An interview with WooCommerce shows that their recent rebrand is a strategic refresh, offering lessons for businesses and search marketers on how to stay relevant and competitive.
A Business Refresh
A recently announced rebrand by WooCommerce is far more than a logo update; it’s part of an evolution of their platform that demonstrates the strategic value of reassessing user expectations to stay competitive.
A spokesperson from WooCommerce agreed:
“Exactly: the brand update reflects our broader evolution toward a more integrated platform. While the visual changes are noticeable, they represent our shift toward making WooCommerce more powerful out of the box while maintaining the flexibility of open source.”
From Evolution To A Refresh
WooCommerce has been on a steady evolution from a plugin to a platform. And even though it’s referred to itself as a platform for awhile now, the evolution from plugin to platform is speeding up because of an internal WooCommerce initiative called More In Core. Announced in 2024, More In Core is a shift to a WooCommerce experience that provides a more complete ecommerce experience straight of the box, delivering the core functionalities that most ecommerce sites need without needing to install additional plugins.
One of the examples, from October 2024, is the Brand Plugin integration, which used to be a premium plugin but is now a standard feature of the platform itself. The Brand feature enables store owners to create a taxonomy based on brands.
A WooCommerce spokesperson explained:
“While ‘More in Core’ is an internal name we use (we’re excited about these improvements!), our goal isn’t simply adding more features — it’s about thoughtfully building a comprehensive commerce platform that delivers the essential tools that the majority of merchants need out of the box, reducing plugin conflict and management, increasing the depth of integration between platform features, and freeing builders and sellers to focus on other parts of their business.
We’re starting by integrating Woo-owned extensions, like Brands. This isn’t about removing opportunities for third-party developers — we remain committed to a vibrant ecosystem where developers can build and grow on our platform. We’re carefully considering which features are truly essential for most merchants and integrating them in ways that maintain the flexibility WooCommerce is known for.
Looking ahead to 2025, merchants and developers can expect continued thoughtful and deep integration of key features, continued performance improvements across product and order management in particular, and a streamlined user experience that’s leveraging more and more of WordPress’ modern admin designs.”
User Experience And UI
Focusing on the user is a great place to start a business refresh. Do site visitors use your site the same way? Are there emerging trends to consider?
I asked WooCommerce if there were any any specific UX and UI improvements implemented as part of their recent February 2025 brand refresh. They answered:
“The brand refresh aligns with ongoing work to make WooCommerce more intuitive. We’re focusing first on improving core experiences in the admin interface and store management — the essential interactions our merchants use daily.
More specifically, we’re rolling out improvements to the payments onboarding and configuration experience.
We’re creating a new commerce-optimized starter theme with a set of creative variations available out of the box. We’re iterating rapidly on the WooCommerce Analytics product we just released in beta, and collaborating directly with the community on new capabilities around order status and fulfillment management.”
Lessons For Search Marketers
I asked about how their brand refresh fits into a larger strategy in order to find out what others can learn about doing something like this for their own brands and websites. I asked them for what lessons search marketers could learn from their experience and they described a process that identified stakeholders from the ecosystem to the users, user expectations set by competitors and wrapping all of that into creating their refresh.
The WooCommerce spokesperson shared:
“Our rebrand considered the multiple groups that make up our ecosystem: builders who create stores for clients, developers who create products and extensions, merchants who run their businesses on WooCommerce, hosts who help connect us to a larger set of customers, and contributors to our open source platform. The key was researching each group to understand how they interact with WooCommerce differently: developers building businesses on our platform, merchants managing daily operations, builders creating client sites, and contributors enhancing the core platform.
And of course we also had to factor in the current landscape. What other ecommerce platforms look like, what other technology companies look like — and how can we stand out. All that, plus we needed to make sure it felt true to Woo: that it aligned with our open-source roots, what we believe in, and what the platform does. We’re incredibly proud of what our in-house design and marketing teams accomplished here; it’s a great demonstration of the team we’ve assembled and what they’re capable of.