New “LIVE” label on wordpress toolbar, why?

Additionally, when I click the ‘Live’ label and it directs to

/admin.php?page=wc-settings&tab=site-visibility

I get nothing but a ‘Save Changes’ button and no other settings.

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Hi @bozzmedia,

I’m sorry you’re experiencing these issues. The Live label is related to the new coming soon mode in WooCommerce. We have some documentation to learn more about it here: https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/coming-soon-mode/

The error on the settings page might be related to a clash with another plugin. Could you please provide an SSR so we can investigate further?

We’re also seeing this WooCommerce Live button in the admin bar.

It’s going to confuse clients who’ve had WooCommerce live for years, and unnecessarily add clutter to the WordPress UI.

Where’s the button to ‘Turn off the Site Visibility label’ please?

Thanks @adrianduffell, I would be up for troubleshooting the settings page but my concerns are more related to what @paulpooka mentions, a way to disable this entire feature and get rid of the LIVE tag. It’s inconsistent with our other network sites, it’s distracting and it’s not needed for most of our use cases. Clients are already confused about it.

Yes please, we need to get rid of it. I know my store is ‘Live’, I don’t need to be reminded like this.

I usually setup a new site or make major changes in staging (some hosts make this really easy), with the store ‘Live’ from the get go, which it actually isn’t, because it’s in a password protected staging site.

So again, this ‘Live’ is useless info. I’m rolling back to the previous version of Woo.

Hi there,

At the moment, I’m not aware of any options to hide the site visibility badge from the admin bar. I did come across this snippet of code that could be added to the site using a plugin like Code Snippets.

In the meantime, can you create an issue report for this over here for our developers to investigate further?

Thanks!

GPT Chat told me how to temporarily solve this problem. This code worked for me now. I expect a more civilized solution to the problem from the developers.
This code needs to be added in functions.php

add_action( ‘admin_bar_menu’, function() {
global $wp_admin_bar;
if ( class_exists( ‘\Automattic\WooCommerce\Internal\ComingSoon\ComingSoonAdminBarBadge’ ) ) {
remove_action( ‘admin_bar_menu’, array( \Automattic\WooCommerce\Internal\ComingSoon\ComingSoonAdminBarBadge::class, ‘site_visibility_badge’ ), 31 );
$wp_admin_bar->remove_node( ‘woocommerce-site-visibility-badge’ );
}
}, 100 );

So we put this code in to temporarily fix it, then they actually fix it, then we have to remember to remove that temp fix. If I don’t remove such things, I/we end up with 400 000 custom code snippets in our sites.

This is not the first time I’ve had to do something like this. I wish devs would consider more carefully their updates. Was such a ‘feature’ even being asked for?

As mentioned, I just rolled back until they come up with a permanent solution. It’s not like it was a serious vulnerability fix. Or was it?

Hi @bozzmedia and everyone.

Currently, there isn’t an in-built option to disable the “LIVE” label. However, you can remove it by adding a specific code snippet shared by @riaanknoetze here.

However, you are always welcome to create a bug or enhancement request for this over here for our developers to investigate further.

Additionally, when I click the ‘Live’ label and it directs to

/admin.php?page=wc-settings&tab=site-visibility

I get nothing but a ‘Save Changes’ button and no other settings.

Once you click on the “LIVE” label, you should be redirected to the settings page, where you can enable or disable it. More info: https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/coming-soon-mode/

If you do not see any option except the save changes button, it indicates a conflict with your theme or with another plugin. The best way to determine this is to:

• Temporarily switch your theme to Storefront or Twenty Twenty-Four
• Disable all plugins except for WooCommerce
• Repeat the action that is causing the problem

If you do not see the same problem after completing the conflict test, then you know the problem was with the plugins and/or theme you deactivated. To figure out which plugin is causing the problem, reactivate your other plugins one by one, testing after each, until you find the one causing conflict. You can find a more detailed explanation on how to do a conflict test here.

I hope this provides some clarity on the matter. If you have any other questions or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Can you (the coders at Woo) just remove whatever you added to make that ‘Live’ button appear? Instead of your users having to implement workarounds.

Show of hands anyone who thinks this ‘Live’ button is useful? Bueller, anyone?

