Products → Add New. Set the product type to Simple, then fill in the price, SKU, category, featured image and descriptions. The Virtual tick matters: virtual products skip shipping and can auto-complete on payment. Don’t publish until the category and featured image are set — the shop grids use both.

Set the product type to Variable, then build the attribute first under the Attributes tab and tick Used for variations. Only then generate the variations and price each one. Every variation needs its own price or it can’t be bought. Set sensible default form values so the Add to Cart button isn’t greyed out. Start from Products → Add New.

Adoption animals are ordinary Products with the Adoption panel filled in — status, email template group, image, animal name and story. They can also be created by cloning an existing animal, but only one whose Adoption Status matches what you want.

Regular price vs sale price, and how to schedule a sale between two dates, all on the Products edit screen. Stock is managed per product, or per variation on a variable product — site-wide stock defaults live in WooCommerce → Settings → Products. Pay-what-you-want products (donations) use Name Your Price; the minimum and suggested amounts live on the product itself, not in the donation widget.

Marketing → Coupons. Covers fixed vs percentage discounts, usage limits per coupon and per customer, product/category restrictions and expiry dates. Always test the code on the front end before it goes out to anyone.

WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping. Rates are set per shipping zone and per shipping class. This rarely needs touching — when postage prices change, edit the existing rate rows rather than adding new shipping methods.

Posts → Add New. Use the Intro Paragraph for Large text. Use the Excerpt for summary snippet on news page grid. Set the category to News, add a featured image (required — the news grids use it) and write a short excerpt. The publish date controls the ordering. Existing ones: all News posts.

Start from the ready-made Rescue story (starting point ) – then click on — copy to new draft. It is a draft kept purely as a starting point, so it never appears on the site. Use Clone so you only need to swap the title, images and text. Leave the original draft alone so it stays available for next time. You can also clone any published story from Success Stories if you want to match one in particular. Either way, double-check the copy stays in the Success stories category, and remember to set its own featured image and excerpt.

Posts → Add New, set the category to Success stories, then build the body in WPBakery. The featured image and excerpt are what appear in the Success Stories listing block, so both are needed. Compare against the Success Stories already published.

Most pages are assembled from Reusable Blocks rather than inline content — the Home page is almost entirely blocks. Editing the page does nothing in that case; you have to open the block itself in Reusable Blocks. If an element on a page won’t respond to your edits, this is nearly always why.

In the Media Library, use Enable Media Replace to swap an image everywhere it appears without changing its URL — much safer than uploading a second copy. Images are compressed automatically on upload. If a thumbnail looks wrong or stretched after a change, run Tools → Force Regenerate Thumbnails on it.

Appearance → Menus controls the link structure. The big dropdown panels are separate Reusable Blocks named Mega Menu Content — …. Edit the block for the panel content, the menu for the links themselves.

If you change a page slug, add a redirect in Tools → Redirection from the old URL to the new one. Skip this and every existing link, bookmark and Google result for that page starts 404-ing.

WooCommerce → Orders. Statuses: Pending payment (not paid), Processing (paid, needs action), Completed, On hold, Cancelled, Refunded, Failed. Virtual orders such as adoptions and donations auto-complete on payment; physical orders sit in Processing until you mark them Completed after posting.

Open the order in WooCommerce → Orders and click Refund. Refunding through the gateway actually returns the money; Refund manually only records it in WooCommerce and moves nothing. For a partial refund, enter amounts against individual line items. Refunds cannot be undone.

The Order notes box on the right of every order in WooCommerce → Orders. Note to customer emails them; Private note is internal only. Always leave a private note whenever you change something by hand — it’s the only audit trail anyone has later.

Use the Order actions dropdown at the top right of the order in WooCommerce → Orders, pick the email to resend, then click the arrow button. The order notes record it once sent, so you can confirm it actually went. To check it reached them, see Checking whether an email actually sent below.

Invoices are generated from the order and use the HW Custom invoice template. Download them from the order screen in WooCommerce → Orders, or the customer can get their own from My Account → Orders.

Users, then search by name or email. Switch To logs you in as that customer so you see exactly what they see — their orders, subscriptions and downloads. Always click Switch back when you’re done.

WooCommerce → Settings → Emails sets the base recipients. WooCommerce → Notifications adds extra per-product and per-category rules on top. The Reply-To address on customer emails is set separately by the WooCommerce → Settings → Reply-To rules.

Every subscription in WooCommerce → Subscriptions has one parent order — the original purchase — and then a renewal order for each payment after that, all listed under Related Orders. The subscription record itself holds the status, the next payment date and the items. Make changes on the subscription, not on the old orders in WooCommerce → Orders.

