Adding Woo to existing site – same or separate WP install?

You don’t tell us what theme you have. Some themes are WooCommerce-compatible, others may need some tweaking. My preference would be to add WooCommerce to the existing site. Add a couple of products. If it gives problems, just deactivate the plugin.

Thanks lorro,
It’s a customized (a few css changes, colors and suchlike) child theme of Twenty Sixteen.

I guess I’m concerned that if a big plugin like Woo is added then that could slow down every operation (I don’t really know how WordPress is structured internally but would, say, a page fetch (even of one of the existing pages) need to go through some of the Woo code (because of hooks etc).

Also is it going to make the backend more messy, with more widgets, shortcodes, menus, etc available.

Twenty Sixteen is well behaved with WooCommerce. Speed depends on several factors. I wouldn’t expect Woo to slow down non-Woo pages. I think it will be easier to manage one site instead of two. Try it, its easily deactivated if needs be.

Okay, will do (after taking a full backup :-)).
Many thanks!

One more question – how would I stop the menu that appears on the rest of the site from appearing on the shop pages? I guess there are plugins for this but is it possible to do without one?

I’m not so bothered about the footer but I don’t want the menu to be there (I’d like it to look much like a separate site (though in the same fonts, color scheme as the main site) and would make the menu item which takes you to the shop from the main site to open it in a separate window (I know how to do that).

Thanks,

Try this custom css:

.woocommerce #site-header-menu,
.woocommerce-page #site-header-menu {
  display:none;
}

Custom css can be entered at:
Dashboard > Appearance > Customise > Additional CSS

If it doesn’t work for you, please post the link to your site.

Thanks lorro, it seems to work but in the end I installed a separate copy of WordPress into a sub-folder. The existing site has SiteOrigin and a mass of other plugins (not my design!) and they seem to make the shop page slow too. In a separate install it’s much faster.