Manually creating WooCommerce pages

Every e-commerce platform will need to have some way of creating extra pages for e-commerce functionality, such as a cart page, a checkout page, an account page, and so on. WooCommerce prompts to helps you create these pages for you when you first install the plugin. So if you installed it correctly, you shouldn't have to do this. But if you were trying multiple e-commerce systems and for some reason deleted some pages, you may have to recreate those pages.

How to do it…

There's a very useful Tools menu in WooCommerce. It's a bit hard to find since you won't be needing it everyday, but it has some pretty useful tools if you ever need to do some troubleshooting. One of these tools is the one that allows you to recreate your WooCommerce pages. Let's have a look at how to use that tool:

1. Log in to the WordPress admin.
2. Click on WooCommerce | System Status:
   
3. Click on Tools:
   
4. Click on the Install Pages button:
   

How it works…

WooCommerce keeps track of which pages run e-commerce functionality. When you click on the Install Pages button, it checks which pages exist and if they don't exist, it will automatically create them for you. You could create them by creating new WordPress pages and then manually assigning each page with specific e-commerce functionality. You may want to do this if you already have a cart page and don't want to recreate a new cart page but just copy the content from the old page to the new page. All you want to do is tell WooCommerce which page should have the cart functionality. Let's have a look at the following manual settings:

• The Cart, Checkout, and Terms & Conditions page can all be set by going to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout
• The My Account page can be set by going to WooCommerce | Settings | Accounts

There's more...

You can manually set some pages, such as the Cart and Checkout page, but you can't set subpages. WooCommerce uses a WordPress functionality called end points to create these subpages. Pages such as the Order Received page, which is displayed right after payment, can't be manually created. These endpoints are created on the fly based on the parent page. The Order Received page is part of the checkout process, so it's based on the Checkout page. Any content on the Checkout page will appear on both the Checkout page and on the Order Received page.

You can't add content to the parent page without it affecting the subpage, but you can change the subpage URLs. The checkout endpoints can be configured by going to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout | Checkout Endpoints.