Guide Ecommerce & WooCommerce

How to set up WooCommerce

Installing the plugin is the easy part — this is the order to configure it in so nothing important gets skipped.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 9 min read Beginner

WooCommerce is a plugin, not a platform — it turns an ordinary WordPress site into a store, which means everything that makes WordPress work well or badly also applies to your shop. Get the order of setup right and the rest of this section of the knowledgebase is mostly fine-tuning. Get it wrong — configure tax before shipping, or open the doors before testing checkout — and you find out from a customer.

This guide covers the setup itself. Payments, shipping and tax each get a full guide of their own once the basics are in place.

Before you install anything

Three things need to be true before WooCommerce is worth touching:

WordPress is installed and working. If it is not, start with a WordPress install rather than trying to do both at once.
The domain is live and resolving. A store built on a temporary or default address gets rebuilt when the real domain is finally connected, which is wasted work.
SSL is active. A checkout page served without HTTPS will not accept card details in any browser worth using, and payment providers refuse to process on an insecure page in any case. Free SSL is included with hosting here, so there is no reason to skip this step.

Build on a domain you intend to keep

Changing a store's domain later means updating settings inside WooCommerce, checking every payment provider's configuration, and dealing with URLs baked into old order confirmation emails. It is not impossible, but it is a job worth avoiding by picking the real domain from day one.

Installing the plugin

From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New, search for "WooCommerce", and install and activate it the same way as any other plugin. There is nothing store-specific about this step — it is the same process as installing a contact form or a caching plugin.

The setup wizard

Activating WooCommerce launches a setup wizard that asks for your store's country, currency, industry and roughly how many products you plan to sell. Answer honestly rather than picking defaults — the country and currency in particular feed directly into the tax and payment options offered later, and changing them after products exist is more disruptive than getting them right now.

The wizard also creates the pages a store needs automatically: Shop, Cart, Checkout and My Account. Leave these as WooCommerce creates them rather than rebuilding them from scratch — a huge amount of the plugin's functionality is tied to shortcodes and blocks placed on these specific pages, and a checkout page you built yourself from a blank page will not process orders correctly.

The order to configure things in

Order	Setting	Why it goes here
1	Payments	A store that cannot take money is not a store. Nothing else is worth configuring until at least one payment method works.
2	Shipping	Zones and rates determine what a customer sees at checkout — get this wrong and every order after launch needs manual correction.
3	Tax	Tax calculation depends on shipping being set up correctly, since most rules key off the destination address.
4	Accounts & emails	Decide whether guest checkout is allowed and confirm order emails are actually arriving before real customers rely on them.

Each of those has its own guide: connecting Stripe, adding PayPal, setting up shipping and setting up tax.

Adding your first products

Under Products > Add New, a product needs at minimum a name, a price, and a product type — simple, variable (sizes, colours), or a handful of others you are unlikely to need at launch. Add images before writing lengthy descriptions; a product without a photo is the fastest way to lose a browsing customer, and it is easy to leave "add photo later" unfinished once other pages need attention.

If you already have a spreadsheet of stock from another platform, importing products in bulk is considerably faster than adding them one at a time through this screen.

Start with a handful of real products, not placeholders

Testing checkout against a placeholder product with a made-up price tells you the mechanics work but not whether shipping and tax calculate correctly for what you actually sell. Use two or three genuine products, including one that needs shipping, before you consider the store ready.

Before you open the doors

Place a complete test order yourself: add a product to the cart, go through checkout, pay with a real test transaction if your provider offers one, and confirm the order appears in WooCommerce > Orders and that a confirmation email actually arrives. This single test catches the majority of launch-day problems — a shipping zone that does not cover your own address, a tax rule that returns zero, an email that never sends — while the store is still private.

Caching is worth a specific mention here: a caching plugin configured for a normal WordPress site will happily cache your cart and checkout pages too, which shows every visitor the same basket. See how to stop caching breaking your cart before you switch any caching on.

Once test orders work end to end, remove them from the order list, set the store to live, and move on to the guides for the specific pieces — payments, shipping, tax and security — linked throughout this one.