How it works
Every page has a draft and a published design. WooCommerce still does the work; Siteryn Checkout arranges and styles it. And if a design ever stops working, your store falls back to a safe default automatically.
Pages, designs and the structure
There are three pages you can design: Cart, Checkout and Thank You. Each page's design is a tree:
Draft, publish, unpublish
| State | Status line in the builder | Your store shows |
|---|---|---|
| Never published | Not published: your store uses the default design. | The default design, built from your settings |
| Draft saved | Draft saved, not published yet. | Still the default (or the last published) design |
| Published | Published: your store uses this design. | Your design |
| Published + draft | Published, with unpublished draft changes. | The published version; the draft waits |
- Save Draft never changes your store.
- Publish makes the design live and clears the draft. There's no confirmation, so preview first.
- Unpublish returns the page to the default design and keeps your design as a draft.
- Reset to starter replaces the draft with the "Free Layout 1" starter design. Your store is not changed until you publish.
The default design
Before you publish, each page uses a default design built on the fly from your saved settings. It uses the classic Checkout elements, so it looks like a standard WooCommerce checkout:
- Cart: Cart Items and Continue Shopping beside a sticky Cart Totals column, plus Empty Cart.
- Checkout: a two-step checkout ("Checkout", then "Payment") with Checkout Notices and Steps Progress on top, Customer Details (classic) on the left and a sticky Order Review & Payment (classic) on the right.
- Thank You: Steps Progress, Success Message, Order Overview, Continue Shopping, Payment Instructions, Order Items, Billing & Shipping Addresses and What Happens Next in one column (Social Links is included but hidden).
When you open a page in the builder for the first time, you start from this design, so nothing you configured earlier is lost.
Safe fallback
Before rendering, every design is validated. If a published design stops working, for example because it uses an element from a plugin you deactivated or a required element went missing:
- Your store safely shows the default Siteryn design for that page instead. The broken design is kept untouched.
- On the Siteryn → Checkout screen, admins see a notice: "the published Checkout design has problems, so your store is safely using the default Siteryn design for it. Open the Builder tab to fix and republish it."
- The builder opens your design so you can fix it. Errors are listed with Show links.
A design that only exceeds limits (for example after a Pro license lapses) is not broken; it keeps rendering. If even the default design can't render, the page falls back to WooCommerce's own Cart, Checkout or Thank You page.
How WooCommerce keeps working
- One real checkout form. The whole Checkout design is a single WooCommerce checkout form. WooCommerce validates and submits it as usual.
- Live updates. Order items, totals and shipping methods refresh through WooCommerce's own order-review updates when the address or shipping method changes.
- Hooks still fire. WooCommerce's customer-details, order-review and Thank You hooks still run, so express checkout buttons, gateways and tracking plugins keep working.
- No duplicates. When you add a separate Terms & Privacy, Place Order Button or Proceed to Checkout element, WooCommerce's built-in copy is removed, so each prints once.
Block and shortcode pages
Your Cart and Checkout pages can contain the WooCommerce blocks or the classic shortcodes; either way they render your design. On block themes, the Thank You page also uses your design. System Status shows which type each page uses.
woocommerce/cart/cart.php, checkout/form-checkout.php or checkout/thankyou.php override takes priority over the builder. See Themes.