WooCommerce Theme Development Tutorial in 2018
Woocommerce has gained immense recognition in recent years and its popularity is not hidden from anyone. It is one of the world’s favorite eCommerce systems, loaded with all the basic and advanced features. Actually WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, yes it is a plugin that turns WordPress into an online shopping store.
Highly flexible and intuitive, it provides a user-friendly interface with powerful features. To make things easier for online retailers, Woocommerce went a step further to allow anyone to open an eCommerce store in seconds. Let’s dive into the WooCommerce theme development tutorial and take advantage of the benefits of this great plugin for free:
Importance of WooCommerce
Since WordPress is useful for creating all kinds of portals, Woocommerce can help online retailers design their web store with advanced security features. In addition, with Woocommerce it is possible to keep track of monthly sales, taxes and day-to-day activities. With the increasing popularity of digital media, people are investing their time in creating unique online stores. And how is that possible? With Woocommerce, custom theme development is done that even new businesses can take advantage of. Here are the mind-blowing features:
1. It is an open source content management system.
2. To take advantage of the latest features and options, a certain amount is required, while the basic features are free. So to build your own shopping store WordPress Woocommerce site is a profitable business model.
3. The shopping cart is secured to offer a pleasant experience.
4. There are a large number of themes available to choose from that promote easy customization.
5. To enhance functionality, endless features can be added and listed accordingly
6. Featured with multiple shipping gateway to deliver the products to multiple countries.
In addition, the multipayment option allows you to pay through various platforms.
What is Woocommerce Theme Development?
Woocommerce is a CMS that is integrated with WordPress to offer an easy shopping platform to e-retailers. By creating a custom theme in Woocommerce, you get an amazing theme as a result that can then be used to build your own store. With Woocommerce, you can really expect your business to grow by leaps and bounds, but only if the theme development is up to the mark, attractive, and has all the important features highlighted. The most essential features that every theme should have are:
Beautiful website design that when visitors see it, they feel good and spend more time exploring your range of products.
To offer an amazing shopping experience, the website should have categories and subcategories so that people can narrow down the filters.
An attractive website increases the chances of conversions and sales.
Google Analytics integration for better tracking
Fast page loading to decrease bounce rate.
Woocommerce theme development is not as challenging as you might think. All it takes is your time and effort to get the whole process up and running and the results are amazing when:
- WordPress and Woocommerce are installed on your desktop
- Basic knowledge of Woocommerce themes. If you don’t have them, read the tutorials to gain some knowledge.
- Adequate knowledge of HTML and CSS to modify the coding part.
Steps for Woocommerce Theme Development
Let’s start with creating Woocommerce themes now as it will give you complete control over how you want your website to look like.
Woocommerce Support Statement
To get started with creating a WooCommerce theme, it is essential to first declare WooCommerce compatibility. It is to ensure that users get a popup in the WordPress dashboard to indicate that the Woocommerce plugin development is not compatible with the theme. To create or develop a theme, this step is of crucial importance. If you want to declare support, add this encoding in a functions.php file in the theme:
Now, after declaring support, you need to start creating a WooCommerce theme. Since Woocommerce is packed with cool features, you can use the default styles to create new styles from them. Once you are done updating the Woocommerce plugin, you will lose all changes if any modifications are made to the original files. I would suggest not to edit any files but to create a new file to override the existing files in the source theme directory. There are two steps to creating a new file:
Create a custom CSS
If the changes are of a small level, then this method works for you.
- Create a new CSS file
- Name it: custom-woocommerce.css
- Save it in the wp-content/themes/ directory
/css - Now in the foundation.php file, include this .css file
Lastly, to override the default styling, add your CSS to this file.
The second method is to create a WordPress child theme. Basically, the child theme has the features and functionality of another theme that is called the parent theme. To change the default themes, child themes are recommended.
Create a WordPress child theme
- Create the child theme directory and add “-child” to avoid build errors. Make sure you don’t leave any spaces in the name.
- Put it in wp-content/themes
- Create a child topic header
- Now enqueue the parent and child theme style sheets
Everything is ready! You need to activate the child theme now by logging into the site admin panel. Go to Admin Panel>Appearance>Themes. Here, you will see the child theme ready for activation.
WooCommerce Theme Development Conclusion
Learning how to create a custom Woocommerce theme is definitely a daunting task for those who are not very savvy about coding. Having to create a theme requires you to possess good coding skills. With this tutorial, you have an advanced insight into WooCommerce theme development. Now it’s easy to make your website look outstanding in terms of design and features, isn’t it? Enjoy the process!