours, materials. You define attributes, then generate variations, each with its own price, stock and image.
• Grouped — a set of related simple products sold together.
• External or affiliate — listed on your site, bought on someone else’s.

Tick Virtual for anything with no shipping, and Downloadable for files, which reveals the upload and download-limit fields.

Fill in the short description, which appears next to the price, as well as the long one. Set a product image and a gallery. Enable stock management under Inventory if you hold stock, because “in stock” on a product you cannot ship is one of the fastest ways to lose a customer for good.

Compress your images before uploading. Product photography is the heaviest thing on most stores and the most common reason a shop feels slow, which has a measurable effect on revenue.

Step 5: Take Payments

Under WooCommerce, Settings, Payments. The mainstream choices are WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal and Square, all of which install as plugins and connect to an account you verify with your business details.

The decision that matters more than the brand is where the card details are entered. If the fields live on your page and you pass the numbers onward, you take on the full weight of PCI DSS. If you use the provider’s hosted fields or redirect to their page, the card data never touches your server, your compliance obligations drop to the shortest self-assessment questionnaire, and a compromise of your site cannot expose card numbers that were never there.

For a first store, take the hosted option. It is the single biggest reduction in risk available to you, and our guide to ecommerce security best practices goes further into what else matters once you are live.

Step 6: Shipping And Tax

Shipping is configured under WooCommerce, Settings, Shipping as zones: a geographic area, and the methods available inside it. A zone for your own country with flat rate and free shipping over a threshold, plus a second zone for everywhere else, covers most small stores on day one.

The three built-in methods are flat rate, free shipping and local pickup. Carrier-calculated live rates need a plugin from the carrier or an aggregator. Do not over-engineer this before you have shipped anything; a flat rate you adjust after a month of real orders beats a rate table built on guesses.

Tax sits under Settings, Tax and only appears once you enable it in General. WooCommerce can calculate automatically or use tables you define. Which applies to you depends on where you are and where your customers are, and the rules for digital goods in particular differ from physical ones. This is the part of the setup worth asking an accountant about rather than reading a blog post, including this one.

Step 7: Theme, Cart And Checkout

Any WordPress theme will run WooCommerce, but a theme built for it handles product grids, cart and checkout properly rather than approximately. Storefront is WooCommerce’s own and a reasonable starting point; our roundup of premium WordPress themes covers paid options.

Here is the second thing most guides get wrong. Cart and Checkout are now blocks, not shortcodes. For any store created after WooCommerce 8.3 in November 2023, the Cart and Checkout blocks are the default and no setup is required to put them in place. Older guides tell you to create pages containing [woocommerce_cart] and [woocommerce_checkout], which is how it worked before and is no longer what you get.

The classic versions still work, and both can coexist. A block can be transformed back to the classic version using the transform button in the block toolbar, which is worth knowing if an older extension only supports the shortcode. For a new store, stay on the blocks.

Step 8: The Plugins Worth Having

Resist installing everything at once. Every plugin is code running on every request and one more thing that can break your checkout. Start with these categories and add only when you have a specific problem:

• SEO — so product and category pages are indexed properly. Our WordPress SEO guide covers the basics without code.
• Backups — unless your host does it, which ours does.
• Security — a firewall and malware scanning, again often handled at the hosting layer.
• Performance — caching, though the good managed hosts handle this at the server rather than in a plugin.

Our list of the best WordPress plugins is a sensible shortlist. What you do not need on day one is abandoned-cart recovery, a loyalty scheme or a subscription engine. Those solve problems you do not have yet.

Step 9: Test Checkout Properly

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that costs money. Before you take a single real order:

• Place a full test transaction using your payment provider’s test mode, from adding to cart through to the confirmation screen.
• Confirm the order appears under WooCommerce, Orders with the right total, tax and shipping.
• Check the confirmation email actually arrives, and not into spam. Sending through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail is the durable fix here.
• Check your payment provider’s webhook log fired. A webhook that silently fails means orders that are paid for but never marked as paid.
• Do the whole thing again on a phone. Most shoppers are on one.
• Test with a coupon, and test with an out-of-stock product, because both take different paths through the code.

Do all of it on a staging copy first if you are changing anything on a store that is already live.

What It Actually Costs

Honest numbers for a first store:

• Domain: £10 to £15 a year.
• Hosting: from $25 a month on a plan that includes SSL, CDN, staging, daily backups and migrations.
• WordPress and WooCommerce: free.
• Theme: free, or roughly £40 to £80 once for a premium one.
• Payment processing: a percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction, taken from each sale rather than billed upfront.
• Extensions: free until you need something specific. Budget nothing here on day one.

So a realistic starting cost is the domain plus hosting, and nothing else until you are selling. The trap is the cheap shared plan that looks like a saving and produces a store that falls over on the first day it gets attention.

Mistakes That Cost You Money

Choosing hosting on price alone. A store that is slow or down does not sell. This is the one line item where spending slightly more has a direct, measurable return.

Putting card fields on your own page. It feels more professional and it drags you into a compliance regime you do not want. Use hosted fields.

Launching without testing checkout on a phone. Desktop-only testing is how stores discover a broken mobile cart from a customer email.

Installing twenty plugins in week one. Every one is a dependency and a possible conflict. Add them when something needs solving.

Ignoring backups until something breaks. Orders are data you cannot recreate. If you are already running a store elsewhere and moving it, our guide to migrating without downtime covers doing it without losing anything in the process.

Treating it as finished at launch. The first month of real orders will tell you more about your shipping rates, product descriptions and checkout flow than any amount of planning beforehand.