Installing and updating WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit for WooCommerce
The WP Engine Toolkit for WooCommerce plugin is not publicly available and can be obtained only for certain plan levels. If you are interested in using the plugin, please reach out to Support, who will assess whether the plugin is a good fit for you.
Occasionally, this plugin may require an upgrade. Because this plugin is not publicly available, our Support team will notify you via email when you need to upgrade the plugin.
Before using the plugin in production, we recommend testing it in your staging environment to ensure compatibility with your site.
Summary
The WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit for WooCommerce helps you tune your WooCommerce site for optimal performance. The plugin provides optimization options that WP Engine has learned while running some of the most successful WooCommerce sites.
In addition to optimizing your WooCommerce site, this plugin also provides key performance indicators (KPIs), to help you assess your WooCommerce site’s performance. Enabling the KPI Log results in additional processing and storage, so we recommend using the KPI Log feature only while assessing your WooCommerce site’s performance. You can toggle the KPI Log setting at WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Integration.
The WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit for WooCommerce also helps improve conversions for your store. The plugin uses the Payment Request API to provide one-tap payments for your buyers, reducing buyer work during the checkout process. one-tap payments work only with Stripe and when a buyer’s browser also supports the Payment Request API. To configure one-tap payments, visit WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Payment Request.
Optimizations
Auto Logout
This option automatically logs out your customers as they visit pages on your site. Logging out customers makes your site more performant by minimizing the number of logged-in users (which reduces server load) and by eliminating personalization on dynamic pages (which improves cacheability).
Auto Logout will not log out customers when they visit cart pages, checkout pages, or account pages. Use the Enable Auto Logout setting only if you are willing to give up page personalization for site performance.
Guest Attribution
This ensures that any user who is checking out as a guest has their order assigned to the appropriate Customer account. This is done by checking whether a user already exists for the email address provided during checkout.
Guest Attribution pairs well with the Auto Logout optimization because it preserves customer attribution for orders with known email addresses, even when a customer gets logged out by Auto Logout.
Remove Admin Counts
For sites with many orders, the counts listed in your admin sidebar can take time to update. By disabling admin counts, substantial speed gains can be made for administrative users who spend time on the backend of the site.
Customer Order Index
Some queries, such as the ones that power the My Account page, can be inefficient and slow, especially if you have many return customers. By leveraging a finely tuned index of order data and customer data, these performance issues can be minimized.
Disable Cart Fragment JS
A single JavaScript file is responsible for a secondary admin-ajax.php call on most WooCommerce page loads. If your site does not display a cart in your header or sidebar, you should be able to disable this without impacting your site.
KPI Log
To view the KPI Log, go to WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Reports > KPI Log.
The KPI Log tab has three sections:
- High Impact — High-level performance metrics, such as adds to cart and orders processed.
- Views — Page views for several categories, such as cart views and thank-you page views.
- All KPIs — The KPIs from all other sections plus other KPIs, such as the count of searches performed from the site.
When enabled, the KPI Log will track the following metrics:
- Adds to cart
- Orders placed
- Orders processed
- Cart views
- Checkout views
- Order thank you views
- “My Account > Orders” views
- Views to “My Account > Address”
- “My Account > Edit” views
- Views to “My Account”
- Product searches
- General searches
No specific user data or product data is tracked. For example, the KPI Log will not show you who added a product to their cart, but you should be able to get some insight on how your visitors use your site.
The KPI Log should be used to assess whether your WooCommerce site is optimized. The KPI Log is notrecommended for long-term production use because it requires additional processing and storage. To toggle the KPI Log setting, go to WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Integration.
one-tap Payments
The one-tap payment feature uses the Payment Request API to make purchasing easier for your buyers. With the one-tap feature enabled, the buyer’s browser can prefill shipping and payment details during checkout, increasing conversions for your Ecommerce site.
The buyer’s browser must also support the Payment Request API. If the buyer’s browser does not support the Payment Request API, the one-tap payment feature will fall back to your default checkout experience.
Setup
To enable testing for one-tap payments:
- Visit WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Payment Request.
- Select Enable payment Request and Enable Test Mode.
- Enter your test Stripe API keys. When Enable Test Mode is selected, the live Stripe API keys will not be used for one-tap payments.
- Click Save changes.
To enable live one-tap payments:
- Visit WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Payment Request.
- Select Enable Payment Request
- Enter your live Stripe API keys.
- Be sure that Enable Test Mode is deselected, since live Stripe API keys will not be used while in test mode.
- Click Save changes.
To enable debug logging:
- Visit WP-Admin > WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Payment Request.
- Select Log debug messages.
- Click Save changes.
To view debug logging, visit WP-Admin > WooCommerce > System Status > Logs. Then select a log file that starts with wc-toolbox and click View.
Limitations
Here is a list of limitations with the current one-tap implementation included in this plugin.
Only Stripe is supported.
The one-tap payment feature works only with the Stripe payment gateway. Additional payment gateways may be included as their JavaScript libraries mature.
Only one-time payments are supported.
The one-tap payment feature does not support subscription payments or other recurring payments (such as those for online newspapers). Future improvements may include incorporating subscription payments.
Only browsers with Payment Request API implementation work.
For buyers, the one-tap payment feature will work only if their browser supports the Payment Request API. On 09/27/2016, Chrome 52 for Android was the first browser to release support for the Payment Request API. Visit this “Can I Use” page to learn which browsers currently support the Payment Request API.
Errors
You may encounter an issue where orders are not displaying on the front-end after installing the plugin. If this is the case, the cause of the issue is generally that the order_index table wasn’t created when installing the plugin. You will also see an error: “The Customer Order Index tool may be out of date – orders missing from the index will be missing from customer accounts. Please refer to our documentation on how to synchronize your Customer Order Index.”
To resolve the issue, begin by navigating to your WordPress Admin Dashboard. Select WooCommerce from the menu at the left, and then Integration from the top menu. Choose WP Engine Ecommerce Toolkit for WooCommerce to view the options for the plugin.
From this page, ensure Customer Order Index has a checkbox next to it, then click Save. Even if the option is already checked, choose to Save the settings on this page. Doing this will trigger a PHP function which creates the order_index table, in order to resolve the issue.
Last, you will need to run a WP-CLI command in order to re-index existing orders properly. If you have access to the Advanced section in User Portal, you can run this command from this page:
wp wpe-wc-toolbox regenerate_customer_order_index
If you do not have access to this section, please contact Support via Live Chat–available 24/7 in the User Portal–and we are glad to assist.