WooCommerce Repair
When WooCommerce breaks it costs you money by the hour, not by the day. A broken checkout does not announce itself either – the site looks perfectly normal and the orders simply stop.
WooCommerce is where most WordPress problems get expensive, because there are more moving parts. Payment gateways, stock, tax, shipping, emails and the order flow all have to work together and any one of them can fail quietly.
Faults I See Most Often
Checkout fails at the payment step
Customer fills everything in, clicks pay and gets thrown back with a vague error or a blank page. Usually a gateway configuration problem, an SSL issue or a plugin conflicting with the checkout scripts.
Orders stuck on pending payment
Money has left the customer but the order never moves to processing. Almost always the payment gateway failing to call back to your site. The order sits there, nothing ships, the customer chases you.
Confirmation emails not arriving
Orders come through but nobody gets an email or they land in spam. WordPress sends mail badly by default. Fixing it properly means sending through an authenticated route rather than hoping.
Stock not decreasing or overselling
Stock management not enabled correctly, variations behaving differently to simple products or a sync running against another system that is losing.
Cannot add to basket or the basket empties
Often caching. A page cache that does not know to leave the basket alone will show a stale copy to everyone, including someone who has just added something.
Store slows to a crawl as it grows
Large catalogues expose things a small shop never notices. Unindexed database queries, product image sizes and background tables quietly growing until they choke the site.
How I Work Through It
I start with the WooCommerce status report, which lists PHP version, memory limits, database table health, template overrides and which plugins are outdated. It usually points at the problem before I have touched anything.
Payment gateways keep their own logs, separate from WordPress. Those logs show what the gateway sent and what your site did with it, which is how a stuck order gets solved rather than guessed at.
Then I place a real test order and follow it all the way through – basket, checkout, payment, order status, stock, emails. Watching the whole chain is the only reliable way to find where it breaks, because the symptom and the cause are often at opposite ends of it.
Backup first, always. Nothing gets changed on a trading shop without a way back.
What It Costs
- Businesses – £150 per hour, one hour minimum
- Private individuals – £120 per hour, one hour minimum
- After the first hour, charged in half hours
A broken checkout is nearly always a same-day job. If your shop cannot take orders, say so in the first line of your message and it goes straight to the top of the list.
What I Need To Get Started
- Your shop address
- WordPress admin login
- Which payment gateway you use
- An example order number that went wrong, if there is one
- Roughly when the orders stopped or the fault started
An order number that failed is worth a great deal. It lets me trace that exact transaction through the logs instead of waiting for the fault to happen again.
Worth Knowing
If your shop is busy, ordinary daily backups may not be enough. A backup taken last night does not help much if you have taken thirty orders since. It is worth checking how often yours actually run and whether anyone has ever tested restoring one.
Who I Work With
Private customers and small to medium sized businesses. That is the work I am set up for and the work I am good at.
I do not take on corporate contracts. Development teams, sign-off processes and layers of project management are a different job to this one. If that is what you need, I am not the right person and I would rather tell you now than find out halfway through.
Get Your Shop Working
Tell me what the shop is doing and I will tell you what is likely behind it.