WooCommerce powers approximately 23% of the top one million e-commerce websites. Its appeal is clear: you own your platform, you control everything, and the plugin ecosystem can extend it to do almost anything. But that same openness is exactly why WooCommerce stores accumulate UX problems faster than stores on more constrained platforms.
Most WooCommerce stores start with a theme, add WooCommerce, then gradually install plugins to fill gaps. A review plugin here. An upsell plugin there. A wishlist plugin, a loyalty plugin, a shipping calculator, a chat widget. Six months later, the store has 35 active plugins, and nobody knows which ones conflict with each other. The customer-facing result: buttons that don't work in Firefox, checkout forms that lose data on mobile, and add-to-cart buttons that sometimes work and sometimes don't.
Themes like Flatsome and Divi are popular in the WooCommerce ecosystem and technically capable. But they load significant amounts of CSS and JavaScript that affect Core Web Vitals scores. A Divi-powered WooCommerce store with 30 plugins often scores poorly on Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time, two metrics that directly correlate with conversion rate.
The checkout is where this becomes most expensive. WooCommerce's checkout can be heavily customized, which means it can be heavily broken. Custom fields, conditional logic, custom payment gateway integrations, and checkout page builders all introduce risk. A checkout that has been customized without end-to-end testing across devices and browsers is a checkout that's quietly losing orders.