Temporarily deactivating plugins is a common process in troubleshooting a problem.
Because WooCommerce Subscriptions turns your WordPress site into a recurring billing engine, a number of issues can arise from temporarily deactivating the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.
These issues may include:
- Missed scheduled renewal payments, including automatically retried payments.
- Subscriptions reaching the end of term, but not being transitioned to the expired status.
- Subscriptions that reach the end of the prepaid term not transitioned to cancelled.
Disabling scheduled actions
↑ Back to topWhen deactivating the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, steps should also be taken to stop associated scheduled actions.
Scheduled actions, such as renewal payments, are processed by WooCommerce Subscriptions by a event library called Action Scheduler that is included in WooCommerce.
Because of this, the scheduled events for subscriptions will continue to run, even if the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension is inactive. In these situation, while the event is triggered, the appropriate action, like creating a renewal order and processing a payment, will not be run.
Because no failure occurs, the event will also not be flagged as a failure.
To stop Action Scheduler from running, download, install, and activate the Action Scheduler Disable Default Runner plugin.
This plugin will stop the Action Scheduler queue from running altogether. This means that all actions for all plugins using Action Scheduler will stop, including WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Disabling a payment gateway plugin
↑ Back to topIt is also possible to disable a specific payment gateway plugin.
If a gateway plugin is disabled while Subscriptions is active, those subscriptions that use that gateway will be converted to use manual renewals. This means that the subscriptions can be paid for, but the customer will need to log in and pay for the subscription using a different gateway, rather than a payment being automatically processed.
Disabling subscriptions with WooCommerce Payments
↑ Back to topWhen using WooCommerce Payments, you have two options to sell subscription products:
- Built-in subscription functionality; or
- The WooCommerce Subscriptions extension.
The above information is relevant when using WooCommerce Payments with the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. When using the built-in subscription functionality of WooCommerce Payments, refer to the guide to deactivating subscriptions with WooCommerce Payments as it uses an off-site billing engine.