Last updated - July 8, 2021
Ok. You have successfully installed and activated WooCommerce. Now let’s go through the few initial steps to build your unique online store.
To help you familiarize the process, WooCommerce has a Setup Wizard.
Where do I find the Setup Wizard?
The Setup Wizard usually will be automatically displayed after the activation process. If it is not displayed automatically, you can always run this from the Help section.
First, go to WooCommerce → Help.
Click Help to open a menu tray and click Setup Wizard.
To run the wizard, click the blue Setup Wizard button.
A welcome screen is displayed as below.
Do I need to always use the Setup Wizard?
It is not mandatory to run the Setup Wizard at the start as you can later manually update all the steps done through the wizard.
You can choose from either of the buttons – Not right now or Let’s Go!
Though it’s not mandatory, there is one step that the Setup Wizard can help you with to simplify the process at the initial stages. That is, creating pages.
Creating the foundation for your store
WooCommerce needs to create a few default pages for your store to function properly. These are:
- Shop
- Cart
- Checkout
- My Account
Let’s see how to create these pages with the Setup Wizard.
Click Let’s Go! button to go to the Page Setup.
You can read brief descriptions of each of these pages here.
Now click Continue button to create pages.
You can skip the next few steps till you get ‘Your Screen is Ready!’ screen.
Now your WooCommerce Store is ready for setup.
What’s the significance of these pages?
If you go back to the dashboard and open an automatically-created page, you can see it has a shortcode in the content section that helps WooCommerce to identify the specific purpose of that page. This actually makes the page unique.
Click Return to the WordPress Dashboard.
Go to Pages.
Let’s look at one of these pages, for example, the Checkout page.
When you open the Checkout page, you will be able to see a shortcode –
Is there a way to create these pages without using the Setup Wizard?
If you prefer to not use the Setup Wizard, or you want to re-install the essential WooCommerce pages, follow the below procedure.
On the admin panel, go to WooCommerce → System Status
On the System Status page, you have to open the Tools tab and click Install pages.
You don’t have to worry about creating duplicate pages while creating pages this way, as WooCommerce create pages only if any of the essential ones are missing. Already created and setup pages will not be affected by this step.
Once the pages are successfully created, you can see a message on the top of the screen.
You can verify this by going to Pages on the admin panel as well.
There is also a setting which tells WooCommerce how to use these pages correctly. Read more about that here.
Now you can start with Settings one-by-one. Let’s get on to check out options first.