In WooCommerce → Subscriptions: Active = paying normally. On hold = paused, no payments taken, can be reactivated. Pending cancellation = the customer cancelled but has paid to the end of the term, so it stays live until that date and then goes Cancelled by itself. Cancelled and Expired are final.

Open it in WooCommerce → Subscriptions and set the status to On hold. No renewal payments are taken while it’s on hold, and the next payment date shifts when you reactivate it. Always add a private order note saying who paused it and why — without it nobody can work out later what happened or when to resume.

In WooCommerce → Subscriptions, set the status to Cancelled to stop it immediately, or leave a customer-initiated cancellation to run through Pending cancellation to the end of the paid term. Add a private note either way. Cancelling does not refund anything — do that separately on the order in WooCommerce → Orders.

Adoption subscriptions can be switched to a different animal through the Change flow. Animals that are Deceased or Released remain switchable because the plugin keeps them in the switch-eligibility grouped product set in WooCommerce → Settings → Adoption Addons.

Failed renewal payments retry automatically on a schedule before the subscription goes on hold. The fix is nearly always the customer updating their card via My Account → Subscriptions → Change payment. Check Related Orders on the subscription in WooCommerce → Subscriptions to see exactly which renewal failed, and WooCommerce → Status → Scheduled Actions for the pending retry.

Products → Add New, tick the Adoption option, then fill in the Adoption panel: Adoption Status (up for adoption), Email Template Group, the adoption image, Animal Name (leave blank to use the product name) and the Story. Leave Create Adoption Switch Workflows when deceased ticked. Saving adds the animal to the Active Adoptions grouped product automatically. Existing animals are in Products.

Faster route — cloning. You can duplicate an existing animal with Clone / New Draft and get the whole Adoption panel set up for you. Only ever clone an animal that already has the Adoption Status you want the new one to end up with. A Deceased animal carries extra data with it — its status, its switch workflow IDs and its category mapping — and every bit of that has to be stripped out by hand afterwards, which is slower and easier to get wrong than starting fresh. To add a new adoptable animal, clone one that is currently up for adoption.

Edit the animal in Products, set Adoption Status to Deceased, then Update. On save the plugin creates two AutomateWoo → Workflows — one that emails the animal’s subscribers, and one that switches them to a new adoption on a set date. It also moves the animal out of Active Adoptions and into the switch-eligibility group.

Both workflows are linked directly from the product’s Adoption panel, and listed in AutomateWoo → Workflows. To change the wording or the switch date, open the workflow and edit it before it runs. To stop it entirely: clear its entries in the AutomateWoo → Queue, delete the workflow, then clear the workflow ID fields on the product. Trashing the workflow on its own is not enough — it still runs.

WooCommerce → Settings → Adoption Addons. The deceased email subject and the email/switch delays are in the General section. The Email Template Groups section holds the template groups and the Reply-To name and address used on adoption emails. The Statuses & Categories section maps each adoption status to its product categories.

The certificate is built from the product’s adoption image, Animal Name and Story, laid over the certificate template, using the template group chosen in the Email Template Groups section. Changing any of those clears the cached PDF so it regenerates on the next download. Last PDF valid date on the product in Products shows when it last changed.

Two places to look. AutomateWoo → Logs and the AutomateWoo → Queue show whether a workflow has run or is still waiting. Settings → FluentSMTP → Email Logs shows every email the site handed to the mail server, including failures and the exact content that went out — this is the one that answers “did the customer actually get it?”.

WooCommerce → Settings → HW Donation Widgets → Preset amounts (comma separated). The same screen sets the minimum and maximum amounts, the recurring frequencies and the button text. Changes here apply to every donation widget across the site, including the Donate page.

The donation widget element has its own Preset amounts field in WPBakery — see it on the Donate page. Anything set there overrides the global WooCommerce → Settings → HW Donation Widgets setting for that page only, which is handy for appeal or campaign pages that need their own amounts.

Donations arrive in WooCommerce → Orders as normal orders against the one-off or recurring donation product, with the donated amount as the price. Recurring donations also create a record in WooCommerce → Subscriptions, and behave exactly like adoption subscriptions for pausing, cancelling and failed payments.

Forms → Entries to read submissions and resend notifications (but not for the Adoptions form, it’s notifications are handled by a special plugin). Forms to edit a form, with Notifications under each form’s Settings controlling who gets emailed. Note: The adoption form is attached to adoption products and its field IDs are used to build the adoption emails — don’t delete or renumber its fields or the emails will come out with details missing.

Users. Administrator = full access to everything, Shop manager = orders and products only, Editor = content only. Give people the smallest role that does their job.

TBA for more specific role access.

Settings → UpdraftPlus runs weekly backups of Plugins and Database – Uploads are backed up by hosting daily. Take a manual one before anything large — bulk edits, plugin updates, imports. Never restore over the live site without checking the backup’s date first and ask HyperWeb before doing this.