Reasons Why WooCommerce Store Owners Are Jumping To The Latest 3.6 Release

WooCommerce currently owns 28% of the eCommerce market. And one of the major reasons for this WordPress-based, open source eCommerce platform’s domination is its regular updates. And yet again, after the late 2018 3.5 version release, WooCommerce 3.6 is here in April 2019.

And even though version 3.6 is a minor release, Automatic has paid attention to a variety of pain points that their users had encountered with the earlier versions.

Let’s quickly jump to what these improvements are and exactly how this upgrade will be beneficial for you.

*All the features of this release are backward compatible. So, if you have already been using version 3 or above of WooCommerce, the transition will be smooth.

Now on to the upgrades:

Performance-based upgrades

As far as store performance is concerned, the new release is primarily directed towards improving the page load speed in the front-end as well as the back-end. To provide better user experience the loading time for the store and individual product pages has been reduced. In the front-end, product attributes have been cached, due to which there is a 62% improvement in load time while filtering or ordering products.

On the store admin side, i.e. the back-end, a slew of management issues have been resolved such as speeding up the bulk edits or uploading multiple products’ information making searches run faster and adding an index to the download permission database for speeding up the workflows that use downloadable products.

Product-based upgrades

WooCommerce’s Product Blocks feature plugin was in development since last year and has been finally released in the 3.6 update. The key benefit of this plugin is that you can add products on any page or post throughout the store. This means that the merchant will no longer be restricted to displaying his products only in the product archives or the individual product pages.

The only requirement for this feature to run successfully is that the store owners must use WordPress 5.0 or higher versions.

The owner can categorize his products into these eight product blocks:

• Product by Attributes
• Products by Category
• Featured Products
• Best Selling Products
• Top-rated Products
• Hand-picked Products
• Newest Products
• On Sale Products

Apart from these, some template file changes and additional updates have also been made in this version, such as

• The option to select the name of the state under the country’s name
• The newly added registration success notices in the Account pages
• The availability of bulk edit forms to increase or decrease stock options, and many more

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With Automatic releasing four versions of this platform in the last fifteen months, you may be pondering over whether you need to upgrade to this version or not. However, this version was highly anticipated due to speed improvements and the introduction of Product Blocks, which is why you may not want to miss out on it. You can also connect with other eCommerce store owners and developers through Grazitti’s eCommerce forums, and find out what the popular opinions are.

If you have decided upon upgrading to the 3.6 version, you need to start preparing your store for it. Before upgrading make sure that all your extensions and themes are compatible and most importantly, do not forget about backing up your data.

Our expert developers can make this job easier for you. Visit our webpage here to learn how we can assist you.