Installing and Uninstalling WooCommerce: Take a moment to review the server requirements before installation or you may encounter issues when using WooCommerce. If you need a new host or don’t have one yet see our recommended hosts who can get you set up with WooCommerce right away.

With WooCommerce activated several items are added to your site for it to function properly:

• New menu items, custom post types, and taxonomies for orders, products, and more.
• New widgets and shortcodes.
• User roles for shop managers and customers.

WordPress Installation

If you have an existing site and want to install WooCommerce, using the WordPress Admin is the most straightforward option as it handles everything for you.

To install WooCommerce:

1. Log into your WordPress site.
2. Go to: Plugins > Add New.
3. Search for WooCommerce.
4. Select Install Now when you see it’s by Automattic.
5. Select Activate Now and you’re ready for the WooCommerce Wizard!

WooCommerce Setup Wizard

When WooCommerce is activated for the first time, the WooCommerce Setup Wizard helps you set up your shop.

Select Let’s go! to get started. Or select Not Right Now if you prefer to manually set up your WooCommerce shop.

Multisite installation

On a multisite install, WooCommerce acts like most any other plugin. Each site in the network, although sharing a database, stores its information in separate tables. Thus, each store is a separate setup.

While you can network-activate plugins, such as WooCommerce and its extensions, you would be unable to share product databases, checkout, and user accounts across sites in the network.

Only themes and plugins are shared across the network of sites.

Reverting to a previous version of WooCommerce

We always recommend using the latest version of all plugins and extensions on your site for security reasons. Not to mention to take advantage of any features and functionality now available, so this section is for guidance only.

To use a previous version of WooCommerce:

1. Disable and delete the current plugin.
2. Restore a previous backup of your store database.
3. Download a previous version of WooCommerce under the Advanced View.
4. Upload the previous version under Plugins > Add New.
5. Activate the previous version of WooCommerce.

One warning as mentioned in step two, you need to check and see if the version of the WooCommerce database has been updated or not. More often than not, it is updated with each version of WooCommerce, so you would need to restore your database from the previous version of WooCommerce to make sure everything works as it should.

This is why we highly recommend having backups in place alongside a staging environment to test new releases of mission-critical software like WooCommerce. See Updating WooCommerce for more information.

Uninstalling WooCommerce

There are two things to understand when uninstalling or removing WooCommerce.

• If you deactivate and delete the plugin from WordPress, you only remove the plugin and its files. Your settings, orders, products, pages, etc? will still exist in the database.
• If you need to remove ALL WooCommerce data, including products, order data, etc., you need to be able to modify the site’s wp-config.php file to set a constant as true.

Open your site’s wp-config file and adddefine( 'WC_REMOVE_ALL_DATA', true);on its own line above the/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ line. Then when you deactivate and delete WooCommerce it will remove all of its data.