Hi @sean-h

It is designed to indicate your WooCommerce site’s visibility status, and it is useful for many users, especially while performing maintenance on their store. Even developers can see whether the site is live or in maintenance mode before making any changes to it.

However, we understand that some users may find this feature unnecessary or distracting. And the team is already aware of this issue: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/51389

At the time being, we can’t give you an estimate for when the team will look into or fix the issue, as bug/enhancement reports are prioritized based on a few criteria. Please subscribe to the GitHub issue if you’d like to receive updates.

Thanks!

Hi @shameemreza,

Useful for many users? Are you sure? How many users are we talking about? Woo is installed on several million websites. Did you do a survey to get an idea if it was worth implementing something like this?

There is actually a very, very easy way to see if a site is live, without any extraneous coding and an annoying button like this. Anyone who is a developer will know this, but even a complete beginner; simply look at the site from the front. And if you accidentally make changes to a live site when you should not have, you’ll learn soon enough and most likely won’t do it again. That will hopefully also teach you the importance of backups. And if you’re just starting out with your very first site and you build your first Woo store live, so what? It can take Google up to 6 months to index, and rank, a brand new website.

But I make changes to live sites all the time. If I’m adding new products or design tweaks I’m not going to put the whole shop in ‘coming soon’. Why would I? It’s already there. If I make major design changes, I do that in staging, and when I push live I simply tell the staging tool to preserve any subsequent changes to the real live site.

I will confess, I’m very new to Woo, but not WordPress. This new ‘Live’ button is right up there as one of the most annoying changes I’ve seen in the 10 years since I started out, along with plugins that hijack the main dashboard area with ads.

When I first installed Woo it defaulted to ‘coming soon’. But, it was in staging and I needed to see what it looked like live as I began building, behind a password protected URL. So no, the site wasn’t actually live nor viewable by anyone else even though Woo thought it was. There was a separate live installation without Woo, showing a ‘coming soon’ landing page, which I designed myself.

I’ve only just stared with Woo, but I have to wonder how many more hours I will need to spend fixing things like this, things that are not conflicts with anything on my site, but unwelcome, deliberate visual changes made by coders at Woo.

And by the way, any plugin that I have so far installed that in turn added an item to the top bar like this offers a simple setting to remove it, if required. WPML, WP Recipe Maker, Updraft Plus, WP Mail SMTP, SiteGround Optimiser…..Why should Woo be any different? There is only so much space at the top. Only site admins should have the final say as to what goes there.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. Some people seem to think because they don’t need it no one else will benefit either. I was curious about it but don’t see an issue with it.

As for “i check my sites front end” wont always work as i’ve had a coming soon app that showed a “under construction” page to people not logged in but showed ok to logged in users ie admins.

Seeing as I can’t edit or delete that last novel of a comment, I might as well keep going, just a bit.

It goes both ways; just because some might find it useful (I don’t actually argue that) it does not mean everyone else should also like and accept it. So yea, it might be a non-issue/molehill for some, but for others who simply don’t need or want it, because they already have enough stuff up there, yes, it’s an in-your-face mountain.

Like I said, the least they could do is what any half reputable plugin would do, offer users the choice to easily hide or display it, as needed. Why do we have to install yet another plugin to add yet another piece of custom code to fix something that someone else deliberately broke/added to our sites?

Thanks for the feedback everyone, it is valuable. Unfortunately, we don’t normally provide settings to remove UI elements as it can create an overwhelming amount of choices for users. This is explained more in the WordPress philosophy. Your best bet to remove it is with code using the filter here or via a plugin like Admin Bar Editor, which provides full customization over the admin bar.

We hope for it to unlock a new use-case where store owners can easily place their store back into coming soon mode and make updates in private. This is a tactic Apple takes with their online store during their new product presentations for example, and may be interesting to Woo store owners as well.

In a worse-case scenario, it also serves as a visual alert to help where the store is accidentally placed in the wrong mode. Admin users have the coming soon protections bypassed and may not be aware it’s happened without the visual cue.

Please continue to provide feedback about the badge. Our plan is to monitor the feedback for a period of time before making further decisions about it.