A broken contact form is inconvenient. A broken WooCommerce checkout is considerably more urgent because every failed transaction can mean a customer deciding to give up and shop somewhere else.
The first step is not to immediately start changing plugins or restoring backups. You need to understand where the checkout is actually failing, and why.
Try placing an order yourself
Open the store in a private browser window and go through the same process a customer would. Add a normal product to the basket, go to checkout and make a note of the exact point where things stop behaving.
The checkout page might refuse to load, the order total might spin forever, a payment method might disappear or the Place order button might do absolutely nothing. Alternatively, the payment may appear to be complete but WooCommerce never confirms the order. Those symptoms may look similar to a customer, but technically they can point to very different causes.
Inside WordPress, the WooCommerce Status area is a good next stop. This can highlight outdated templates and configuration issues, while the WooCommerce logs can contain much more detailed information about errors with payment gateways and other integrations.
Think about what changed recently
If the checkout worked yesterday, ask what has happened since. WooCommerce itself may have updated, a payment gateway may have changed, a plugin could have been installed or the theme may have been modified.
Another area worth checking is Caching. Basket and checkout pages need to behave dynamically, so an overly aggressive or incorrectly configured cache can create some fairly confusing results.
WooCommerce sites also tend to have more moving parts than a normal brochure website. Payment systems, shipping calculators, subscriptions, product options, discounts, analytics and marketing tools can all interact with the checkout. A conflict does not necessarily mean either plugin is badly built. Sometimes two perfectly reasonable pieces of software simply stop agreeing after one of them changes.
Check the payment gateway separately
If everything works until the actual payment stage, look at the payment gateway rather than WooCommerce as a whole. API credentials, webhooks, expired keys, test mode, gateway updates and problems at the payment provider can all interrupt checkout.
If your store has more than one payment method, test them separately. Discovering that Stripe is failing while PayPal still works gives you considerably more information than simply knowing that “checkout is broken”.
Be careful with full-site restores while trying to fix an active shop. Restoring yesterday’s database could overwrite today’s successful orders, customer records or stock changes. Getting the checkout working matters, but losing legitimate data while doing it creates another problem.
If you are stuck, send us the store address and tell us where in the checkout the problem appears. If you know whether something changed beforehand, even better. We can help narrow down the cause and explain the sensible next step.
