I just attended the WooCommerce Developers Conference (WooConf) in Seattle. The talks were great and very inspiring. For me, the biggest take-aways were:

  1. Performance improvements and scalability
  2. How to convince clients to use an open source solution for e-commerce
  3. Tips on upgrading an older install of WooCommerce

Let’s break down these items:

Performance Improvements and Scalability

Performance improvements  are mostly related to under the hood improvements in WooCommerce. The use of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) classes was discussed. CRUD makes it easier for developers to write code to retrieve and write to databases. It also opens up the opportunity to get data from external  sources.

In addition to the discussion of CRUD, we were reminded of best practices in using technology such as HTTP/2 and PHP 7.  The slowness of current search options, especially SQL,  search was also discussed. MindSize presented their neural search product which could add super fast search to our WooCommerce sites.

Use an Open Source Solution for E-commerce

There are many solutions for selling online. You can set up a site on Shopify or open an Amazon store. While these platforms as well as others offer easy to set up stores, you, as a seller, do not own your store. What would happen if Amazon decided to close your store  or you were no longer happy with Shopify? How would you get your products and orders and move them to another platform? With an open source solution like WooCommerce, you always own your data!

Upgrading an Older Install of WooCommerce

I have an e-commerce site that was originally developed on WooCommerce 1.6. When the site was updated, some variation data was changed so prices no longer appeared for these products. The WooCommerce support team suggested downloading a CSV file and then uploading the corrected file to a new site.  I have not tried this out yet but am looking forward to the challenge.

In addition to all of the great information, I also won an AeroPress coffee maker from SiteGround!