WooCommerce 3.6 has arrived! The latest release of WooCommerce has been in development since November 2018. For store operators and builders, one of the biggest additions in WooCommerce 3.6 is the introduction of the new Product Blocks for the WordPress block editor.
Build rich landing pages and more
For all sites running WordPress 5.0 or higher, you will have access to build rich landing pages using the following blocks now available in WooCommerce 3.6:
- Products by Category
- Best Selling Products
- Hand-picked Products
- Newest Products
- On Sale Products
- Top-Rated Products
- Products by Attribute
- Featured Product
To learn more about what you can do with the new Product Blocks, and how developers can customize them, check out this post.
Performance Improvements
Customers and Store Owners will experience a noticeably faster experience due to extensive performance enhancements that improve both admin and frontend page load times.
A few quick highlights of the improvements on the front-end for sites running WooCommerce 3.6 are:
- A 62% improvement in the load time when ordering and filtering products
- Reduced overall load time by bypassing inactive webhooks
- Reduced the load time for pages with category or product attribute lists
- Reduced load time of product pages with attributes
Additional Updates
In addition to the new Product Blocks and Performance Improvements, you will find the following enhancements in WooCommerce 3.6:
- The ability to increase/decrease stock options via the bulk edit form.
- Accessibility improvements on the shop order-by selector.
- When adding/editing/deleting items manually from orders, the corresponding product stock will be updated to reflect the event, and an order note will also log the action.
- Added suggestions for official extensions.
- Store attribute values as post_excerpt for variations to support easier searching for variations.
- Customer notes containing URLs now automatically converts to clickable links.
- Allow states in zones to be searched by country name.
- Added registration success notices to account pages.
Upgrading to 3.6
3.6 is a minor update and should be compatible with sites running any version of WooCommerce greater than or equal to 3.0. WooCommerce folkis still recommend testing and backing up prior to upgrading – just to be safe.
Interested in creating an online storefront? Checkout all the great features of WooCommerce.