How to reset WooCommerce? (Step-by-step process)

WooCommerce is one of the top choice eCommerce platforms in the world. Although WooCommerce is extremely powerful and user-friendly, the plugin can’t work automatically without your control. Thus, you should have some basic knowledge about programming and WooCommerce, inside and out, including the process of reset WooCommerce, which is a common issue many users may encounter.

In this article, we are presenting the reasons why we decided to reinstall and how to reset WooCommerce from your WordPress site.

Why do you have to reset the WooCommerce plugin?

It’s important to understand why you need to reset WooCommerce before we head to the detailed process.

Error installing a WooCommerce plugin

There are times for new WordPress users to encounter fatal errors when it sounds like something happens to your WooCommerce plugin setup. After installing WooCommerce, you need to install WooCommerce Product Add-ons. Nevertheless, when you try to activate the plugin, it gives the following error:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error

This error occurs since WooCommerce hasn’t installed properly. In this case, just deactivate and delete WooCommerce from your Plugins menu. Finally, re-install WooCommerce as you did before.

WordPress crashes after installing WooCommerce plugin

No matter how confident you’re in your WooCommerce platform, no plugin immune to making mistakes. WooCommerce can even sometimes operate in ways that cause WordPress crashes.

To solve this, consider an updated version or a previous version. Make sure you choose the plugin version carefully and install the one you’ve found.

If the updated version still causes problems, you’d have to reset the WooCommerce plugin as there will be something inside the plugin causing a conflict with WordPress. Literally, it is the incompatibility error causing website problems.

Want to have a fresh start with WooCommerce

The good news is that you have uninstalled your previous platform and you want to switch to WooCommerce again, it’s okay. The great number of choices on the market means you try until you’ll be able to find the one that really works for you.

This time, you want to replace your old eCommerce platform with WooCommerce and use it now as that’s better suited to your region.

If such a course of reason occurs, you’re advised to reset your WooCommerce plugins.

How to reset the WooCommerce?

Method 1: Quick Way To Uninstall WooCommerce

Step 1: Removing the WooCommerce Plugin

If you want to understand how to reinstall WooCommerce, the prerequisite is to delete the WooCommerce plugin completely.

The first step of the uninstallation process is to get rid of the WooCommerce plugin. Here are the common suggestions:

1. First, hover WordPress Dashboard.
2. Press the “Plugins” button.
3. Type “WooCommerce” within the search field.
4. Click “Deactivate” the plugin.

However, as earlier said, WooCommerce requires more when it comes to deleting it permanently.

In fact, by simply navigating to the plugin page and deactivate and delete the plugin from WordPress, you simply temporarily disable it. Unnecessary files including orders, customer details products, pages, etc… will still exist in the store database.

As your site and skills grow, you realize that WooCommerce contains hundreds of backend stuff to your WordPress installation. In other words, you have to keep your database clean from all those associated files if you wish to uninstall the plugin completely.

Step 2: Uninstall WooCommerce

Before we explain the detailed way, there is a quick solution to get rid of WooCommerce data completely.

1. Open your site’s wp-config.php file through FTP or File Manager.
2. Scroll towards the bottom, add this line:

define(‘WC_REMOVE_ALL_DATA’, true);

Make sure to use straight quotation marks and add the code on its own line above the / That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. / line in the file, around line 76 of the file.

1. Save the file to the server.
2. Press “Deactivate” > “Delete” to remove the plugin from your admin panel.
3. You can again go back and remove the above code from the wp-config file. Then when you deactivate and delete WooCommerce it will remove all of its data from your WordPress database.

Method 2: Manually Delete Woocommerce Data Completely

If you wish to remove a WooCommerce plugin permanently, it’s a good idea to spend time manually deleting it. Below are steps you have to go through:

Step 1: Clear WooCommerce data

When you decide to delete the plugin, the first thing you should do is to clear all relevant data from the admin panel.

• Delete all WooCommerce product pages and categories by navigating to the “Products → All Products / Categories” sections.

Here’s the result:

Press “Screen Options” on the top right corner of the page to configure a particular number of items to display per page, for example, 20 to more than 100, so that you can easily and quickly find and delete them.

• Remove all coupons and orders under the “WooCommerce → Coupons / Orders” sections.

