Store readiness: 12 checks that catch launch blockers early

Every check in this feature exists because something real went wrong on a real store. That’s the whole design philosophy, so let’s tell it that way.

The invisible wall

WooCommerce ships a “Coming soon” site-visibility mode — and for stores built recently, it’s on by default. Here’s the trap: it walls off your storefront pages while leaving the product APIs wide open. Which means your catalog syncs perfectly, your app fills with products, everything looks great — and the first shopper who taps through to checkout hits a wall your dashboard never showed you.

That incident became check #1.

What the 12 checks cover

The StoreToNative companion plugin (optional, one-click pairing) runs twelve checks inside wp-admin, where store configuration actually lives — reading things no external service can see.

Blockers — things that will cost you a sale today:

• Coming-soon mode walling the storefront
• No HTTPS on the store
• No published products
• No payment gateway enabled — the quiet killer: everything works right up until money should move
• Permalinks set to “Plain” (breaks the pretty URLs the app relies on)

Warnings — things that degrade the experience:

• Stale product lookup tables (real story: a store’s price sorting was “broken” in the app for days — the store’s own index tables were stale after a demo import; one regeneration fixed it, and now the plugin detects it and can schedule the fix itself)
• Shipping zones, guest checkout, checkout page configuration
• Missing site icon, conflicting swatch plugins, outdated versions

Each check tells you what it costs you and exactly which screen fixes it.

A false alarm is worse than a missed warning

The rule we held ourselves to while building this: one false red and merchants stop trusting the card forever. So every check was tested against healthy stores configured in unusual-but-valid ways — stores behind certain SSL proxies, stores using pickup-only shipping, stores whose checkout page is managed by another plugin. When a situation is genuinely ambiguous, the check says nothing rather than guessing. Boring diagnostics are trustworthy diagnostics.

The readiness card shows up in wp-admin and in your console the moment the plugin is paired. Try it on your store — the trial includes everything.