Optimizing customer experience is what every store owner always wants to do. With a WooCommerce store, people often customize product pages, shop pages, Thank You pages to bring satisfaction to customers. But this page customization is not all about WooCommerce optimization.
In reality, quite a few customers take special care of the checkout process while shopping in an online store. They almost want to shorten this process to go straight to the checkout page instead of going through the cart page.
As a store owner, you will want to help your customers skip the WooCommerce cart page. In this article, we will introduce different methods to complete this task.
But first of all, let’s explore how the WooCommerce skip cart is beneficial to your store.
Why Skip the Cart Page in WooCommerce
There are dozens of reasons why people usually abandon their shopping carts. Anyway, we can say for sure that the time-consuming checkout process is one of them.
By default, after customers click on the Add to cart button, they will be directed to the WooCommerce cart page before coming to the checkout page and end the shopping process here. Although they are basic steps to place an order in WooCommerce, a few people say that going through the cart page is quite unnecessary. As a result, if you don’t find a way to optimize their checkout process, it is possible that you will lose potential customers.
That’s the reason why the WooCommerce skip cart becomes a hot topic discussed among WooCommerce store owners. What role does the care page play in WooCommerce? Is it possible to skip it for a quicker checkout process?
In reality, it will be a great idea to simplify the checkout process. But it is also necessary to consider when you can skip the cart page in WooCommerce.
Let’s continue reading to know it!
Case 1: When your store sells only one product
If your WooCommerce stores have only one product to sell, customers often don’t need to check the product information on the cart page. In this case, going to the cart page is an unnecessary step for them, and they will want to save time by getting the WooCommerce skip cart. Then, after adding the item to their cart, they will go straight to the checkout page from the WooCommerce single product page or shop page.
Case 2: When your store sells multiple products
You will want to simplify the checkout process even if you have multiple products. And your customers also love it. That being said, different from the single product store type in case 1, customers somehow want to check the information of multiple items.
Although WooCommerce skip cart helps shorten the checkout process, your customers don’t have a chance to see the important information of their multi-product order like the total ordering cost or the list of all the products in their cart.
So if this is the case, what should you do? You still skip the WooCommerce cart page or find another solution.
The answer here is that you can select one of the two methods. If you want to skip the cart page while still showing your customers all the cart information, you can create a WooCommerce mini cart on the checkout page. Then, you can let customers see all the necessary information without going to the cart page. Similar to the cart page, your mini cart should consist of basic information such as a summary of all of the products, individual prices of each item, and a total ordering cost. Here customers can review all their products before deciding to spend money on them.
Nevertheless, the WooCommerce skip cart will make your customers interested in a shortened process, which helps to reduce cart abandonment and boost your sales. The only disadvantage is that there will be some difficulties if customers want to go back and forth to check something on the cart page. However, if you have a mini cart, there are not any difficulties.
Now you already know why and when you should skip the cart page in WooCommerce. It’s time to learn how to cover this task. Let’s go!
How to Skip the Cart Page in WooCommerce
In this part, we will show you how to get the WooCommerce skip cart. In general, you will go through the three following steps:
- Redirect the WooCommerce cart page to the checkout page
- Hide the cart page from the menu
- Change the Add to cart button text and message
To cover these tasks, you will use one of the three methods:
- Use the default WooCommerce settings
- Use code snippet
- Use a third-party plugin
Now let’s see the instructions in detail!
Step 1: Redirect the cart page link to the checkout page
The most important step is to redirect to the checkout page. You can easily do that using the default WooCommerce.
Method 1: Use the default WooCommerce Settings
In the Dashboard, you go to WooCommerce > Settings.
Then, choose the Products tab where you will select General.
Look at Add to cart behaviour, you will see two options as the image below. Please tick the Redirect to the cart page after successful addition box.
Hit the Save changes button to update the Settings.
Next, you will have to redirect the Cart page link to the Checkout page by navigating to the Advanced tab and selecting Page Setup.
In the Cart page section, you select Checkout from the dropdown menu.
Again click on Save changes.
With some basic steps in WooCommerce Settings, you will easily help your customers skip the WooCommerce cart page. From the frontend, the shopping and checkout process will be shown as the screen below.
Method 2: Code snippet
You also can use the code snippet to send your customers from the WooCommerce shop page or single product page directly to the checkout page.
Then, please follow the steps below:
- Step 1: Go to the WooCommerce admin dashboard, select Appearance > Theme Editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) file
- Step 3: Add the code below at the bottom of function.php file
add_filter ('add_to_cart_redirect', 'redirect_to_checkout');
function redirect_to_checkout() {
global $woocommerce;
$checkout_url = $woocommerce->cart->get_checkout_url();
return $checkout_url;
}
For details, please see the following image:
Method 3: Use a WooCommerce Checkout Plugin
If you want to get more features and functionalities to optimize the checkout process, it is highly recommended to use a plugin. Here we will introduce the plugin named Direct Checkout for WooCommerce.
