Online store owners know the real effort in making users buy a product.

And, what if your hard-won customer is about to finish the purchase and WooCommerce checkout timeout error show up?

Pretty much annoying, isn’t it?

Wrong WordPress theme settings happen to be one of the major reasons for WooCommerce timeout errors.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to fix WooCommerce errors as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, our article describes how our Support Engineers fix checkout timeout errors with WooCommerce.

Importance of WooCommerce

Basically, WooCommerce is an open-source, WordPress plugin which helps to build an online store in a faster way.

Have you ever thought that what makes the WooCommerce site different from other e-commerce sites?

It’s none other than the popularity of WordPress. By installing the WooCommerce plugin, it adds e-commerce functionality to the WordPress website. Also, WooCommerce helps to sell products and services from the WordPress site.

That’s why it attracts a lot of e-commerce newbies to use WooCommerce.

However, many errors pop up in WooCommerce sites due to plugin problems, bad hosting settings, etc.

A typical WooCommerce checkout timeout error page shows up as,

How we fix WooCommerce checkout timeout errors

From our experience in managing servers, we’ve seen customers facing different kinds of problems with the WooCommerce platform.

Now, let’s see the top causes for timeout errors and how our Support Team solve them.

1. Problems with plugins

Recently, one of our customers had a problem with WooCommerce. The error occurred at the time of product checkout. He got an error after submitting the payment information.

The typical error message was, ‘Internal Server Error’.

The order did appear in the WC Orders section. However, the Console showed a 500 error for ?wc-ajax=checkout.

On checking, our Support Engineers found that the problem was related to one of the installed plugins. The plugins were not updated and thus not compatible with the latest WOO standard for Shipping Zones.

We had to disconnect the WooThemes account and remove and reinstall the buggy plugin. Finally, we could reconnect the plugins and then they started working fine.

2. Hosting configuration

Sometimes, error may shows on the checkout page due to incompatible hosting settings with WooCommerce.

When the WooCommerce checkout page keeps on spinning for a long time without any recent changes, it could be the hosting settings.

Here, our Dedicated Engineers start by checking WooCommerce > Status > Logs. 

It clearly shows if there are any fatal PHP errors that could be causing the timeout error. And, the fix involves editing the PHP configuration of the domain or server.

In one of the instances, there was the force https turned on for the checkout page. This was creating conflict and resulted in an error. Similarly, an incorrect https redirect in cPanel can also be the cause. And the solution involves just deleting the unwanted redirect and checkout pages start working fine.

3. Payment gateway connection

As a matter of fact, the payment gateway connection also can cause a timeout error.

If the payment gateway fails, the checkout will also not function.  And the popular reasons for payment gateway failure involves authentication errors, a bad connection between the store and payment gateway service provider.

Therefore, for the WooCommerce checkout to work properly, we always set the right settings and configuration.

[Need assistance to fix WooCommerce errors? We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

In short, a WooCommerce checkout timeout error may occur due to bad hosting configuration, corrupted theme, connection errors and so on. Today, we saw the various reasons for timeout errors and how our Support Engineers fix them.