The next Woocommerce update is out for beta testing. The new version 2.7 shows a significant speed increase along with improved product views on mobile.

One of the biggest changes is going to be the product gallery. Version 2.7 introduces a new image gallery on single product pages. Woocommerce took a poll to see what users wanted, and went with a zoom/swipe hybrid approach for improved mobile support.

Visitors now have access to both magnification and zooming (lightbox)
Gallery behaviour is more intuitive – clicking a thumbnail updates the main image rather than opening a lightbox
Dramatic improvements on handheld, in particular; touch gestures – swipe to scroll through the gallery, pinch to zoom, swipe up to close, etc
Opening the lightbox on mobile now displays the image in it’s true size, larger than the in-page display

“Product visibility (which controls if products are visible in the catalog, search, or both) was previously post meta, and was used in all WooCommerce product queries. In 2.7 this is a new product_visibility taxonomy instead. In testing, with ~8k products we saw speed improvements of around 94%.”

Is your website staying up to date?

We always have more people contacting us when these large updates come out. Rather than waiting for a large update to break your store, contact us today to evaluate you Woocommerce settings before you update to the newest version.