Key features
- Redirect customers from the shop page directly to the checkout page
- Change the add to cart text
- Display all the checkout fields on a single page
- Offer the AJAX add to cart to add variable products to the cart without reloading the site
- Remove any checkout fields to speed up the WooCommerce checkout
- Replace the cart link with a custom one
- Provide Buy Now feature on single product pages
- Allow adding Quick View button to the shop page and product categories
Developed by QuadLayers, Direct Checkout for WooCommerce is regarded as the best plugin to skip the WooCommerce cart page. It will help send customers from the product page or shop page to the checkout page while skipping the cart page. Besides, you can replace the cart link with a custom one and customize the add to cart button. Customers who want to save time while shopping certainly will love this fantastic feature.
In addition to the main feature of checkout redirect, this WooCommerce checkout plugin provides many other striking features that help improve the checkout process as well as the whole WooCommerce store. Some of the features include removing unnecessary checkout fields, adding the Buy Now and Quick View buttons, and many others.
With lots of great functionalities, the plugin is the best choice for those who desire to improve the customers’ shopping experience and reduce cart abandonment.
Pricing
Direct Checkout for WooCommerce provides users with both free and premium versions. With the free version, you will only get basic features. Meanwhile, the premium one offers many other remarkable features. To use them, you need to make a one-time payment of $19.
Step 2: Remove the cart page from the menu
As usual, the WooCommerce site menu bar will include the cart page link. If you don’t want the cart page link to display in the main menu, then you can hide it quickly and easily.
In the WooCommerce dashboard, you go to Appearance > Menus.
Then, in the Menu structure section, you select the option of Cart page and click on Remove to hide the page from your menu.
Finally, press the Save Menu to update this change.
Done!
You decide to skip the cart page in WooCommerce, then it is recommended to remove it from the site menu. This removal will help enhance the user experience.
Step 3: Change the Add to cart text and message
If you choose to skip the WooCommerce cart page, you will need to make some other changes. Besides the page link removal in the menu, it is necessary to change the Add to cart text and message. It is simply because, after successful addition, your customers are no longer directed to the cart page.
Below are the ways to change the Add to cart text and remove the Add to cart message using code snippets. Let’s explore!
1. How to change the Add to cart text
If you skip the cart page, then there is no reason to keep the Add to cart text in the shop page and product pages.
To customize the text, you open the functions.php file and add the code below at the bottom of the file.
Here we change the text of Add to cart into Buy Now.
// To change add to cart text on single product page
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_single_add_to_cart_text', 'woocommerce_custom_single_add_to_cart_text' );
function woocommerce_custom_single_add_to_cart_text() {
return __( 'Buy Now', 'woocommerce' );
}
// To change add to cart text on product archives(Collection) page
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_add_to_cart_text', 'woocommerce_custom_product_add_to_cart_text' );
function woocommerce_custom_product_add_to_cart_text() {
return __( 'Buy Now', 'woocommerce' );
}
After updating the file, you check how the button text display in the frontend.
In addition, the plugin we mentioned above for WooCommerce skip cart, Direct Checkout for WooCommerce, is also a fantastic plugin to customize the Add to cart text. Besides, you can use some other plugins like WooCommerce Custom Add To Cart Button, and Add to Cart Text Changer and Customize Button, Add Custom Icon. But they only help change the text but not be able to skip the cart page.
If you want to get to know more about the ways to customize add to cart button, please refer to 5+ ways to customize WooCommerce Add to cart button
2. How to remove the Add to cart message
As usual, when a customer buys an item, the message “Your product has been added to cart” appears at the top of the checkout page.
But once the cart page no longer displays, this message seems not to be needed. Therefore, you will want to remove or customize it.
To remove this message, you go to Appearance > Theme Editor and add the following code snippet at the end of the functions.php file.
add_filter( 'wc_add_to_cart_message_html', '__return_false' );
After updating this code snippet for the functions.php file, our default Add to cart message disappears. You can see the image below:
In conclusion,
Skipping the cart page is essential for an optimized checkout process in WooCommerce. This is also considered a great way to bring great convenience to customers, help reduce cart abandonment and increase sales.
Our article has introduced you to some methods to apply the WooCommerce skip cart. You will take three steps for this. The first step is the most important one while the two remaining steps are the additional ones. For each step, there will be different ways to implement, using the default WooCommerce, checkout plugin, and code snippet. You can choose to use any of them. But normally, you will have to combine them together.
If you have never known how to skip the cart page in WooCommerce, then try following our instructions. In case you have applied any other methods, please let us know. We are so happy to hear from you.