We’re just starting a big effort, and I want to post about it here because you’ll see it happening out in the open. Over the next three months, most of our product and engineering teams will focus solely on the WooCommerce core plugin, the software at the heart of every Woo store.
When we started this push, the WooCommerce repository on GitHub had over 2,300 open issues and 500 open pull requests. Some are bugs, some are improvement ideas. Most came directly from vendors, developers and agencies who took the time to write down what they saw.
That backlog is, in a sense, a to-do list that this community has written for us. And we didn’t move it forward fast enough. We are now re-evaluating every item on it. Each issue is reviewed by a product person and receives a response, and is:
- Added to a priority list that owns a small cross-functional team and leads to closure, or
- Closed for a clear reason and an open invitation to reopen if we made the wrong call.
Why spend an entire quarter this way? WooCommerce is right in the middle of everything. Your store runs on it, your extensions hook into it, your theme displays content from it. The time we invest here pays off across the platform, allowing us to deliver what comes next faster and with more confidence. That’s why we’re deliberately postponing most major new initiatives until this work is complete. That said, work on the critical areas of WooPayments and Woo AI will continue in parallel. We will share the work on those releases separately.
There’s another idea driving all this: WooCommerce integrates deeply with WordPress; that is our superpower. Each Woo store is also a complete website, with everything that goes with it. We lean on that so the two feel like one cohesive product, not neighbors, and we work closely with WordPress teams to drive improvements across the entire combined system.
Based on what we heard from customers and developers, the work is grouped into four areas:
- Makes Woo faster and more reliable. The foundation should feel solid, and that includes performance and release quality. Updating your store should be a non-event: you install the WooCommerce update and you keep selling. That is the bar we adhere to.
- Modernizing the builder/developer experience. Woo should be easier and more predictable to build. We focus on APIs, documentation, development tools, extensibility, backward compatibility, and clear guidance as things change.
- Improving the store owner/admin experience. We’re working on product management, order management, settings, and configuration in WP Admin so that these interactions feel fast and cohesive.
- Strengthening the cash register engine. The most important commercial tasks must be reliable: shopping cart, checkout, payments, subscriptions, tax, shipping, product data, inventory, orders and accounts. These are the systems through which your income flows. That includes working well wherever you sell, with better support for regional tax, shipping, and payment structures around the world.
If you submitted an issue on WooCommerce, thank you, and you’ll hear from us if it’s still open. If we close something that you think we shouldn’t, please post a comment to help us consider reopening it. Your feedback directly shapes what we build, and we want to prove it publicly, song by song.
You can see the entire effort in the WooCommerce GitHub repository, and people from the team will be sharing progress along the way. If something in WooCommerce has been annoying you for years – a bug, a workflow, a missing hook – now is a good time to save it or bump it.
WooCommerce was built by this community. Over the coming months, your feedback will accelerate this even further.
Beau has been building web-scale systems for more than 25 years and has worked at Automattic for more than 10 years. He has helped build WooCommerce, WordPress.com, Jetpack and others, and is currently artistic director and overall lead for WooCommerce.
