Most store launches that go wrong don't fail because of design. They fail on something small that nobody tested: a payment gateway still in sandbox mode, order emails landing in spam, a shipping zone that quietly charges zero for international orders. This is the checklist we run on every WooCommerce build before it goes live. Bookmark it, copy it, share it with your developer.
1. Payments and orders
- Every payment method is switched from test/sandbox mode to live mode — card, UPI, wallets, and cash on delivery if offered.
- You've placed at least one real low-value order through each payment method, then refunded it.
- Order confirmation, processing and completed emails arrive — and don't land in spam. Check from Gmail and Outlook.
- The admin "new order" notification goes to an inbox someone actually watches.
- Refunds work end-to-end from the WooCommerce admin (WooCommerce payments docs).
2. Shipping and tax
- Shipping zones cover every region you sell to — and there is no "catch-all" zone accidentally charging zero (setting up shipping zones).
- Tax settings match your registration and are displayed consistently (inclusive or exclusive) across product, cart and checkout (WooCommerce tax docs).
- Estimated delivery times are visible before checkout, not only in the confirmation email.
3. Checkout friction
Baymard Institute's aggregate of 50 studies puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at around 70%. Among shoppers who abandon for reasons other than "just browsing", 18% cite being forced to create an account and 17% cite a checkout that was too long or complicated (Baymard cart abandonment statistics).
- Guest checkout is enabled.
- Unnecessary fields are removed. Baymard's benchmark found the average US checkout shows about 23 form elements by default, while their testing suggests 12–14 is achievable.
- Shipping cost and total are visible in the cart, not revealed on the last step — "extra costs too high" is the single most-cited abandonment reason in the same research.
- Coupon field doesn't dominate the checkout (a prominent empty coupon box sends people off to search for codes).
- Checkout works on a real mid-range Android phone, not just a desktop browser.
Place a real order on your own phone, on mobile data, before launch. It takes ten minutes and catches problems no staging review will.
4. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google's Core Web Vitals give you concrete targets: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads (web.dev: Web Vitals).
- Homepage, a category page, a product page and the cart are all tested in PageSpeed Insights — on mobile.
- Product images are resized and compressed before upload; no 4000px originals in the catalog.
- Unused plugins are deactivated and deleted, not just deactivated.
- Page caching is on, and cart/checkout/my-account pages are excluded from it.
5. SEO basics
- "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unchecked in WordPress settings. (This one takes down more launches than anything else on this list.)
- Every product and category has a unique title and meta description.
- Product structured data is present and valid — check a product URL in Google's Rich Results Test (Google product snippet docs).
- The XML sitemap is submitted in Google Search Console.
- If you're replacing an old site, every old URL 301-redirects to its closest new equivalent. Google's own ecommerce launch guide is worth reading end to end.
6. Trust and legal pages
- Returns/refund, shipping, privacy and terms pages exist and are linked from the footer and the checkout.
- A real phone number, email or WhatsApp is visible — a hidden contact route reads as a red flag to first-time buyers.
- SSL is active on every page, with no mixed-content warnings.
7. Tracking and after launch
- Google Analytics 4 is recording purchases, not just page views.
- Automated daily backups are running and you've tested a restore at least once.
- Someone owns plugin and WooCommerce core updates — with a staging site to test them on first.
Want this done for you?
We run this exact checklist on every store we build. If you're about to launch — or you already launched and something feels off — we're happy to take a look.