Should WooCommerce Let Customers Skip the Cart Page?
Why This Depends on the Store
The cart page's core purpose is letting a customer review and adjust their order before committing to checkout — genuinely useful when they've added several items and might want to change quantities, remove something, or apply a coupon before moving forward. When a store's typical order is one or two items with little need for that review step, the cart page becomes an extra click that adds friction without adding much real value.
Weighing the Decision for a WooCommerce Store
- A single-product or narrow-catalog store (a digital product, a service booking, a small handful of SKUs) is a strong candidate for skipping straight to checkout, since there's rarely a meaningful cart-review need.
- A multi-item, browse-heavy store (general retail, a large catalog) benefits more from keeping the cart page, since customers there are more likely to add multiple items over a session and want to review before checking out.
- A mini-cart dropdown/sidebar is a middle-ground option, giving a quick visual confirmation without requiring a full page visit, while still allowing checkout to be reached in one click from anywhere on the site.
- This is measurable — testing the actual impact on conversion and average order value for a specific store's real customer behavior beats assuming either approach is universally better.
Implementing Skip-the-Cart
- A "redirect to checkout after add to cart" setting or plugin is the standard way to implement the direct-to-checkout flow, avoiding the need to remove the cart page entirely (which some customers may still want to access directly).
- Consider a mini-cart as a lighter-weight alternative if fully removing the cart step feels too aggressive for the store's customer base.
- Test the actual conversion impact for the specific store rather than assuming the change is automatically beneficial.
Want to test and optimize the cart-to-checkout flow properly? See WooCommerce fixes.