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. WooCommerce is actually 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 reap 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 growing 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 startups can take advantage of. Here are the awesome 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 ensured to offer a pleasant experience.

4. There are a large number of themes available to choose from that promote easy customization.

5. To improve functionality, infinite functions and lists can be added accordingly

6. Featured with multiple shipping gateway to deliver the products to multiple countries.

In addition, the multi-payment option allows you to pay through various platforms.

What is Woocommerce theme development?

Woocommerce is a CMS that is built on 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 par, it’s attractive, and it has all the important features highlighted. The most essential features that every theme should have are:

Beautiful website design that when visitors view, they feel good and spend more time exploring your product range.

To offer an amazing shopping experience, the website must 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 loading of pages to decrease the bounce rate.

Woocommerce theme development is not as challenging as you might think. All it takes of your time and effort to get the whole process going 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 get some knowledge.
• Adequate knowledge of HTML and CSS to modify the coding part.

Steps for Woocommerce theme development

Let’s get started now with Woocommerce theming as it will give you complete control over how you want your website to look.

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 receive 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 crucially important. If you want to declare support, add this coding in a functions.php file in the theme:

Now, after declaring the 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 editing any files, but instead creating a new file to override the existing files in the source theme directory. There are two steps to create a new file:

Create a custom CSS

If the changes are 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 functions of another theme which 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. Be sure not to leave any spaces in the name.
• Put it in wp-content/themes
• Create a child theme 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 theme in Woocommerce is definitely a daunting task for those who are not very adept at coding. Having to create a theme requires you to possess good coding skills. With this tutorial, you get an advanced look at 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!