We just kicked off a large effort, and I want to post about it here because you’re going to see it happen in the open. For the next 3 months, most of our product and engineering teams will focus exclusively on the WooCommerce core plugin, the software at the center 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 enhancement ideas. Most came directly from merchants, developers, and agencies who took the time to write up what they were seeing.
That backlog is, in a real sense, a to-do list this community wrote for us. And we haven’t moved it forward fast enough. We’re now re-reviewing every item on it. Each issue gets a look from a product person and gets a response, and is either:
- Added to a prioritized list that a small cross-functional team owns and drives to closure, or
- Closed with a clear reason and an open invitation to reopen it if we got the call wrong.
Why spend a whole quarter this way? WooCommerce sits in the middle of everything. Your store runs on it, your extensions hook into it, your theme renders content from it. Time invested here pays off across the entire platform, setting us up to ship what comes next faster and with more confidence. So we’re deliberately holding off on most major new initiatives until this work is done. That being said, work on the critical areas of WooPayments and Woo AI will continue in parallel. We’ll share the work on those releases separately.
There’s one more idea guiding it all: WooCommerce integrates deeply with WordPress; that’s our superpower. Every Woo store is also a full website, with everything that comes with it. We’re leaning into that so the two feel like one coherent product rather than neighbors, and we’re working closely with WordPress teams to drive improvements across the entire combined system.
Based on what we’ve heard from customers and developers, the work is grouped into four areas
- Making Woo faster and more reliable. The foundation has to 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’s the bar we’re holding ourselves to.
- Modernizing the builder/developer experience. Woo should be easier and more predictable to build on. We’re focusing on APIs, documentation, dev tools, extensibility, backwards compatibility, and clear guidance as things change.
- Improving the store-owner/admin experience. We’re working through product management, order management, settings, and setup in WP Admin so those interactions feel quick and coherent.
- Strengthening the checkout engine. The core commerce jobs need to be dependable: cart, checkout, payments, subscriptions, tax, shipping, product data, inventory, orders, and accounts. These are the systems your revenue flows through. That includes making them work well wherever you sell, with better support for regional tax, shipping, and payment structures around the world.
If you’ve filed an issue on WooCommerce: thank you, and you’ll be hearing from us if it’s still open. If we close something you think we shouldn’t have, comment to help us consider reopening it. Your feedback is directly shaping what we build, and we want to prove that in public, issue by issue.
You can watch the whole effort unfold on the WooCommerce GitHub repository, and folks from the team will be sharing progress along the way. If something in WooCommerce has been irking you for years — a bug, a workflow, a missing hook — now is a great time to file it or bump it.
WooCommerce was built by this community. Over the next few months, your feedback will accelerate it even more.
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