WooCommerce released its latest upgrade, version 2.5 – dubbed the “Dashing Dolphin,” in January.
Here’s how the WooThemes product release announcement describes the new features:
This latest version focuses on getting the store itself to run quickly and is aptly named Dashing Dolphin.
We made several changes under the hood that improve the speed of your store.
First, we improved how WooCommerce knows who is on the site and what they have in the cart, known as a session handler. … We’re now storing less temporary data in the database, which speeds up every page load.
Several pages in the backend were improved, such as the tax settings screen. For store owners that collect taxes in a lot of regions, this screen will both save and load much faster.
We improved the layout of the email settings page as well. It’s now easier to navigate and edit your emails to customers (for example, transactional emails).
Read the full announcement.
Sellwithwp.com sums up their review of the upgrade this way:
WooCommerce 2.5 overall is a nice refinement to WooCommerce, improving day-to-day management for both store owners and developers, while improving and optimizing key pieces of the plugin’s technical infrastructure.
More specifically, they mention:
WooCommerce 2.5 doesn’t make huge changes to the way you run your WooCommerce store, but it does add several small quality of life improvements for shop owners and managers. [Namely, a table format to quickly view and manage emails and “minor front end tweaks to the variable product and checkout pages.”]
The biggest changes in WooCommerce 2.5 are the things you don’t always see — the several fixes and performance improvements … such as transients refactoring, a new session handler, making the checkout process more resilient, making product review display much faster, and PHP 7 support, all make WooCommerce faster, more dependable, and more scalable.
Developers also benefit from WP CLI support and new REST API endpoints, expanding the ways that developers can interact with WooCommerce stores outside of building companion plugins.
Read the full review.
Statistics (Sept. 2015) indicate nearly 30 percent of eCommerce sites operate with WooCommerce. If yours is one of them, you’re in good company. Have you upgraded to 2.5?
If you have questions about upgrading your WooCommerce plug-in, please contact us. We are glad to help.