The WooCommerce launch checklist we actually use

A store that looks finished is not the same as a store that is ready to take money. The gap is almost always in the parts nobody sees until a real customer hits them: a payment method that works in test mode only, an order email that lands in spam, a cached cart showing someone else's items.

This is the checklist we work through before a WooCommerce store goes live. It is written for store owners as much as developers. You do not need to do every step yourself, but you should know each one was done.

Payments

• Test every gateway in sandbox first, then switch to live keys and place a real, small order with each one. Sandbox success says nothing about live credentials.
• Refund that real order from the WooCommerce admin and confirm the refund reaches the payment provider. Refunds are where integrations most often break.
• Check the currency, decimals, and price display match what your payment provider expects.
• Try a failed payment on purpose, with a declined test card, and make sure the customer sees a clear message and the order is marked failed, not pending forever.

Shipping and tax

• Set up shipping zones for every region you sell to, and one clear fallback for places you do not.
• Place test orders to at least one address in each zone and check the rate shown matches what you intend to charge.
• Confirm tax settings with whoever handles your accounts. Whether prices are shown with or without tax is a business decision, not a technical one.
• If some products ship differently, use shipping classes instead of one-off exceptions.

Emails

WooCommerce sends a lot of email, and customers judge a store by it.

• Go through WooCommerce → Settings → Emails and read every template that is switched on. Add your logo and a real reply-to address.
• Send order emails through a proper SMTP or transactional email service, not the server's default mail function. Default server mail often lands in spam or never arrives.
• Place a test order and confirm both emails arrive: the customer's receipt and your new-order notification.

Products and content

• Every product has a clear title, price, SKU, stock setting, and at least one good image with alt text.
• Images are sized for the web. A 6 MB photo straight from a camera slows every page it appears on.
• Categories are few and obvious. Customers should find a product in two clicks.
• Legal pages exist and are linked from the footer: privacy policy, terms, and a refund and returns policy. Payment providers often ask for these.

Speed and caching

Caching makes a store fast. Cache the wrong pages and it breaks checkout.

• Never cache the cart, checkout, and my-account pages, or anything that shows a specific customer's data. Good caching plugins exclude them by default; check that yours does.
• Remove plugins you are not using. Each one adds code to every page load.
• Test the product and checkout pages on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not just on your office Wi-Fi.

Security and maintenance

• Admin accounts use strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication. Delete accounts nobody uses.
• Automatic backups run daily, are stored off the server, and you have restored one at least once. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
• Check that your plugins are compatible with WooCommerce's High-Performance Order Storage before relying on it.
• Keep a staging copy of the store for testing updates, so plugin updates never get tried out on live customers first.

Tracking

If you will run ads, tracking belongs in the launch, not a month after it.

• The purchase event fires exactly once per order, on the order-received page, with the order value, currency, and order ID.
• Reloading the thank-you page does not fire a second purchase. This is one of the most common tracking bugs we see in inherited stores.
• GA4 and your ad platforms receive the same purchase, and the numbers roughly match your real orders after the first week.
• If ad spend matters to you, set up server-side tracking so blockers and browser limits do not hide sales. We wrote about why server-side tracking pays for itself.

Launch day

1. Switch payment gateways to live mode and confirm the keys.
2. Remove any "coming soon" or maintenance mode.
3. Place one real order yourself, end to end, on your phone.
4. Watch the first few real orders closely: emails sent, stock reduced, tracking recorded.

A launch that follows this list is usually a quiet one, which is exactly what you want. If you are planning a store and would rather hand the list to someone, that is most of what we do.