WooCommerce checkout broken
The one page that takes the money is down. Everything else is decoration.
A broken WooCommerce checkout is the most expensive outage a store can have — the catalog works, the cart works, and the register is jammed. Customers don't report it; they buy elsewhere. Here's the ranked diagnosis, at the urgency it deserves.
Same-day diagnosis. Flat quote before any fix.
What’s actually happening
Checkout is WooCommerce's most fragile mile because everything converges there: payment gateways calling out to Stripe or PayPal, shipping calculators, tax services, session cookies holding the cart, coupon logic, and whatever optimization plugins were bolted onto exactly this page. Any link failing breaks the chain — usually silently, at 'place order.'
The failures cluster into species: the gateway declining or erroring (credentials, API versions, webhooks), a plugin conflict seizing the page's JavaScript, sessions dropping carts mid-flight, or the checkout simply timing out on underpowered hosting during the heaviest operation the store performs. Each has a distinct fingerprint in the order logs — stores rarely need guessing, just reading.
The usual causes, ranked
After twenty-seven years of these calls, the odds are well mapped. Start at the top.
Payment gateway errors
Expired API credentials, a gateway plugin behind its API version, or webhooks failing so payments succeed at Stripe while orders die at the store — the ugliest variant, because money moves and orders don't record.
A plugin conflict on the checkout page
Checkout runs more JavaScript than any other page; one broken script kills the place-order button. Often arrives with an update to something unrelated-sounding.
Session and cache problems
Aggressive caching applied to checkout serves stale carts, mixes sessions, or empties carts mid-purchase. Checkout must never be cached — yet regularly is.
Hosting limits at the worst moment
Order placement is the store's heaviest operation — payment calls, stock updates, emails, all at once. Underpowered hosting times out exactly there, intermittently, under load.
The order emails just aren't arriving
Sometimes checkout is fine and the silence is the confirmation email dying in transit — customers 'never got the order,' support melts down, and the fix is the email pipeline, not the store.
What you can safely try first
Nothing below can make things worse — that’s the selection criterion. Anything riskier belongs in professional hands, on a backup.
- 1
Run a real test order
Cheapest product, real payment method (refund yourself after). Note exactly where it fails and what the screen says — 'spins at place order' vs a gateway message vs an emptied cart are three different species.
- 2
Check WooCommerce's own logs
WooCommerce → Status → Logs. Gateway errors are usually written there in plain, forwardable text — 'authentication failed' or 'API version deprecated' ends the mystery.
- 3
Compare orders against your gateway dashboard
Payments in Stripe/PayPal with no matching store orders = webhook failure, found. Also your recovery list: those customers paid and heard nothing.
Stop and call when…
- Payments exist at the gateway with no orders in the store — stop everything; this needs immediate reconciliation
- Checkout fails intermittently under traffic — capacity forensics, not settings
- Any real revenue is flowing — every diagnostic hour has a dollar figure
From there it’s our job: same-day look, flat quote, and the $389 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
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Questions we hear a lot.
Customers say they paid but there's no order. What happened?
The gateway took the payment and the webhook that reports back to your store failed — money moved, record didn't. The immediate job is reconciling gateway payments against store orders and contacting affected customers; the fix is repairing the webhook pipe. This is the drop-everything variant, and it's exactly what same-day exists for.
Checkout works for some customers but not others. Why?
That pattern points at sessions and caching — some visitors hitting a cached or mixed-session checkout — or a payment method that fails only for certain cards or regions. The 'who fails' pattern is itself diagnostic; note anything the failing customers share.
Can I just disable plugins to find the conflict?
On a live store, carefully or not at all — deactivating the wrong thing mid-day can take payments or shipping down with it. The professional version tests on a staging copy or reads the error logs first, which usually name the culprit without the demolition derby.
What does the flat repair cover?
Same-day diagnosis, the fix — gateway, conflict, session, or email pipeline — a verified live test order, and reconciliation guidance if payments and orders diverged. $389, and if the honest finding is that hosting or the plugin stack needs bigger surgery, you'll get the scope in writing first.
Related symptoms & help
Errors travel in packs. If this one visited, check its friends.
- Order Emails MissingWhen checkout works and the silence is the mail.
- Slow WebsiteSlow checkout abandons carts before it breaks them.
- SSL ExpiredThe certificate failure payments notice first.
- eCommerce DevelopmentStores built so checkout isn't fragile.
- Emergency RepairRevenue actively bleeding? Jump the queue.
Un-jam the register. Today.
Send the symptom, get a same-day look and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.