Issue #202 Loop WP

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #202 of Loop WP!

Last week was all about Miles, which I took for a spin whilst in beta. Miles is your AI Design Partner for WordPress. It was my most popular newsletter of the last 10 weeks, so check it out.

This week, I'm revisiting a story I first covered in Issue #196, when Maarten Belmans (Studio Wombat) shared early data on block vs classic checkout adoption across 10,000 WooCommerce stores.

Let’s go! 👇

In Issue #196, the number that stood out most was how low block adoption looked compared with social media sentiment.

💡 Back then, the big takeaway was simple: despite all the focus on Blocks, most stores were sticking with classic checkout.

Maarten has now published a fully updated report based on 15,000 stores (up from 10,000). While it confirms the original point, it also tells a much bigger story about WooCommerce in 2026:

🚨 “Store owners” aren't necessarily “anti-block”. They're pro-stability. When you're running a business, "new" often looks like "risk", and nothing feels riskier than touching a checkout that's already converting.

🤔 One question Maarten raises that I'd also love data on: how many stores switch “back” to classic after trying blocks?

The most interesting part of the updated report might not actually be Blocks.

It's that 32% of the 15,000 sampled stores were unreachable, returning 404s, 5xx errors, or stuck in maintenance mode.

🚨 Some highlights:

The story here is not simply "everyone is leaving WooCommerce for Shopify." The bigger story is that e-commerce is hard, many stores disappear entirely, and the ones that survive are careful about risk.

💡 That also helps explain why adoption of new WooCommerce experiences can be slow. If a checkout works, most merchants are not in a hurry to rip it out and replace it.

🚨 Whilst it didn’t surprise me, another part of the report that is worth discussing was “site speed” (this is not necessarily all Woo’s fault, and they have been working hard on performance over the last 18 months or so).

Maarten measured homepage Time to Last Byte and found WooCommerce sites averaging 1,782ms, compared with 848ms for non-WooCommerce sites. That's a 110% difference.

💡 The metric needs nuance; it's server response only, no assets downloaded, and the WooCommerce sample is ten times larger. But the direction is hard to ignore.

Many WooCommerce stores are still carrying too much weight: heavy themes, page builders, too many plugins, average hosting, or all of the above. And merchants don't always separate "performance", "complexity", and "maintenance burden" into neat categories.

🤔 A small but telling ~1% of migrating stores moved to NextJS-powered platforms. Maarten noted they "honestly feel snappy." It's a tiny trickle for now, but for the dev-leaning part of this audience, is it a signal worth watching?

The install figures paint a picture of an ecosystem that is flexible, messy, extensible, and often carrying years of accumulated decisions (and I can relate to a lot of this with my clients 🫠):

🚨 Interestingly, a lot of this data is comparable to the Metorik 2026 Insights Report (which covers 65 million WooCommerce orders), but with some differences, the biggest being that the average site runs 58 plugins according to Metorik.

If you're running 30 plugins and a legacy page builder, you don't "test out" a new block checkout. You stay on classic because you're not willing to risk your conversion rate on an experiment.

Also, if you’re running 30 - 58 plugins (yes, I know there’s the quality over quantity argument…and the hosting argument), your WooCommerce site is more likely than not going to be slow!

💡 Low block adoption isn't really about Blocks. It's about the reality of how these stores are actually built and maintained.

Issue #196 asked “why” classic checkout was still winning.

💡 This updated report gives a fuller answer: because compatibility matters, performance matters, existing stacks matter, and most merchants care more about reliability than platform philosophy.

Blocks may keep growing, and they will. But for now, the clearer takeaway is that WooCommerce still has work to do if it wants more stores to embrace the block future it's building.

What do you think, {{first_name|friend}}?

Reply and let me know.

🚨 I will leave you with this quote from the report:

I couldn’t agree more with Maarten, and it’s a question worth asking, especially in light of Shopify’s recent MCP announcements, native B2B features and other platform improvements in the last four months (and that’s not even including their marketing campaigns).

All of my inherited or new e-Commerce clients (except one) over the last two years have been on Shopify.

That’s it for this week. 👋

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,