WooCommerce 4.0 is released today after a team of developers finished implementing the changes from the last couple of months and some features that are dating back to 2018.
WooCommerce 4 is a major release and you should be aware that it’s not fully backward compatible. Before you intend to update your WooCommerce to the latest 4.0 release, first you need to check if your theme and code are compatible with the latest changes. You can reference this official doc for making changes and upgrading to the latest version, here.
What’s new in WooCommerce 4?
One of the main things in the latest update is all-new WooCommerce admin and its the first step towards a more modern JavaScript-driven experience of WooCommerce core.
With the plugin being actively used on more than 1 million stores, we now believe the WooCommerce Admin is ready to be included in the WooCommerce core to bring a set of improvements to all store owners:
- New dashboard
- New and improved reports
- Improved notification experience
- New store management tools
Reporting
WooCommerce admin provides much better reporting capabilities than previous generations of reports and allows for filtering, comparisons and overview of sales, revenue, product popularity, highest-grossing and adds capabilities for improved customer management and analytics.
Please note that the plugin will keep the old reports for now. They will be deprecated sometime in the future releases, once the plugins team get all needed feedback.
There is a new and simplified report exporting in CSV format, it will ensure compatibility with other tools used for reading reports and gathering stats.
Activity panel
One of the brand new features is a new Activity panel with improved order management workflow and consistency between the desktop and mobile experience to all the customers.
News setup wizard and onboarding
Starting a shop can be a complex and confusing experience, in order to help customers get their shop up and running faster and with greater ease, the new onboarding process is now included. Therefore, 50% of new customers would be able to try out a new onboarding experience.
Other changes in WooCommerce 4
In addition to the new WooCommerce admin, you will find the following enhancements in 4.0:
- Enhancement to the Order edit screen
- Latest fixes of WooCommerce Blocks package
- Updates related to Brexit and VAT
- Improvements to email handling
- Optimizations for saving variations and Cash on the delivery payment gateway
Beyond these enhancements, the release also contains some tweaks, new hooks, and fixes – all of which you can find out about in the readme.
Conclusion
The great update for this awesome plugin just got released. We hope you’ll find it very useful as we do.
If you have any thoughts or impressions, feel free to use the comments section.
