Next in our Marketplaces 101 series, we’re going to look into some of the debugging sides of your marketplace. The WooCommerce status page is a helpful built-in tool to help troubleshoot your WooCommerce powered website. You may or may not have heard of this page in your WordPress admin but now you will. Plugin and theme support teams will often ask for your WooCommerce Status page and this article will outline why we want these details.
How to get the WooCommerce Status page?
The WooCommerce status page can be found under WooCommerce > Status. From here you can easily click the ‘Get System Report’ and copy this into your support ticket. The following video shows you how to find this easily.
This page includes
- System Status
- Tools
- Logs
- Scheduled Actions
- WooCommerce Services (if you are connected to woocommerce.com)
Why does support ask for the system status page?
This single page can tell us a lot about your installation without having to log in to your site. We can see if everything is up to date or if you have had previous marketplace plugins installed and more. We can also check that you are running the latest version of the plugins and if you have any known conflicts. A lot of our support tickets can be resolved by simply running the latest version of our plugin.
The WooCommerce status page can be analysed quickly and helps us to provide support effectively and efficiently. This is why our support forms require this very important page.
What does the system status page include?
There are quite a few areas of your website that is available in this single page. It can quickly show you where you might have problems from an outdated plugin or template override issues. We also add extra sections to this page specific to WC Vendors to make debugging easier for you.
- WordPress Environment
- Server Environment
- Database
- Security
- Active and Inactive plugins
- WooCommerce Settings
- Theme details
- Template overrides
- WC Vendors Pro
- WC Vendors Pro Templates
- Action Scheduler
WordPress Environment
This section gives an overview of your WordPress environment with details about your site and install.
Server Environment
This section will outline details related to your web hosting server. This is where you can find information related to your file upload size limit and more. If you’re PHP or MySQL versions are out of date a warning will appear here.
Database
This section outlines all the tables and details of your database. We can easily see if you have had other plugins installed and deactivated by the tables in your database. This also helps us to quickly debug possible conflicts between plugins.
Another important aspect to consider is the total size of your database. If your site is slow, having this number as a very large number could result in performance issues.
Security
This section will tell you if you’re running an SSL based site and you should be almost all hosting includes this for free these days.
As you can see in this image, my store isn’t running SSL. This is bad! However as this is running on my local machine for testing, this is ok.
Active and Inactive Plugins
This is possibly one of the most important parts of the status page from our support teams perspective. We can quickly see what plugins you have installed and their versions. This is vital for debugging purposes.
Settings
This section provides an overview of the general settings of your WooCommerce installation. This can help us sometimes when we have users reporting issues with currencies or product types.
WooCommerce Pages
These pages are created when you install WooCommerce and run the setup wizard. If you skipped the wizard or accidentally deleted any of these pages then we can see this here. These pages are vital for your site to run correctly.
Theme
This provides information about the current theme you are running. This is an important area of the status page as a large majority of our support issues are related to theme issues. Although WooCommerce provides a guide on how to create compatible themes that can cause issues with WooCommerce and WC Vendors.
There are literally 10’s of thousands of themes available and although you should be able to use any 100% compatible WooCommerce theme, there are times when even that is not enough. This is why we suggest testing your site with the Storefront theme. This is the theme we do all our plugin development with. If your issue is resolved using the storefront theme then its time to contact the developers of your theme and outline the issue.
As you can see in the image below, a child theme isn’t being used. This can result in issues when you update your theme if you have any overrides. We highly recommend that you create a child theme to work from. You can learn about that on the WordPress theme handbook.
Templates
This section will show which of the core templates your theme might be overriding and if the template files are out of date. It’s very important when you are overriding template files to only override the files you need to. Do not copy all the template files from WooCommerce as this is a cause for many support tickets we have received over the years.
Template files that are commonly overridden here are email templates.
WC Vendors Pro
We have added a section related to WC Vendors Pro to ensure the correct settings have been configured. These are set when you run the setup wizard. If anything here is red, then you will have issues with our plugin.
WC Vendors Templates
Just like the templates section above for WooCommerce, WC Vendors includes a theme override system. If you or your theme is overriding files then you will see them here. If you are using outdated templates they will be highlighted here. Every time we have a plugin update, we outline the templates that have been updated in our changelogs and in our blog post for the release.
Action Scheduler
The action scheduler is a system that can schedule jobs to run in the background while your site is running. This section will outline scheduled jobs that have or are scheduled to run.
Tools
The tools tab can be helpful when you are experiencing issues with core WooCommerce systems like capabilities, sessions and more.
WooCommerce tools include
- WooCommerce Transients – Temporary data stored in the database. If your database size is getting large this could be the reason.
- Expired Transients – Clear all expired transients, again a way to help reduce your database size
- Orphaned variations – If you have variations with no parent products this is a way to clean these from your database
- Used-up Download permissions – You can remove expired downloads or downloads with 0 remaining downloads available
- Product lookup tables – This holds details related to product lookups. Do not run this unless you have to as it can take a while to run.
- Term counts – If you are displaying your term counts and you change product visibility in your catalogue, this tool can help fix these counts
- Capabilities – This will reset the admin, shop_manager and customer roles to the defaults.
- Clear customer sessions – This will remove all current customer sessions including carts. This can help if you have issues with duplicate content and caching issues related to your hosting.
- Create default WooCommerce pages – If you’re missing the default pages from the WooCommerce this will recreate them. It won’t override ones that already exist.
- Delete WooCommerce tax rates – This will delete all of your tax rates. Use with caution, this cannot be undone!
- Regenerate shop thumbnails – If you have changed your theme/shop thumbnail settings this will update the thumbnails with the new sizes.
- Update Database – This will update your database to the latest version of WooCommerce. Ensure you have a backup before doing this, it could cause problems.
WC Vendors also hooks into this page. Our tools include:
- Check Vendor Upload limits – If you have enabled vendor upload limits this checks to make sure they have not reached their limits.
- Reset WC Vendors Roles – This will reset the vendor roles to their defaults.
- Reset WC Vendors Capabilities – This will reset the vendor capabilities
- Remove orphaned sub-orders – If a parent order has been deleted and for some reason, the sub-order has not. This will clean up orphaned sub-orders.
Logs
The logs tab is where WooCommerce and other 3rd party plugins will keep log files. If you are experiencing any issues there is a high chance that there is an error in the log files here. By default, these logs are kept for 30 days before being deleted.
If you see the ‘Your site is experiencing technical difficulties’ notice on your front end. Then check the logs tab for fatal-errors with the current date.
Scheduled Actions
This tab is where all scheduled actions are listed. If you need to manually run an action, this is where you can run these.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is a lot of very valuable information available to help with trouble shooting your WooCommerce install. We blieve that this is a very important area of your online store that you should learn and understand. It will help you quickly diagnose issues with your site and ensure you keep your site running!