Installing WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, which means that you need to have WordPress running on your own server to add WooCommerce. The first step is to install WooCommerce. You could do this on an established website or a brand new website—it doesn't matter. Since e-commerce is more complex than your average plugin, there's more to the installation process than just installing the plugin.

Getting ready

Make sure you have the permissions necessary to install plugins on your WordPress site. The easiest way to have the correct permissions is to make sure your account on your WordPress site has the admin role.

How to do it…

There are two parts to this recipe. The first part is installing the plugin and the second step is adding the required pages to the site. Let's have a look at the following steps for further clarity:

1. Log in to your WordPress site.
2. Click on the Plugins menu.
3. Click on the Add New menu item. These steps have been demonstrated visually in the following screenshot:
   
4. Search for WooCommerce.
5. Click on the Install Now button, as shown in the following screenshot:
   
6. Once the plugin has been installed, click on the Activate Plugin button. You now have WooCommerce activated on your site, which means we're half way there. E-commerce platforms need to have certain pages (such as a cart page, a checkout page, an account page, and so on) to function. We need to add those to your site.
7. Click on the Install WooCommerce Pages button, which appears after you've activated WooCommerce. This is demonstrated in the following screenshot:
   

How it works…

WordPress has an infrastructure that allows any WordPress site to install a plugin hosted on WordPress.org. This is a secure process that is managed by WordPress.org.

Installing the WooCommerce pages allows all of the e-commerce functionality to run. Without installing the pages, WooCommerce won't know which page is the cart page or the checkout page. Once these pages are set up, we're ready to have a basic store up and running.

Note

If WordPress prompts you for FTP credentials when installing the plugin, that's likely to be a permissions issue with your web host. It is a huge pain if you have to enter FTP credentials every time you want to install or update a plugin, and it's something you should take care of. You can send this link to your web host provider so they know how to change their permissions. You can refer to http://www.chrisabernethy.com/why-wordpress-asks-connection-info/ for more information to resolve this WordPress issue.