• Delete log data from “WooCommerce → Status → Logs”.

• Cleanup transient data under the “WooCommerce → Status → Tools” section.

Step 2. Delete customer details

Your WooCommerce store can have tons of customers who bought specific products on your shop site. Once you navigate to the WordPress section, you will see a complete list of accounts’ role named “Customer”. You have to delete all customer accounts on the site after deleting the plugin.

• For this, you need to open “Users → All Users” in the admin panel.
• Once you’ve filtered all customer users, you need to select “Delete” in the “Bulk Actions” dropdown.
• Click on the “Apply” button.

The customer data can spread across multiple pages, making it a long time to manually remove them but nobody wants to do it that often.

Step 3. Delete WooCommerce plugin from Dashboard

This is a pretty simple step to uninstall plugins from the dashboard.

• Once you login to your WordPress admin panel and navigate to the “Plugins → Installed Plugins” section in your dashboard.
• Find and click on “Deactivate” under the WooCommerce plugin.
• The last step after deactivation is just press “Delete” to eliminate the plugin from your site.

The typical way of deleting the plugin will only remove the plugin files from your site without removing data. Well, in most cases, there are many integrations created by the plugin that users need to utilize manual effort.

Step 4. Get rid of Custom Fields with cPanel

WooCommerce uses hundreds of custom fields stored in WordPress as meta keys in the wp_postmeta table. You need to delete custom fields manually, otherwise, WooCommerce leaves behind tables and rows in your WordPress database.

Only to delete the custom fields list for WooCommerce to avoid affecting other functions and account termination. Follow the instructions below to drop them from your database.

• Log in to your web hosting cPanel.
• Access the phpMyAdmin app from cPanel to manage the database of your site with all table details.
• Hover “xx_postmeta” table where xx is the prefix you named the table when you set up WordPress.
• To manage database content securely, it’s recommended you do a backup of your site and then continue to browse the custom fields.
• Best way to remove these keys quite quickly using MySQL query a select first to see then do a delete

For example, use the query under the “SQL” tab to first see the meta keys that contain “ship”.

SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE `meta_key` LIKE ‘%ship%’

Once you know the key format, edit the query to delete dead data.

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE `meta_key` LIKE ‘%ship%’

It’s easy to directly use the delete query if you know how the meta keys are named.

Step 5. Drop Database tables in phpMyAdmin

The database tables storing the content in the backend isn’t deleted even when you delete the plugin from the dashboard. In such a scenario, you need to remove the WooCommerce table with the phpMyAdmin section of cPanel.

• Head to the phpMyAdmin section, click on the required table you want to delete.
• Under the “Operations” tab, press the “Delete the table (DROP)” option.

• Press “OK” in the confirmation prompt for table and content deletion.

Step 6. Delete residual files from FTP server

Deleting residual files created by the WooCommerce plugin is one such last necessary activity to carry out to finish WooCommerce uninstallation.

• Login to the server using an FTP account.
• Click through to the “Uploads” folder where you find the “/wp-content/” directory.
• Usually, WooCommerce contains all media like images, “woocommerce_uploads” folder placeholder downloadable files, logs, and database of Geolocation information.
• Mark every WooCommerce file and then delete all directories from your server to clean up.

Reinstall WooCommerce

After you’ve done deleting the plugin (with the first quick method or the second manual way), you can easily reinstall it to your WordPress site. Resetting WooComerce is similar to the plugin setup, you just install WooCommerce as normal:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Type “WooCommerce” in the search box > Install Now.
3. Once installed, click Activate Now and starting with the WooCommerce Wizard, and building your eCommerce site.

After enabling WooCommerce, you can build your WooCommerce store and may need to get a WooCommerce theme to empower your online store.

Conclusion

As mentioned, many users have the habit of deleting and resetting WooCommerce from the admin panel, assuming that is enough. Whatever the reinstallation reason, it requires more to remove all the traces completely. In the general case, be aware of this fact before trying to reset WooCommerce on your site.

Resetting is not as simple as just deactivating. Learn how to reset WooCommerce through this article whenever there are possibilities of WooCommerce reinstallation. Getting eliminate the residual database and file content will noticeably increase the loading speed of your site.

If you have any questions or recommendation, please let us know by leaving a comment below.