Most people don’t fail to launch a WordPress store because it’s hard. They fail because they open twelve tabs of plugin comparisons on Friday night and by Sunday they’ve bought nothing and built nothing. This is the checklist I hand people who want a store live by Sunday night. It assumes you have a domain and nothing else.
## Friday night: hosting, SSL, and a clean install (60-90 minutes)
Pick managed WordPress hosting, not a $2 shared plan. You want one-click SSL and staging. Install WordPress, force HTTPS in Settings > General, and confirm the padlock shows on your domain. Set permalinks to Post name — do this now, not after you’ve published pages, because changing it later means redirects you don’t want to think about.
Create one admin account with a real password, delete the default ‘admin’ username if your host created it, and install a backup plugin. Take a backup before you touch anything else. That backup is your undo button for the rest of the weekend.
## Saturday morning: WooCommerce and the four settings everyone forgets
Install WooCommerce and run the setup wizard. Then go back and fix what the wizard skips. First, set your store address and currency under WooCommerce > Settings > General — a mismatched currency is the number one reason test payments look wrong. Second, under Payments, enable one gateway and put it in test mode. Third, under Shipping, delete every zone you don’t need; a leftover ‘Rest of the world’ flat rate has surprised more than one seller. Fourth, under Accounts and Privacy, decide whether customers can check out as guests. For a first store, allow guest checkout — requiring an account costs you sales.
Add one product. Not five. One, with a real price, a real image, and a real description. The goal today is a complete transaction, not a catalog.
## Saturday afternoon: the pages and the legal basics
Create four pages: Shop, About, Contact, and a policies page covering refunds, privacy, and terms. WooCommerce can generate a refund policy template under Settings > Advanced — use it as a starting point, then edit it to match what you’ll actually do. Link all four in your menu. If you sell digital products, set them to virtual and downloadable in the product editor and skip shipping entirely.
## Saturday evening: test the whole thing with a real card
Put your gateway in live mode for ten minutes, buy your own product with a real card, confirm the receipt email arrives, then refund yourself. Test mode is fine for the mechanics, but a live test catches email deliverability problems that test mode hides. If the confirmation email lands in spam, fix your SMTP plugin before you tell anyone the store exists.
## Sunday morning: speed and mobile
Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. You don’t need a perfect score. You need the store to load in under three seconds on a phone. Install one caching plugin, enable it, and clear the cache after every change. Check the checkout page on your actual phone — not a browser resize. If the buy button requires horizontal scrolling, you’ve lost the sale.
## Sunday afternoon: the soft launch
Send the link to five people you trust and ask them to buy something and tell you where they got confused. Watch them do it if you can. The confusion is always somewhere you stopped seeing. Fix those two or three things, then post the link.
The store won’t be finished. It doesn’t need to be. A working checkout with one product beats a perfect store that launches next month.